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Grindhouse: Gears of War 2 Multiplayer Impressions

• By Sid Shuman
• October 15, 2008 09:49 AM PST
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GamePro hops aboard the express elevator to hell in Gears of War 2's multiplayer modes Horde and Annex.

GamePro gets an exclusive new session with Gears of War 2's multiplayer modes.

In addition to a beefier campaign mode (read more here), Gears of War 2 features a larger array of online and splitscreen multiplayer match types that will prove irresistible to shooter veterans. Here are our final hands-on impressions of what is shaping up to be a truly impressive multiplayer game. Mark November 7th on your calendars, action fans.

For the Horde!

Horde was the standout of the bunch. It's a new five-player cooperative romp through Locust-infested territory, and the action is wall-to-wall intense. You can play Horde on any multiplayer stage -- even the classic maps that come as a day-one downloadable bonus. The goal in Horde is simple: defeat the incoming waves of Locust, stockpile powerful weapons, and above all else stay alive! Following each wave of attacks, your team will be graded on its performance and earn points that will populate global Xbox Live leaderboards. The difficulty scales up with each wave, introducing tougher, more numerous monsters who wield heavier weapons and armor.

Beast riders, who sit astride these massive Blood Mount creatures, are a constant threat in Horde. They can clamber over obstacles to attack you and your allies.

Most of our Horde experiences were based on a stage called "Day One," a desolate city intersection riddled with Locust emergence holes (watch the giant center hole closely for a guest appearance by a massive Locust creature). The first few waves were short and sweet, producing a ragtag collection of Wretches and Locust Drones that went down quickly. Then the action started heating up. Massive Boomers began waddling into the fray, absorbing more punishment and inflicting more damage than their lesser cousins. In later waves, we encountered never-before-seen variations of some iconic monsters, such as the cleaver-wielding Butchers (a melee variant of the tubby Boomer grenadiers) and the shield-wielding Maulers (tough hombres who can kill you with one whack of their grenade flails). On and on we went, blasting through the increasingly difficult creatures while struggling to stay in close proximity to our teammates. We quickly learned that team cooperation is a key factor in Horde, though prudence is always king: it's tempting to dart through enemy territory to rescue a dying teammate, but the risks sometimes outweigh the rewards. Even if a teammate dies, he'll respawn with the next wave, and can watch the rest of the round while providing valuable intel to his surviving buddies using the Xbox Live voice headset or taking screenshots for posterity.

These grenade-slamming Maulers are vicious -- don't let them get close!

By the tenth round, we were battling almost everything the game could throw at us: powerful Locust Priests, grotesque beasts of burden called "Blood Mounts," and a mysterious creature that we didn't recognize from any of the past games (Epic declined comment on this secretive monster). Upon reaching wave 11, the enemy patterns reset back to level one, with a key exception: they took twice as much punishment to kill. Hours later, we reached wave 40 and were greeted by Locust enemies that were twice as accurate and twice as powerful as well, triggering some seriously frantic run-and-gun tactics from our surviving teammates. Our progress stymied by the steadily ramping difficulty, we reluctantly set out controllers down and prepared to experience the other multiplayer facets of Gears of War 2.

NOTE: Read more details about Horde here and here.

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