Sunday, May 24, 2009

Gears of War 2 - Horde mode

Recently, I bumped into an old friend in the street. Turns out he recently bought an Xbox 360 and is playing GoW2 on it. Naturally, I immediately asked his gamertag and sent him a friend request.

As you can guess from the title, we met up recently online to play Horde mode in GoW2. Horde mode is kinda like old school arcade fun in that you and your buddies are dumped in a map and then tasked with surviving 50 rounds of increasingly hostile Locust. Horde mode takes the great gameplay of GoW2 and strips away any pretense of story - leaving you with 50 levels of awesome shoot em up action fun.

But not just shoot em up action fun. The sheer number of enemies in Horde mode means that the only way you have any hope of surviving is by working together as a team. If you can get a team that communicates and looks out for each other, playing Horde mode is an incredibly fun and addicting game.

We were playing on the River map - which is great for Horde mode as it has an old two level house with only one entrance to it. Basically, you would have 2-3 guys defending the entrance to the base while 1-2 guys go up to the second floor. The second floor generally has either the sniper rifle or a torque bow so you want to go to the house for the weapons anyway. Unfortunately, the second level isn't particularly safe as a large corner of the house has been blown away meaning people on the second floor are susceptible to gunfire from 2 directions.

We had four guys so I took the second floor while the other 3 held the front door. I was up there sniping enemies and reporting on enemy movement. Every once in a while, when the enemies rushed the front door (which is quite often), I would run down and help out on the main entrance. And then, when people needed to leave the house to get ammo (having an ammo box inside the house would admittedly have made it too easy), it was a mad rush to the ammo box while everyone else tried to lay down covering fire.

Awesome fun!

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