Gears of War 2 is a third-person shooter video game in development by Epic Games and to be published by Microsoft Game Studios exclusively for the Xbox 360. It is the sequel to the critically acclaimed best-seller Gears of War, and was announced by lead designer Cliff Bleszinski during the 2008 Game Developers Conference on February 20, 2008. It is currently scheduled for release in November 2008 and will use a heavily upgraded version of the Unreal Engine 3 (A state of the art gaming engine). The cover story in the May 2008 issue of Game Informer revealed several new gameplay features. Players can now play on individual co-op play settings. One player may, for instance, play on Casual while the teammate plays on Hardcore. A "communal combat system" will adapt to give a player at a lower difficulty an equivalently fair challenge at the player at higher difficulty. The player will be able to maintain multiple save files that work with the drop-in/drop-out co-op features. There will also be a fourth difficulty level that is a level below Casual; senior producer Rod Fergusson admitted that — for the first game — "We overshot on [the Casual] difficulty and a game that was a little harder than we intended." Several unique weapons will be included in the game as well. Overall, this game will be an exciting and state-of-the-art video game with a solid storyline and jaw-dropping graphics. This title is going to be so amazing that it is sure to put the gaming community in awe.
--Sam B.
