With my time in Stilwater officially at an end, I started up Gears of War 2 and have been progressing through the campaign all co-op style with my partner in crime from Saints Row 2.

GoW2 is a great looking game with plenty of action, tons of goofy dialog and many, many, many pitched, frantic battles, but for all it does right, it’s missing something.

After spending so much time in Saints Row 2 with the freedom to do whatever you wanted to, to now be in a game that shepards you along your merry way at every possible turn is somewhat anti-climactic.  Now, I know that you couldn’t do anything you wanted to in SR2.  You couldn’t, say, kill the hot dog stand vendor and make money selling hot dogs, or make pies and deliver them to orphans but there was a lot of stuff you could do and all of those choices gave the illusion of absolute freedom. Yes, there was a story, but like Oblivion, the story was there when you wanted to get to it.  Actually, this was better than in Oblivion as there was a financial advantage to doing the story in SR2 as you got continual revenue streams from the neighborhoods you liberated as a result of doing missions in SR2, but that’s besides the point.  When I was playing around in Stilwater I never stopped to say “Man, I wish I could do” insert stupid task here.

Now, that’s not to say that all of that freedom didn’t come at a price.  The game has a fair share of bugs, not as many as Mercenaries 2, but enough that there were plenty of aggravating moments, and I have no doubts that the bugs were a result of there being so much damn stuff to do.  That’s not to say that GoW 2 doesn’t have bugs somewhere, but hell if I’ve seen any so far.  SR2 also suffered from a bit of a personality disorder in that the goofiness of the activities flew in the face of the semi-seriousness of the missions.  Granted, you could do most of the main story without doing activities, but still, going from knocking over a casino to spraying human waste all over people is a jarring switch.

GoW 2, on the other hand, leaves no room for messing around, nor would I expect it to.  After all, humanity’s very survival depends on you fulfilling your mission objectives and killing the other guy, er, grub, before they kill you.  There’s no time for you to ride around in a burning ATV.

All of this makes me wonder if there’s a way to combine the immediacy of a well done narrative with the ” do what you want” freedom of a sandbox game.  GTA IV did a pretty good job of combining the two together, as most of the missions were done simply for Niko’s personal vendetta, so if he wanted to take time off to boost cars, that’s his business.  Even that suffered though as you could very easily blow off missions where your cousin was kidnapped, or in some other form of jeopardy so that you could instead go to the cyber cafe and email your mom.  I haven’t played Far Cry 2 but I understand that it’s an open world shooter where you can take things at your own pace.

So far, it’s not that I’m not enjoying GoW 2, because I am, immensely, it’s just that after playing so much open world stuff, the artifice involved in the linearity of GoW 2 kind of bugs me.  The other night, as we were progressing through the campaign, we realized that we had missed a collectible.  The game blocked off said geegaw from us by having a pile of busted up cars blocking our path.  Now, these are two of the biggest dudes you’ll ever see, capable of toting around guns that have chainsaws attached to them.  They’re not the spryest cats out there, but I’m pretty sure that they’re capable of climbing over a car to get to where we needed them to go.  The game had different ideas though, and because you’re supposed to get from point A to point B, and go no place else, the cars were insurmountable.

And there lies the real problem, that I’m a sandbox man in a linear world.  I see the cars and say “but I want to climb them” and the game sees me and says “but you need to be over here.”  All that needs to take place is a realignment of perspective , but the adjustment period is taking longer than I thought.  You could argue that the GoW 2 gameplay isn’t gripping enough for me to do what it wants me to do, but it’s plenty gripping.  It’s that once you can steal a chopper, fly it over the entire map, jump out and then parachute down to your crib, dressed like a HAZMAT worker, well, that’s a freedom that’s hard to give up regardless of how well your new, linear game plays.

I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually, but until then, I’ll have to curb the urge to shoot the hot dog vendor, should I ever find one.  The thing about global fights for survival is that junk food is in short supply.  Fancy that.