It improves and extends a lot of Gears1's most exciting features, but there still are some improvements needed on-line.
So I went online and directly died 20 times without making a single kill, but after a week I finally got the hang of it and I would play it till Halo 3 came out.
Campaign and AI.
But now, the Halo3 hype is over, and the sequel came out.
First I started the campaign, it took me 2 days to get trough it on normal because there was so much puzzling put in it, that it felt like I was playing SuperMario64 (which also took me a week to figure out how to start a mission), but the shooting and blood only got better.
the features to make it more realistic worked out pretty well, chainsaw fights and advanced execution's are sure to bring back that noisiness but exciting feeling that you got when you chainsawed somebody for the first time.
Tough the noobie style of your friendly I.A. does take away some of the fun, when you are playing against bots they all do the same and the so called "Bot Battles" can take minutes to finish.
Horde is probably one of the things that keep this game interesting if your not in the mood to get 'one shot killed' and you completed the campaign its great and the waves are really exciting, but it is annoying that you cant have any friendly I.A. in horde so you don't have to play alone.
Multiplayer.
If you ever played Gears1 online you know that the saw is the most important part of the game, but now in Gears2, there in the starting period and they look at what weapons and strategies are used the most and they make them weaker or less used weapons and strategies stronger.
The chainsaw is used to much at this points, and you don't get stunned if somebody shoots you when you are revving your chainsaw , and the shotgun isn't strong enough to blow somebody apart and also do quite some damage from a distance.The shotgun is very important in the game, but it just isn't strong enough up close at this point.
Also the smoke grenade hardens sneak-ups to somebody, because they get planted everywhere and the have a blast radius that is bigger then from where your shotgun can actually do feelable damage to somebody.
And the way multyplayer matches are created also is different, they now use a Halo style matchmaking system in which you can't chose your game type/level but you can vote for it in a brand new trigger system.
They probably did this because they do not want to have the "AFK host" problem again.
And one last thing I think does need improvement is the lagg lots of people have a lot, that's the reason I always hosted so I had a good connection, but now, my connection always blows.
So it looks better, but there are just a lot of things that could use some improvement especially online.