I was puzzled to see that the game has exactly the same issues as first Gears of War, because Epic did a really good job of identifying and addressing these issues in Gears of War 2. These are:
- Pace-breaking slow sequences, where game switches weapon to Peace Maker Carbine and forces you to walk, having to listen to some radio transmission or follow General Sarrano. Yes, the dialogs in the game are brilliant, but still, it's breaking the pace.
- Oddly placed checkpoints, where you have to run a lot or wait a lot to get to action. In a lot of cases checkpoint is made right before dropkit, and not right after it, so if you did any changes to your loadout or bought ammo, your changes are gone. A stellar example of such a checkpoint is the one before a small room with quite a few minibosses very close to the very end of the SP campaign.
Game also has it's own specific issue and that is mantling over cover. Sometimes you're stuck walking back and forth along the cover trying to find that magic spot where the game will show you hint for mantling. But the most annoying issue is the distance from which game will allow you to mantle – it's too small, you must be colliding with cover. If not, you'll go sliding. Quite often I found myself repeatedly slamming into the cover, instead of mantling over. And the problem here is that when you slam into cover while sliding, when you get up, you're still not close enough to mount over. So you press A and slam into cover again. You can run into cover and mantle in one smooth motion, but this requires some incredibly accurate timing, which I couldn't nail most of the time.
These issues are quite annoying in SP campaign, for the same reason - all of them break pace requiring player to wait or unnecessarily do something repeatedly. Of course that's not something easily fixed in the finished game, but it can be avoided during development and I hope they'll be gone in the sequel, if there is one.
- Walk sequences: They should just be skippable. If it's considered the player should listen to all the dialog, it's better to make a longer corridor, then make the player feel he or she is being held back.
- Checkpoints: I understand that in some cases it has to be done that way, because player loses access to the dropkit. But hey, isn't it better to move the checkpoint just a few "meters" forward, so if I die I don't have to select weapons and buy ammo again? If checkpoint is moved just a bit forward, player still can turn around and modify his loadout, if he/she thinks they need another weapon for the fight ahead, but does not force player to modify loadout time and time again if he/she dies.
- Mantling: increase the radius of mantling trigger by 1.5-2.
Some minor usability issues are also present in SP dropkit menus:
- Replace left weapon/Replace right weapon options are not always available, so in case player prefers to have certain weapon on a certain button, he/she has to do some "juggling".
- Buying ammo for weapon automatically selects said weapon. Quite a few times after deciding to spend remaining points on ammo for some gun, later when I couldn't access the dropkit I would find out I have wrong gun in the loadout. Just because I decided to buy some ammo for it.
- No option to buy max ammo as in MP. Minor annoyance, but still, why not if it's done in MP?
![[V]endetta](/data/avatars/s/52/52846.jpg?1424422898){kind=avatar}
