Eight Deadly Sins of Gears 2's Horde mode

[Xbox360]

Are you aware of the seven deadly sins? No, no, not those deadly sins, we're talking about the Seven Eight Deadly Sins of Gears of War 2's Horde mode, which our OXM pals just posted.

OXM's list of Horde deadly sins was formed after recently getting a chance to try out Gears 2's four player co-op Horde mode and each sin comes across as sound advice. Horde mode advice that not only will save you from being called a "n00b" or "bag of loser dust", but advice that could potentially aid in your team's Horde mode success. You can read all eight deadly sins after the jump, but we just have to point out our two favorites. Number two "Thou Shalt Not Hang Around In The Spawn Zones Like A Douche" and number five "Thou Shalt Not Go All OCD And Take Every Ammo Box" sound spot on to us.

1: Thou Shalt Give A Crap About Killstealing

Every player in Horde mode gets a kill tally shown in notches next to their name after a wave. Everyone also get a points total for dealing damage or helping friends back up, but the real point is that you get a kill tally and that some people are going to care about it.

These same people will almost certainly make some kind of disgusted noise when you fire the killing bullet into the flail-wielding two ton nightmare bearing down on them. Problem is, the entire team's high score gets deleted if you get wiped out during a wave. It's almost as if Epic put the personal scores in there to make Horde mode even harder.

2: Thou Shalt Not Hang Around In The Spawn Zones Like A Douche

The Locust spawn on the edges of the map. This is not some high-level philosophical concept for you to wrestle with while staring out of the window. This is a basic truth. The edge of the map is where the bad guys spawn. Like, on a regular basis. Every wave in fact! So you'll forgive me if I don't come running when the marker pops up on my screen showing me that your distant, musclebound ass needs reviving. It's kind of like the Boy Who Cried Wolf, only it's The Boy Who Cried For Urgent Medical Attention and the Boy in question is an idiot.

3: Thou Shalt Not Ignore The Team To Go For A Little Wander

This is a team game, and there's no I in team. There is meat in team though, and that's what you'll be if you run off on your own to look for something to fight. Dead meat, specifically. It's called Horde for a reason. Beyond wave 10 or so the sheer numbers coming at you are just dumb and make splitting up an impossibility, especially so since Gears 2 has a lot more Locust who just run at you with melee weapons. Those guys need to get put down by combined fire before they get close.


And again, don't expect anyone to come and revive you when you die in some distant, dingy corner of the level. After the first time someone treks half way across the map to find nine Boomers playing spin the bottle with your useless corpse, they'll never bother again.

4: Thou Shalt Not Get In The Goddamn Way When Ink Starts Falling

So there's this new grenade type in Gears 2, right. You might have heard of it. They're called Ink grenades, and when they go off nearby you need to get the hell out of the weird gaseous shit they release immediately. Like, you have maybe three or four seconds before suffocation or lethal poisoning or madness or whatever it is that stuff inflicts.

So while we appreciate it looks super cool when we're fighting back to back or propping our guns up on the same wall or whatever, if an ink grenade goes off and it catches us but not you in the blast radius then please do what you can to make our exit from it as easy as possible.

We can practice our synchronised combat rolls afterwards if we don't die. Promise.

5: Thou Shalt Not Go All OCD And Take Every Ammo Box

Horde mode gives you an awful lot of stuff to shoot and not quite as many bullets as you might like. Such is life. But it doesn't mean that the five of you in the team have to play a sort of crap mini-game where you all chase down ammo boxes as they spawn. As being uncivilised goes, that's up there with cannibalism and 'FIRST' posts in comments threads.

If you're maxed out on ammo for your favourite gun then pause for a second when you see that gleaming blue ammo crate, take a breath, count to five, then walk on by. I promise you'll feel better than if you have to watch a friend's pistol shots bouncing off a Boomer armed with a chaingun who's too big to even bother with cover.



6: Thou Shalt Not Use A Weapon Just Because It's There a.k.a. Gordon Freeman Syndrome

There are some big guns in Gears 2. Really big guns. Huge, to tell the truth. Shields, too. But when you kill a Locust carrying one that doesn't make it, like, a loot drop. There's no need for you to do yourself an injury sprinting over to claim it, not least because there's a good chance you will literally get injured.

You can barely walk when you're holding one of those things, let alone firing them, so getting back behind cover can be something of an epic journey. Besides, you're forcing anyone who comes to revive you to make a difficult decision. Do they save you or take the gun? It's like the most horrible relay race ever.

7: Thou Shalt Not Use The Mortar Without Any Intel

Okay. Right. The mortar, then. It's really the mortar from Worms. In its secondary fire mode you deploy it on the ground and then hold down the fire button to determine the number of metres the shell goes before coming back down and exploding in mid-air, raining blazing bomblets down on a wide area. It fires a minimum range of 50 metres and a maximum range of 250 metres. There is no other weapon in Gears 2 that can even touch it in its potential for staggering irresponsibility.

You can lay waste to whole sections of the map that you can't even see, over and over again. It should never, ever be used in Horde mode by anyone who doesn't know how it works, or anyone who doesn't have a good idea where their whole team is. Or anyone who doesn't know where the Locust are, for that matter.

During one wave we found ourselves in an area that another guy had arbitrarily decided was some kind of no man's land. He shelled it once while we were sneaking up on a Locust for a chainsaw kill and then AGAIN as we tried to drag ourselves to safety. Epic's decision to let maimed players crawl faster by hammering the A button is clever, and it's clever because it's totally humiliating. Although really, you know what?



8: Thou Shalt Not Even Touch The Goddamn Mortar, Seriously Just Leave It Alone

Just use the Mulcher or the flamethrower or something. You know that you have to release steam with the right bumper to stop overheating, right? Great. I'm sure we'll get along just fine.