I completely agree with you. My favorite parts of the first game were the horror parts, and when I tried playing the second game I found a boring shooter. Oh, and the second game was way too easy too.

My wife, who normally plays everything on easy, commented about the lower difficulty about a level or so into the second game. I think a big part of that was just how much more powerful the Hammerburst AR was vs. its equivalent in the first game.

Glad I'm not the only one who enjoyed the first but thought the second was a let down. Are you up for the third?

I just finished Gears 2 in co-op (after having played though it single-player before) and was a little surprised at how well I was doing on Insane difficulty. It seemed a little simpler even than Gears 1 on Hardcore. Whether that is a product of level design or AI design I'm not sure. But my buddy and I laughed all throughout the game when time and again Delta Squad is sent alone against entire armies. And then how often Marcus decides that splitting up is the best plan when heavily outnumbered. The story gave way a little too much to the squad mechanics. But it was still fun. One complaint: I finished both games in co-op, but each time was not awarded the achievement.

The immulsion refinery from the first game was so fantastic.  That part of the game alone made me want to finish it.  I really didn't dig Gears 2 nearly as much; it wasn't as suspenseful, creepy, visually interesting or CLIMACTIC as the first game; in fact, the second game's last 12 minutes just fell apart for me.  I disliked it intensely.

Which is probably the only reason I'm not really looking forward to playing the third so much.

I thoroughly enjoyed gears 1, but when I recently finally got around to playing gears 2 all I could think of was "dumb jocks with big guns". Seriously the plot is so freaking lame, the characters have no depth and the gameplay is repetitive. The fact that the gameplay doesn't change between sequels really harms the series I think. Some games just shouldn't get sequels - there is too much of a good thing.  Unfortunately, sales drive decisions, not logic. 

Edit: The level inside the giant worm was pretty fun. Definitely the highlight of my time with GoW. 

I disagree with the point of the horror game being Gears of War's most interesting part.  Maybe, I'm just a young whipper-snapper with a twitch finger but I found those parts to be forced, boring and not very well crafted.  I will concede that the razor-hail was well used but the kryll and the sires were both poorly implemented.  The entire New Hope facility in GW2 felt like a tacked on afterthought that you could get through mostly with your chainsaw alone.

The main complaint I'm seeing here is that GW2 is too much of "dumb jocks with guns" game, to which I ask, "Are you really surprised that a game that with characters whose biceps are as big as semitrucks is a dumb blockbuster game?"  For me, the heart and glory in Gears is in the combat and if GW3 can provide me with more interesting combat and cover situations (the moving cover inGW2 was a nice touch) then I'll be satisfied, dumb aesthitics or not.  You do have to consider that Cliff B. is the video game equivalent of Michael Bay.

David you make some great points.  I liked both games, but it was the spooky stuff that had me most enthralled.

You forgot to mention the Berzerker sequence in Gears 1.  I think I actually started sweating towards the end of that bit.

@Keith-- I'm mixed about the Berserker, personally, though it was another of those basically unexplained omissions in the sequel (if I remember correctly). I defintely started sweating, and both solo and co-op nearly had my controller thrown through my TV.

@Kyle-- I get the twitch appeal, and while a lot of games have copied parts of the cover system that Gears used (Uncharted and Mass Effect 2 come to mind), no one has yet included all of the moves you can do behind cover--or things like SWAT turns. That--especially in co-op--makes the game really fun to play. It's more in retrospective that the game begins to fall apart (for me). Like I said in the article, though, the third game will make it home sooner or later.

I agree that Gears 1 was better than Gears 2 though not in the way you believe.  The story of Gears I don't give a damn about at all, its just some derivative lore of tough good guys fighting bad alien things giving excuse to shoot and napalm the fuck out of everything, and the characters are beyond stereotypical it's insulting.  Of course the black guy is a big athlete, or course the guy from middle America is a hick piece of shit, or course the Indian guy is a spiritual nature type.  I mean, who the hell is writing this?  It's so bad...

But Gears to me is all about great gameplay, like any good game, and Gears 2 though I liked it a lot, did have its fair share of design problems, especially in its multiplayer aspect.  The main gripe for me was that the maps where simply just too large to fully enjoy the execution/warzone game types.  Whereas Gears the first had nice smaller maps that gave good rhythm to the team deathmatch experiece, the size of some of the maps on G2 made some rounds of execution/warzone excuciating long.  Didn't you just hate when two guys where left one on one and one dude decides to camp himself somewhere, while the other endless trolls around looking around this big map looking for him for five minutes?  It's ridiculous, and the reason this happened was because of the inclusion of Horde mode, which I'm sure Epic felt justified making the maps larger for.  So to make Horde maps, the quality of the team deathmatch experience had to suffer, and I really hated that - and obviously I take execusion/warzone game types over horde... I can't see Gears 3 reverting to smaller multiplayer killing fields once again as in the first with the further expansion of the Horde mode... But whatever, you can't have everything.     

At the risk of touching off a fanboy/girl debate, Halo: Reach proves you can have co-op maps AND multi-player maps. It just takes more developer resources.

Personally, the absolute FAIL of the netcoding and back-end server lag at launch made me give up on Gears 2's multiplayer. I had too many other games to play to keep checking back. After a couple weeks of patches that STILL didn't fix the problem. . . I gave up.

Gears has a very loyal and very large fan following. GoW3's success is all but guarenteed IMO.

Interesting that you appreciate the horror elements.

To me, the setting of Gears isn't ever a factor in driving me forward through the game.  The tension is always in how powerful the enemies are and how it forces some level of tactics to beat them, since they can often be too strong to take on with brute force.

Some of the horror elements are actually unwelcome distractions to me, because it adds some other element to worry about when all I want is combat scenarios.  For example, I liked the Kryll, but hated the factory in Gears 1.

I will admit that you mentioning the horror aspects has articulated one way in which Gears 1 is unique from Gears 2.  I have great memories of playing through Gears 1, but ultimately, Gears 2 is filled of more of what I like, which is exactly that feeling of being a super-soldier yet still being overwhelmed by enemy forces.