The original Gears of War hit the Xbox 360 like a sledgehammer, going on to sell millions of copies and winning GameSpot's Game of the Year award in 2006. When we reviewed the game, we called it an "amazing technical achievement," emphasising that "games just don't typically look this good." True to our word, games in 2007 had a hard time matching up to Gears' presentational quality, and even now, two years later, the original game is still a standard-bearer.

In early 2008, Epic attended the Game Developer's Conference to show off the latest features of its Unreal Engine 3 technology, as well as to formally announce Gears of War 2. Deformable scenery, improved water, crowd generation, and soft tissue were all demoed to an eager crowd and gave an indication of what Gears fans could expect in the sequel. All of these effects and more made it into Gears 2 when it launched in November 2008, and we claimed that "the sequel maintains [its predecessor's] high technical and artistic quality."

Given that Gears 2 contains many of the same characters, weapons, and locations as the first game, we decided to compare the two. Epic claims that the two-year interim allowed its designers to push the Xbox 360 to its limits, but were they really able to raise the bar any higher? Let's find out.