Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games certainly knows how to put his money where his mouth is. After endlessly sprouting off his Gears of War 2 catch cry ‘bigger, better and more badass', we can finally see where all of that confidence in this product comes from. Gears 2 is certainly all three of those things, and in many ways leaves the first game trembling in the corner like a chastised child.

At its heart, Gears of War 2 is almost exactly the same as Gears of War. Most of the first game's characters return throughout the single player portion and the central mechanic still sees you stopping and popping your way through wave after wave of locusts. The difference comes from this sequel's stronger focus on telling a coherent story and in attempting to imbue it with some emotional weight.

Innovation comes not in changing anything too drastically in terms of gameplay – it's still a fairly linear romp from start to finish – but from a marked increase in scale. This game is just one awesome set-piece after another, and as you stand on the deck of a giant rig, fighting off grapplers, incoming mortars, brumaks, corpsers and everything else under the sun, you realise that you're having such a blast that you don't care if the experience is incredibly linear.

The fun continues throughout the rather meaty campaign (around ten to twelve hours length for the average gamer), which alternates between above and below ground settings rather nicely. Sure, there's absolutely no logical reason for so much conveniently-placed cover from gunfire (particularly later in the game, where you'll scratch your head at the placement of levers that create low walls – what do the locusts do for fun, war games before bed time?), but the action is so thick and fast that you'll rarely have time to break from the immersion.

Another large leap forwards is in the graphics. Gears of War was certainly not an ugly game, although it was plagued with awful texture pop-in (something the Unreal Engine 3 is well known for). Gears of War 2 assaults the eyes with a visual feast; every single surface is meticulously designed and textured, to the point where you really do have to admit that Epic has done an awesome job in creating these environments. Best of all, textures now seem to fade in, rather than pop-in jarringly. This slight delay is still an annoyance, but it's great to see that the coders have been hard at work developing a compromise – let's just hope that they share this piece of information with other developers using the engine for future titles.

Gone too are some of the less interesting weapons and in their place you have the likes of a flame thrower, a cover-mounted machine gun, a massive shield that protects you from all incoming fire, a mortar launcher and a short burst pistol that deals out quite a lot of damage. The arsenal is varied enough to encourage experimentation, and you'll rarely feel like sticking to just one type.

Coupled with the new weapons is an overhauled animation system. Now, instead of simply dying when you shoot them, locusts will enter into an incapacitated crawling state. During this, you can run up and curb stomp them or (and this is the best part) take hold of them in a new meat-shield move. It's basically a get out of jail free card, as your hostage will absorb all incoming fire and even protect you from a direct explosion –exploding into a shower of gibs in the process. Similarly, when you become incapacitated, you're no longer stuck in place like in the first game (which spelt game over). It's now possible to crawl back behind cover and call for help by pressing the A button. This helps the flow of the game and provides for some insanely intense moments when you're waiting to be revived.

Multiplayer is just as good as the first game, with the only problem being that us Aussies get shafted when it comes to finding a match. Not only will it take ages to find a game, with no option to filter for local matches (or even a good connection), but you can almost bet your salary that any game you do connect to will be extremely laggy. When compared to other recent shooters, such as Call of Duty: World at War, this American-centric design decision simply serves to irate. A recent patch has apparently improved match finding times but there's still the issue of not being able to connect to a game with good speed.

One way to solve this is to simply start up a Horde match with a few online mates. This new game mode is easily one of the most addictive multiplayer modes you'll ever play and I even know of some people who have not even started the single player campaign yet – they're so hooked on working their way through the increasingly difficult waves of enemies that Horde mode offers.

Given the flagship status of this title, we're also perplexed at some of the rather blatant bugs present. Before the recent patch, many users couldn't even start their campaign (myself included) due to a bug that would make the game stick on the difficulty option screen. Logging out of Live or restarting the console was required to get around this head-scratching glitch. Others have reported similar issues, a standout one causing the scripted AI to get stuck during the first hospital mission, requiring a restart.

With the amount of attention heaped on this title we're completely amazed that some of these errors managed to ship in the retail code. However, the recent patching of the game certainly shows that Epic is on the case and hopefully these glitches will just be a distant memory as you fire up your campaign and get lost in the fight to save humanity.

Despite the multiplayer issues, there's so much to like about Gears of War 2. I love the way that achievement progress bars pop in from the side of the screen every now and then. I love the sheer scale of the game and the visceral immersion that you experience throughout every minute of gameplay. Negative counterpoints to these elements include a fairly average script and some ‘emotional' moments that don't quite come across right, but in the end it's frickin' Gears of War! The story has been improved immensely from the first game, but if you want anything too deep or profound, you'd go rent a movie or something anyway.