A modder working under the name xHeliosx has released Gears of War 2: Hollow, an unofficial PC port of the 2008 third-person shooter, built from a leaked build that included Windows binaries and surfaced early that year.
Neither Gears of War 2 nor Gears of War 3 was ever released on PC officially. PC Gamer noted that around the time of the second game, series creator Cliff Bleszinski was publicly sceptical of the platform on piracy grounds, arguing that a player savvy enough to want a good PC and to upgrade a graphics card was also savvy enough to know how to pirate software.
The second game’s campaign has kept a following in the years since — a weekend-length run of set pieces that at one point has players fighting their way out of the inside of a giant worm.
What the port includes
Hollow is playable today and contains the Road to Ruin DLC. Progress is saved at the completion of each chapter rather than at any point the player chooses. Multiplayer is present and can be attempted, but it is not guaranteed to work, because the port’s author did not put it through testing.
It just wasn’t tested honestly as my focus was pure single player.
Getting the port running takes some hunting. The launcher is hosted on ModDB, but the additional files needed to run the game were distributed through xHeliosx’s Discord server, which has since gone down under the volume of requests to join — leaving players to source those files from elsewhere.
The port covers the second game only; Gears of War 3, the other entry in the series that never reached PC, is not part of it. Official PC support for the franchise is not absent going forward, however. A Microsoft representative confirmed to PC Gamer that the upcoming Gears of War: E-Day will release on PC.
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