Great Single Player and Fancy new Features. Don't bother with the Multiplayer though.
The Single Player Campaign is Fantastic. The Environments have been beautifully tailored, the addition of Heavy weapons and New Enemies add a much needed increase of Difficulty to the franchise. The new executions are sadistically exciting to watch and the inclusion of drop in drop out Co-Op saves a lot of time for those with a lot of Violence loving friends.
Remember Return to Castle Wolfenstein? The Game with the crap Single player and awesome multiplayer? Well, Gears Two is the Opposite of that. Saying the multiplayer is broken would be an understatement. I hate it when developers try to improve on a already brilliant feature of a game and end up totally stuffing it up, This obviously happened with Epic Games and Gears of War 2.
They added a whole lot of spectacular new features that worked extremely well in the Single player portion of the game but are incredibly impractical in Multiplayer
Chainsaw Duels. Clashing chainsaw blades with an anemic Dinoman while simultaneously wearing out your B button on your controller is awesome in Single Player, If you do it in Multiplayer, Chances are some dick on your team will come along with the shotgun (which EVERYONE USES ALL THE TIME) and blasts your assailant away. While this would be a life saving in the incredibly unlikely real life event of a Chainsaw Duel with a disgruntled lumberjack, This is a dick move in Multiplayer however as your savior as most of the time, he was not looking to save your life, but to increase his score with a stolen kill, that you worked hard for. The Prick.
The Multiplayer is not all bad however, the inclusion of Bots was one of the reasons I bought this game. Now, I almost instinctively knew that the Bots would be totally retarded but I didn't care, I just wanted to blow off some steam after a long day of school or sitting on my ass doing nothing or both.
I am probably the only person in the world who thinks Horde mode is atrocious. I played it for a bit, The first few levels were Alright, with just a few drones and the occasional wretch but as I progressed to wave seven, I noticed that all my enemies were all boomer variants AND ONLY BOOMER VARIANTS. I survived the fat bastards to progress into the other waves, which were filled with epically irritating hordes of Bloodmounts. I quit at this point due to this. Horde mode is just large enemy spamming lamefest in my opinion.
In conclusion, Gears of War2 is a Fantastic Single Player experience that you will remember for years to come. Alas, The Multiplayer element is like communism. It looked good on Paper, but was difficult to execute. (No Pun intended, Seriously, I hate Puns)