The End is Nigh: Gears of War 2

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: Gears of War 2 and the emotional dangers of Insane difficulty.

Gears of War 2 almost destroyed a friendship.

The idea was a good one: spend a couple of lazy days casually completing the game on Insane difficulty.

The concept was flawed in its execution. It’s a very tough game. The impenetrability of the difficulty level comes from the natural stops, false starts and hesitations of the gameplay. Two human players – often with two CPU controlled allies – are still drastically underpowered, with enemies always heady enough to attack front-on. The locust swarms, constantly flanking, drive the two players to continually reposition themselves at a moment’s notice. That’s a lot easier said than done, which means progression only comes after viewing copious blood-soaked game over screens and countless restarted checkpoints.

It’s understandable to get frustrated at points, and even more so when the blame rests with the other player. One personally perilous situation came when it had gone midnight, we were both tired, and I couldn’t seem to tap the B button fast enough to avoid getting torn in half during the boss fight at the end of Act IV. The ensuing colourful language acted as a perfect explanation for why games state that PEGI ratings do not apply to online interactions.

Perseverance was eventually rewarded, and after slogging through the game’s five acts over the course of a week there was a definite sense of relief at not having to play the thing any more. This, however, does not mean the adventure was anything but perfectly paced: the ending, for us, was exactly where it needed to be. Any shorter and we’d have been disappointed. Any longer and we’d probably have flunked out of the challenge.

Gears of War 2 is very well designed in that respect. Meticulously paced, it operates somewhere in between the 30-seconds-of-fun mentality of Halo or the shell-shock intensity of Call of Duty. It works, in oh-so-contemporary form, by fashioning its architecture into exquisite set-pieces and guiding the player through an ultimately linear series of beautiful constructions. It’s all very grand, and the player is innately guided to the finale by its constant subconscious pointing.

But when the argy-bargies are dreadfully difficult, those lavish environments become less of an observable factor, and the narrative diminishes alongside: an encounter with a bundle of tricky Locust and a couple of Bloodmounts has no ability to be anything other than a forced and troublesome hindrance to player progression. The world gets reduced to its component parts, with environments turned into either places to hide or areas to be cautious around. Narrative be damned, the experience is a gorgeous, frustrating and compelling series of inter-connected challenges.

The nature of co-op also has an effect on the experience. As charming as it is, it overrules almost everything about a game’s aesthetics. There can be no room for narrative when two players are shouting “Carmine!” into their microphones over every cinematic before the end of act three, and subtle nuances in level design will undoubtedly be missed as players trundle along debating what’s going to happen in next week’s episode of Lost. The only way to feed players information about the universe is by cut-scenes – where there’s a seemingly natural urge to be quiet and listen – but that only works if they’re not skipped entirely.

There are times when, in retrospect, I wonder how we ever finished it. Certain areas, such as the entire frequent-instant-death razor hail section, caused near-unprecedented levels of anguish. In the end it came down to that original commitment, made before starting the game, which kept us driving forward. And I’m very glad we did.

Insane difficult was a gruelling, difficult journey. Reaching the end was no easy feat – but it was clearly never meant to be. Finishing certain challenging games on their ultimate difficulty level is quickly becoming a modern rite of passage, and in personal experience my jaunt through Epic’s recent opus has become a conversational piece that even works outside of familiar gaming circles: rarely have I been able to muster up any conversations with the majority of my friends for slogging through to the end of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, for instance. Gears of War 2 chips away at your determination, but forcing you and a friend through its murky tunnels creates a unique bond between two players that’s rarely seen in other co-operative games.

If it doesn’t inadvertently end a friendship, completing Gears of War 2 on Insane will indubitably make it stronger.