Xbox 360 gamers currently taking the fight to the Locust Horde in Gears of War 2 can breath a sigh of relief today, as Epic Games confirmed that a fresh patch will be released before the end of January.

Speaking on the studio's forums, Epic's Mark Rein has released a statement outlining some of the improvements and fixes the patch will contain:

“We’re fixing a whole bunch of online exploits. For example we’ve fixed the ability to wield an invisible shield, melee through some walls, gain infinite Lancer ammo and equip a shield and a two-handed weapon simultaneously plus many more.

We’re also making several small changes to improve the overall online gameplay experience. A few of the ones that might interest you are; increased penalties for quitting matches early, adding additional spawn protection against planted grenades and chainsaw attacks, and adding the ability to see the Submission flag carrier destination by using Tac/Com.

We know you folks love achievements so on the achievement side we’re adding achievement progress numbers to the War Journal, increasing the frequency of in-game Achievement progression notifications and adding some new Achievements for DLC.

This is just a very small list of some of the things that will be in the next title update but one more item which has been talked about a lot in our forums deserves a special call out...

About that shotgun...

We fixed the client side hit detection on the shotgun so that in a high-latency (i.e. “laggy”) match, the shotgun will be more reliable. We’ve also fixed another bug whereby shotgun and boomshot rounds could strike the ground when firing from the hip.”

Gears of War 2 was the fourth most popular game played on Xbox Live during 2008, despite only launching on the platform at the start of November.