"If God Is Love Then You Can Call Me Cupid"

Halo has been apart of my life since January of '02. Way back then I aquired an xbox with halo and SSX tricky. Its not often I will play a game much after I beat it, but I did with Halo. Infact I convinced a good friend of mine to get an Xbox with Halo and we started playing co-op. We then gathered a third compardre and found ourselves playing multi pretty much everyday. Halo then bcame a part of my life almost everyday for the next couple of years. I played by myself, with one or two otheres and sometimes even in big ol' system link with like 6-8 people. Good times...I sure wish I could still get enough people to play. Eh um ya anyway, wih all the love I had for its preceder, I only hoped halo 2 was going to match up. Come November 9th, 2004, one of the most exciting moments of all time, Halo 2 comes in my hands. Do I think it compares to the original halo? Read on you must...

The Epic Plot

Halo 2 takes place a bit after Halo's ending. Halo ended with the Halo ring world destruction, a bunch of hectic battles occur in space, and eventually the Master Cheif finds his way back to earth. Earth is now I believe the last human colony not attacked by a group of alien races known as the covenant, yet! After just getting back home and having little time to rest, Spartan-117 must now help to defend earth and continue to try to stop the increasingly aggessive covenant armada.

Life As The MC

Just as the first, Halo 2 is a first person shooter. You see what your characters, you basically view the game from your characters eyes. Your hands of weapon(s) will be places before your eyes. Along with that, the screen, or your HUD, will display ammo counts, a radar and your life bar. I liked the life system in halo better then this but, I guess this works. You dont have a life bar, but instead just an energy sheild. It will go down pretty fast, so you will often have to take cover behind some object and ait a few seconds. The few seconds will allow your sheild to recover so you may go back out and get it knocked down again. For the most part, the object of the game is to go from point A to point B killing everything in your path. You'll sometimes need to go a different route to find a device to unlock some door or something, pretty standard objectives. Along the way you will come across a wide variety of enemies, much more then in Halo. You will face off the seve different races that make up the covenant, groups of floating laser spitting robot guardians and even some other suprise enemies. Halo wasn't known for its bosses, mainly because it had none. Halo 2 comes about with some enemies that are tougher then your regular foes, bosses if you must. A new and quite cool addition if you ask me. Another improvement would have to be the Artificial Intelligence. Your enemies (and allies) will be alot smarter. Dodging grenades with rolls, climbing boxes, meleeing and using other such strategies. With the uniqueness and inetlligence of your foes, playing levels over again can lead to some very different situations, which is one thing I love about the campaign. The enemies will do different things and go to different spots in the area.

Running around slaughtering the covenant armada is done with much more style this time around. Your weapon selection is vastly upgraded, even the vehicles. one of my favorites from the original, the assault rifle, didn't quite make the jump from halo to halo 2. Maybe because it wasn't really a good weapon, but it was fun. its been replaced by the new Sub-machine gun, which is basically just a smaller version of it. The infamous human pistol has been greatly toned down, so it is no longer the dominating three shot to the head wepon anymore. the new pistol is much less powerful and has a shorter range. Not cool, but it gives people who dont use pistols a chance. The rocket launcher has also been slightly modified. When an enemy vehichle passes by your target, you can hold in the firing buttin for a split second for a homing shot which wil follow the enemy vehicle. Very effective in multiplayer, but it takes alot of fun of using vehicles away. You ever wanted to grab the energy sword after you killed those damn golde elites that would deliver one hit kills to you. Well now you can because the blade will no longer just diappear when dropped but it will remain open and available for use. All the other old weapons make returns and theres even a few other new ones. Everyones favorite new feature in weapons is the duel weilding. Master Cheif has mastered the art of holding two guns at once, amazing. Not all weapons arent duel comapatable however, just smaller one handed things. The duel weilding can lead to devastating fire power, but you will have some disadvantages. While holding two weapons, you cant throw grenades or melee. The collesting thing about duel weilding is that you dont have to fire both weapons at once. One button can shoot one and the other button will fire the other. Effective for when you have to reload one of them.

