Yea the Rockworm is our friend. Even though he is very large and not so friendly. Sort of a centipede clad in stone, never going to be romance material, but looks like a prime target to shoot at and Gears Of War 2 has done just that. But for the amount of screen time he got, he actually serves an interesting purpose. His slow crawl and bulletproof hide mean he’s a perfect piece of movable cover, and his hunger for the glowing fruit that hangs from cavern ceilings means you can steer him around by shooting down chunks of bait. Before you know it you are using him as a shield to glide past gun placements of the enemy for easy headshots.

With all that you might suspect, rather than reinventing an experience already going nicely, Gears Of War 2 builds on the games first framework. The opening of the game is quite exhilarating with fifteen minutes spent in a Locust-infest hospital could have easily been slice out of the original title, but from that point on the Epic‘s designers head for ground less beaten, switching pace, scrambling objectives, and mixing up the scenery. There are new vehicles, including the mutant offspring of an Advance Wars tank and a white-trash monster truck, a handful of weighty additions to the arsenal, and a few fresh enemies. There are even new moves – including a range of charmingly brutal finishers, the option to use downed Locusts as shields, and the frantic chainsaw duels.

Even though all of the additions offer lots of entertainment, it’s the precise staging, rather than the new additions of toys that defines the experience. The Rockworm may look like an Iron Maiden cover art, his willingness explore the slightly outlandish potential of creatures and environment. It reminds you, once again, that beneath the grunting dialogue, the Tabasco-strength attitude, and the David Icke narrative of mankind hassling nasty lizard types, Gears of War has more going on upstairs than it gets credit for.

This game is primarily built for co-op. Marcus and Dom now split up officially and unofficially at more regular intervals, and rather than a chance to explore different-yet-similar corridors, there’s a greater sense of co-dependency to these sections, with separate mini-missions that often dovetail cleverly. If you’re playing alone the game is entirely linear, but each confrontation has been tweaked to provide for a range of different tactics, allowing you to slowly get the best results from the varied cover, sadistic enemy placement, or the simple promise of experimenting with new weapons like the Mortar, which allows you to strike from afar but requires a fairly good eye for estimating distances, or the Mulcher, a worryingly enjoyable mini-gun that chews through almost anything with vivid efficiency but renders you almost immobile.

And even if that thing around the next bend isn’t necessarily something new, it’s probably going to be something clever, like a brutally creative configuration of old foes, or a taxing arrangement of cover. There’s always a twist, always a nice slice of spectacle, and while the corridors and trenches may seem familiar, you’re going to have to mix up your tactics this time to get by with any style.

There are often clues on how to proceed, as usually the sight of a sniper rifle means that it shooting time, and when the ammo starts to pop up all around you during a lull, you can tell there’s something big lurking around the next bend, rarely you would have to follow the game’s lead closely. As with Halo replaying an encounter with new tactics will always lead to a very surprising outcome.