If you’ve been waiting patiently for the release of Gears of War 2, you may have heard that the games creators decided to hire an actual writer this time around, to replace the 10 monkeys they obviously had write the first one. Well it turns out, and I know this is coming as a huge surprise, that the story is no better than the first. It may actually be worse, with the added benefit of being mega-hyped by Epic and Cliff. And just as a fair warning, this is going into super spoiler territory.

Gears of War 2 starts out fine enough, with a quick recap of the planet Sera’s recent history and the war against the “locust hordes”. In fact, while their doesn’t seem to be much amiss, with perhaps even a little emotional resonance by way of Dom’s lost wife. The guys act like soldiers in a typical war or action movie, though perhaps taking the gruff level to the extreme. Then this all goes to crap when they find the giant worms. Not just find, but announce to the whole world by way of screaming “THEIR SINKING CITIES WITH GIANT WORMS!”. This line is given with surprisingly forceful conviction, meaning none of the blame can be laid at the feet of the voice actors here. But giant worms? Really? And some how it actually gets worse. "Worse how" you might ask? Well I’ll give you one guess as to how they kill said giant worm. Thats right, by going inside of it.

On top of the sheer ridiculousness of the giant worms you also get the dual chain-saw staff. When the COGs (humans) decided to attach chain-saws to their weapons the Locust must have really flipped out. “What are we gonna do now! They’ve got freakin’ chainsaws on their guns!” At which point one must have said, “Well lets use two chain-saws then!“ And after reverse engineering their mighty lawn care technology, the locust find themselves with a staff that has a chain-saw attached to both ends, in effect a dual headed hedge trimmer. A hedge trimmer they proceed to the have sword fights with.

Perhaps the oddest part of this series of over the top absurdity comes when their is a scene of actual emotion. When Dom ends up finally finding his wife, only to find her tortured and emaciated to the point that he put her out of her misery seems so out of place in the story that it just leaves you feeling uncomfortable. It would be like an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie about the holocaust. I understand that the game’s creators would like to make their games more emotional or artistic, but when you insert that stuff in a game like Gears of War 2, where your target audience consists of mostly half drunk frat guys, scenes about overcoming loss and grief just don’t fit.

Then again, maybe I’m just not seeing the Gears of War 2 story for what it really is. Perhaps the giant worms are in fact a comment on our collapsing economic infrastructure, with the cities representing mainstream America and the “giant worms” being a metaphor for the wall street fat-cats that grabbed the rug out from underneath our feet. That would make the use of chain-saws a perfect comparison to the political ideals of “Change” being something that good or evil, depending on who wields its. And Dom’s wife dying? Well, that’s just about how dying sucks.