Gears of War and Resistance sequels improve on originals

For better or worse, many of this fall's video-game releases are sequels. Two of the biggest, Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2, have much in common but are ultimately very different games. Both, though, are bound to satisfy the hard-core gamers they were developed for.

When it was released for the Xbox 360 in November 2006, Gears of War overshadowed the competition. It won countless game-of-the-year awards, topped most year-end best-of lists, and reintroduced the idea that, in a shooter game, having to take cover to avoid being shredded by bullets is essential. If there was a serious criticism of Gears of War, it was that the story behind the game-yes, there was one-had been sacrificed in favour of the action.

Resistance: Fall of Man was released that same year for the PlayStation 3, and to me it was the better game. More subtle than the over-the-top Gears, it also told a much clearer story-an alternate history set in 1951 about a war over England between humans and a race of beings called the Chimera.

In comparing the two sequels, I found that Gears had improved the most, largely because it had the most room to improve.

The developers at Epic Games have made the story line in Gears of War 2 (Microsoft; Xbox 360; rated mature), which was released on November 7, more obvious to players, and the game is much better for it. In an interview in Los Angeles in July, Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer for the game, admitted that much of the plot created for the first game never made it into the final product. “This time around, we were a lot more careful about the planning of it,” he told the Georgia Straight. Gears 2 is clichéd and melodramatic, to be sure, and the characters have arms and legs that are the size of tree stumps. Anyone expecting subtlety is playing the wrong game.

On the other hand, in making Resistance 2 (Sony; PS3; rated mature)—released on November 4—the developers at Insomniac Games decided to cast off the voice-over narration that was a feature of the first game. “All of the information that had come in cut scenes is now delivered in-game,” Insomniac's James Stevenson told the Straight at a Toronto press event in October. Unfortunately, a player's comprehension of the story suffers as a result. The action in Resistance 2 is so intense and unceasing that I missed most of the plot elements. I was too busy trying to stay alive to hear what the soldiers around me were saying.

One thing the two games continue to share is their sense of scale. Early shooter games primarily involved close combat, as the computers of the day couldn't rapidly render environments. This is no longer a problem, because the graphic capabilities of the PS3 and the Xbox 360 allow entire landscapes to be displayed at once.

Early in Resistance 2, players find themselves battling in the streets of San Francisco. The awesome establishing sequence shows the city in panorama, the bombed-out Bay Bridge smoking and dwarfed by the Chimeran aircraft in the sky above.

Similarly, in Gears 2, players are presented with a wide-angle view of the Hollow, a massive cavern under the surface of the planet Sera. It is the homeland of the Locust, a species trying to exterminate the human race, and it is filled with ramparts and palaces and castles. The entire underground civilization is rendered in real time right before your eyes.

Both games apply that same scale to enemies as well. It is not uncommon in either title to be scrambling to survive the attacks of a six-storey-tall creature that has rocket launchers strapped to its arms and is able to swat at you as if you were a mere fly.

Another similarity is the diversity of environments you'll traverse. In Resistance 2, set on Earth, the expansive vistas include the ice fields of Iceland; the rolling hills of Twin Falls, Idaho; the steep cliffs of Bryce Canyon, Utah; a crumbling Chicago; and the interiors of Chimeran spacecraft. Gears of War 2 takes players from cratered urban environments to underground caves, with side trips through subterranean structures and the body of a worm that's large enough to swallow an entire building.

The action and battle sequences are appropriately visceral in each game, aided by smooth controls and just enough weapon types to offer a sense of variety without making players feel they need to have a cheat sheet to differentiate between them all.

In terms of multiplayer action, Resistance 2 allows 60 players to participate in each on-line session, up from 40 in the first game. But cooperative gameplay is what's received the biggest enhancement. Up to eight players can play the campaign-the story-together over an Internet connection. Players engaged in the cooperative campaign play a different story than the one played by a lone gamer. In a July interview at the E3 Media and Business Summit in Los Angeles, Ted Price, CEO of Insomniac, explained to the Straight that the eight-player story follows the same time line and overlaps with the single-player plot, but the goals are different.

Gamers can play through the Gears 2 story cooperatively as well. Only two players can participate, although the game supports instant drop-ins and drop-outs. Gears 2 boasts a new multiplayer mode called Horde, in which a group of five players takes on waves of increasingly difficult enemies. As long as one of the five survives the round, all players respawn for the next one.

The improvements to the storytelling in Gears of War 2 make it more of an equal to Resistance 2, and both games are energetic, exciting, and fun to play. They are better, not worse, than their predecessors.