Gears loves me, Gears loves me not

Gears of War 2 is a lot like a relationship. One moment everything is going fine. The next you’re shooting them four times point blank with a shotgun just to be chainsawed in half when they should have been dead three times over…. Well okay, maybe it isn’t like relationships.

But I just shot you four times! I can see your blood on your screen!

What I’m getting at is ever since I completed the co-op campaign and horde mode in Gears 2, I had been struggling with the multiplayer in an attempt to re-experience the magic I felt with the original. After about five attempts playing primarily wingman with Slevin over the course of about a month we were just about ready to call it quits and move onto some other game to get our multiplayer fix. Suddenly, one night, after four entire games where I did not get a single kill everything came together. People took damage when I shot at them! It was magical. After playing the rest of the night with several good matches I was hooked again.

I have no idea what happened, I certainly didn’t get better, the game just sort of started working. This persisted through the week, the game was working well enough that we could actually improve. We learned the maps, started winning more and more games, and by a weeks time we seemed to be able to win half of all our matches. That may sound pretty terrible, but Wingman has five teams of two, so winning means besting four teams, not just the other one. Sometimes you can lose without even dying just because you didn’t get enough of the kills.

Now I know there are still several know bugs in the game, the most annoying of which makes the shotgun shoot directly at the floor while blind firing. But we managed to succeed in spite of all these. Then a week after all our success I got back from a trip and the game felt almost as broken as before. Enough is enough, I had to shelf the game and move on.

Of course, the next day Epic announced this patch and said it’s coming within the month. I still haven’t played in over a week, but I cannot wait until I hear the patch goes live. What is it about a good multiplayer game that gets me addicted like a single player game never can? Don’t get me wrong, I love single player games, probably even more than multiplayer, but I never find myself constantly thinking and obsessing over a single player game while I’m away from it.

This game isn’t even good! It’s riddled with bugs and plays like a mess, but that week of somewhat playability mixed with the promise of more in the future is all I need to keep craving shotgunning locust into pieces. Just the promise that this game could work is intended is enough to keep my interest piqued. Epic has its chainsaw bayonets sunk in me and they aren’t letting go.