First impressions:

Gears #1 was a flag ship title for the 360 back in the day, and in my opinion should always have been the exclusive killer-app, instead of the over-hyped and ultimately underwhelming Halo 3.  The boffins over at Epic Games had created an iconic, attitude filled franchise to rival the best of ’em, and despite a very simple gameplay mechanic of run to cover, shoot, run to cover and shoot, the atmoshere and the use of the newly releaed Unreal Engine 3 made it one of the biggest and best looking games in years.

The sequel was touted from the very release of the first game, and word on the street in the following months was that is would be ‘bigger, better and more bad-ass’, a marketting tag line that made fans foam at the mouth.  Celebrity developer Cliff Bleszinski became the face of the Gears media assault, and had enough personality to carry the weight of such a big name game on his shoulders, with memerable appearances at E3 2008 and the like…and guess what – he even delivered the game on time, with no delays.

So whats it like?  Well immediately its familiar and at the same seems bigger-budget, with the first Act throwing at you some truly blockbsuter moments, and this being only the opening levels.  The art work is beautiful and the character animation and detail is faultless.  I’ve really only scratched the surface of this baby, but already I’m hooked.  I thought it also a nice new addition to include bots in the multiplayer maps, this serving as training grounds before taking the fight online to face real human adversaries.  There’s a host of new modes and tons of stuff to tweak and customise to your liking.  I’ve not really delved into this portion of the game yet, as I have primarily been a campaign gamer, and online multiplayer remains a reason to come back to the game once I’ve beaten it in single player.  Word of caution:  Play it on HARDCORE difficulty unless you want to breeze through it in a weekend.

More impressions on this the more I play it.