Gears of War 2

 Gears is a game best played by your hands rather than your head; it’s a lot like masturbation in this regard. The story in Gears of War 2 is pretense for the action in which you imbibe, the narrative equivalent of the set-up to a porn movie. The Pizza-delivery guy arrives at a fraternity house where several nubile co-eds are slathering their skin with tanning oil and dropping their tops. Dom searches for his lost wife, having exhausted every avenue available in the past.  The Pizza guy coyly attempts to leave the pizza and makes for the exit, yet the horny co-eds need someone to rub the tanning lotion on their breasts. The Locust ambush Marcus and Dom as they are traveling to a border town forcing them to take action.

Sex and Violence ensue.

It is as shallow as a porn movie. The themes of War and Destruction that Gears brandishes are used as a cock-tease for all of the Bodybuilding Lizard-Gorillas you gun-fuck. War never changes. Man destroys, he does not create. The Nihilistic apathy directed towards the capacity of man to love and create is manifested directly through the game-play mechanic of progressing the porn story through perversely sexual battle orgies, complete with the ejaculating guitar-outro upon skull-fucking your last ‘opponent’.

Establishing Dom’s wife as a ‘plot’ stimulus to help advance the goal of battle climax seems wholly unnecessary. You never bring up past emotional baggage, ineptitudes, and complex emotional problems in a porn movie. You would only bring those themes up if you thought you were making a completely different movie. Perhaps a pretentious art-house flick about the emotional-coming of age of a misanthropic and scarred individual. Sounds like a Noel Baumbach film.

Gears biggest flaw is that it thinks it isn’t porn. Gears believes it is pretentious, that there is in fact pretense to chainsodomizing a lizard army in a world best described as Warhammer for pro-wrestling fans.

Gears of War is a great murder-porn game, it’s lascivious lust for battle and gameplay mechanic involved is still amazingly competent, and immensely satisfying. But there is so much wasted exposition and purely contrived elements thrown into the mix that ultimately detract from the porn, so much that I have a hard time playing through the game a second time. Once you’ve witnessed the story and know all that is going to happen, the ‘story’ becomes a serious pacing problem upon second play through, padding out whole sections of the game.