18 years later, Gears of War 2 finally comes to PC as a free download

Gears of War fans can finally play the best game in the series on PC, almost two decades after it first came out for Xbox 360.

Gears of War 2: Hollow is a brand new unofficial PC port of the 2008 game, bringing the game to PC for the first time with support for high resolutions and frame rates.

Developer Helios proudly states that this release doesn’t use emulation, instead running as a “custom community build” using recompilation.

It features the original campaign for Gears of War 2, as well as multiplayer, horde, and co-operative modes, along with all DLC maps included.

According to Helios, the port is based on a broken PC development build of Gears of War 2 which was never released. They’ve managed to add all of the content from the Xbox 360, and made it playable in single-player.

As this has been made by one developer, the full extent of multiplayer has not finished testing yet, and this release should be considered like a beta.

Read More: One of the greatest Xbox games ever made is now free-to-play on Game Pass

The unofficial Gears of War 2 PC port features many platform exclusive features, but still has a few drawbacks

Retro gaming YouTuber Video Game Esoterica has shared more details about the port, which you can view below. He notes that the game is running on Windows, but that he’s seen other users playing it on Linux-based platforms such as Steam Deck.

The PC port can use either a controller similar to the original release, or has support for keyboard and mouse controls.

However, the implementation isn’t perfect at the moment, as the UI still uses controller prompts for actions such as pressing A to take cover or pressing Y to refocus your camera.

Gears of War 2: Hollow also features a launcher for you to tweak settings, allowing you to change resolution, framerate limit, and also some graphical details like anti-aliasing, shadow quality, and anisotropic filtering.

You can also disable certain engine features such as lens flare, bloom, and depth of field, as well as rebind controls for keyboard users.

Gears of War 2 was released exclusively for the Xbox 360 in 2008, continuing the story of Marcus Fenix and his COG squadmates as they fight against the Locust, who are attempting to sink all the cities on the planet Sera.

Although you can play most of the series on PC, Gears of War 2, Gears 3, and Judgement were released exclusively on console, meaning you’ll either have to wait for an official remaster or fan-made unofficial port to be able to play it on PC.

With Microsoft set to release Gears of War: E-Day in October, along with a potential remake of the second game following last year’s Gears of War: Reloaded, Microsoft probably isn’t too happy with this release of Gears of War 2: Hollow.

As always, we don’t encourage piracy, so if you’re going to seek this out, make sure you have a legally-obtained copy of Gears of War 2.