Gears of War 2: “Thanksgibbing” Horde Event

Of the gentlemen that write for this site, I’m the “Gears of War fan“.  I’ve played countless hours of Gears 1 and 2, have read (almost) all of the novels by Karen Traviss, and even own my own COG tags.  By far the best feature EPIC games added into Gears of War franchise was horde mode.  In horde mode players work together to face off against wave after wave of the locust horde.  Teamwork, patience and a good aim are required to survive. Horde mode was so much fun, that other developers “borrowed” the idea and added it to their own games to spice things up.  This Thanksgiving week EPIC is giving away 10 X-XP for the death of some modified enemies in horde mode.  They are calling this event, “Thanksgibbing”. As well they should.

Gears of War 2

I hopped on Gears with my good friend Derek who is also a Gears fanatic. Let’s just say he knows how to wield his lancer…. Of all my friends that play Gears, Derek is also the most capable player.  I figured he and I would be able to handle anything those knuckleheads at EPIC could throw at us.  We were vets, like Marcus and Dom.  Long ago we cleared horde waves 1-50 all by ourselves, it was our Battle of Aspho Fields. After the terror that is Thanksgibbing we found ourselves humbled and humiliated like a couple of dead Carmine brothers.

The sadists at EPIC have made the the post apocalypse a little more apocalyptic!  The waves of enemies during Thanksgibbing are seemingly endless, and death rains down in the most insulting form possible, Wretches.  What we discovered is that these weren’t your average everyday squishy wretches.  These Wretches appear to shoot shotgun rounds out of their mouths, in some sort of twisted reverse suicide attempt.

When wave one began the damn wretches just kept coming.  Shotgun rounds slammed us from all sides and tore us to shreds.  All of our years of Gears training could not prepare us for this madness.  How did EPIC make matters worse?  Take the most difficult foot solider in the game, the Bloodmount, make them spawn endlessly, and oh yeah, make them breathe fire.

After a few dozen attempts and only a few cleared waves, we were done.  We did find a nice spot on the map “Subway” where you could probably farm XP all day, but Derek refused to fire his weapon at that point and seemed to be in some weird melee only Wretch killing Zen trance.  We may make another attempt later in the week with a full squad of gears, but as of now we remain defeated and humiliated.

Thanksgibbing Video provided by “Sidewinder24X7”