The levels in campaign arent as big as halos were, but driving can still beat walking. Halos old vehicles return for more action along with some new rides. The classic warthog is here along with the all new gauss hog which uses a different turret then the regular warthog. The scorpion tank is now faster and has a faster firing rate. The covenant have their own form of the warthog, the spectre which seats four riders. The banshee is back and now available in multiplayer to. Also expect to see some other new vehicles. The level designs are wonderous. Every level is long and detailed. Theres quite the bit to look at throughout each level.

Halo With Others

the multiplayer I would say is the most popular part of the game. Theres so much new to the mutli that halo didnt offer. Tons of maps, gametypes and the options for each gametype are very in-depth. Theres a variety of maps each have their own ideal purposes, like some are meant for capture the flag while others are just meant for games like slayer, which is commonly reffered to as deathmatch. The games got its share of really big maps like the new Containment and even small ones like lockout. You even get new versions of some classic Halo maps like Blood gulch and longest. Halo 2 offers many different game types, more so then the first did. Theres slayer, assault, capture the flag, territories and even more. The very much disliked race gametype didn't make the cut though. To make the games even better you can customize each gametype changing many of the rules. Change the time limit for controlling the hill. Add more the one skull to the map. Make the flag touch return or make it so your team has to guard it. Make the kill count in a slayer anywhere from one to 250 kills. The statistics at the end of each game are also very detailed. it tell basic stuff like how mnay kills and death you have, but also tells how many medals you have, your accuaracy and even your average life span through out the game. Medals are new to halo 2. There only there for show, but they are pretty cool. You get them form performing certain tasks in multi like sniping someone or sticking a plasma grenade to them. You can work to figure out what all the medals mean. Another thing coll about multi is how much you get to customize your profile. In halo all you could do was give them a name and a color. This time you can choose a mix of two colors for the armor and even have a signature symbol to appear above your ahead. theres a big list of icons to have. Theres everything from a grunt to a sword, theres ninja and dots. You can make yourself look pretty cool. For even more of a difference, you can change your profile character to be a Covenant elite instead of just being a Spartan. A very cool new feature to make multi look cooler. The multiplayer is meant to be played on Xboxlive, but if you dont have live then you can play upto four players on one xbox or upto 16 players by system linking multiple xboxes together. Overtime Bungie is releasing new maps and patches to add to the Halo 2 experience. Thus far you can find some patches which fix stuff like increasing the strength of melees and grenades, etc. There have also been a total of nine new maps released with probably more to come.

All Visuals Clear

Halo 2 looks simply amazing. As good has halo looked, halo 2 beats it. The lighting effects used for Doom 3 was used in Halo 2. While most os the parts dont look quite as good as the lighting in doom 3, the cinemas were absolutely incredible looking. Standing around in the campaign just looking at different stuff in the levels, you can see how much time and detail bungie put into making the game look good. When your on earth you see all kinds of garbage thrown all over, rubble from building and even posters on the walls. The only complaint is the graphicals glitches that occur during cinemas. It will sort of lock up for a moment, not much but its pretty annoying.

Incoming transmission

Two things that have always appealed to me about Halo. The epic battle sound effects and the awesome music. The sounds of so many explosions and gunshots going off around you is incredible. The the battles your marines and the enemies will blurt many random comments at each other. There are hundreds upon hundreds of dialouge snippets from combat in the game. You wont get sick of hearing the same things. The music is possibly better then the first halos. There is still the popular theme but its remixed and now adds a female ghostly voice. Also new, the soundtrack includes a few mainstream rock bands such as incubus and breaking benjamin. I wasn't big on the idea, but the music from them in the game doesn't have lyrics and it actually works out really good. The music so fits the mood.

My Last Words

Halo 2 is awesome, simply awesome. A must have for Xbox live FPS fans.

Release: November 9th, 2004
Developer: Bungie
Console: Xbox
Genre: 1st person shooter
1-16 Player(s)
Online Enabled
System Link
Contect Download

Final Rating: 9.6/10