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4.0 out of 5 stars
Riding on the coat tails of success, Feb 3 2005
In a nutshell I felt that H2 was not as good as Halo in many ways. It was a let down.When I got Halo for the X-box and began playing it I was thinking what is all the fuss about (especially after I experienced a poor PC demo were it ran like crap on a fairly high-end machine displaying nice graphics at best). After finishing it on the X-box I could see why it was voted game of the year. Unlike the PC port the X-box version was great. In fact it was so well done it seemed like the console and controllers were built around the game. It runs, looks, and plays great.
With H2 however the X-box is showing signs of old age and is also beginning to show its lack of functionality. In game and in cut scene there were drops in frame rate and/or lag in object redraw due to the extra graphics and modeling. This still could have been acceptable in-game were action or graphics could get intense (i.e. Fable) but in cut scenes? Come on. I will always appreciate speed over graphics (not that the graphics of Halo are bad, they are great even 2 years later). While the controls in Halo were no nonsense and very well thought up, the addition of duel weapon wielding in H2 caused confusion. Not only did you immediately lose the grenade functionality with dual weapons, now you had to keep in mind that Y was for dual weapon and X was for switch weapon. When you wanted the secondary weapon (i.e. more ammo) to be your primary that required going from the duel wield to single (dropping the secondary), switching between the primaries and then going back into the duel mode. Needless to say it was kind of a pain and when thinking back to the ease of use in the first game this was an addition H2 could of done without. A free hand to throw grenades is still more effective then a dual weapon wield anyway. Even the reloading of dual weapons was a bit silly. Since this is physically impossible to do (outside of games) even the animation wasn't there for it. Your character would simply lower both weapons out of view to reload both at once. Controls in the first Halo were excellent. In fact they are the best I have experienced on the Xbox. I don't know if it was because of a steady frame rate or not, but the tracking of targets was very precise. You could spin around and find an attacker accurately just as you can fine tune into a target at a distance in front of you. This is no longer the case with H2. Aim a little too far to the left or right and you lose tracking altogether. The effect is kind of like using a mouse cursor that has acceleration built into it. Its annoying because just as you get used to a certain rate of turn the tracking takes off on you and you get to start over. Also close combat in the first Halo was fun. Dodging (and turning to shoot) those big guys as they where trying to body check you was quite an experience. In H2 your character is slower. He gets pummeled by shots and those body checks (the addition of Brute Pistols didn't help matters). I also found the character ALWAYS got stuck on some container or part of a wall when trying to avoid getting hit. This usually meant death. I did like the additional use of vehicles in the game and I have noticed that the relative strengths of vehicles have been adjusted to be fairer. For example no longer do you have a lumbering tank that can ONLY take as much damage as Master Chief's shields and health can withstand (my biggest complaint of Halo). As far as the extra weapons are concerned they are mainly alien duplicates of what already existed on the human side and were not really necessary. Even the power blade is kind of redundant considering the use of the existing melee. Another thing I didn't like about H2 was the size of the battlefields. They are generally smaller and felt more like a series of gauntlets to get through from point A to B rather then the large areas one could explore and do almost at leisure in the first Halo. Sometimes, I admit, those seemed too big for their own good, but this was better then feeling "boxed in" all the time. Maybe I am just speaking for myself when I say that the story in H2 was hard to follow, but I found that when I finished the game I had only a brief idea of what transpired during the game. It seems the creators of H2 have made the assumption that everyone who is going to play H2 has already played Halo before hand. Still, that's no excuse for the "snippets" of a grander story they presented. I am not even going to go into the conclusion of H2 because that is a whole other gripe I had with the game and I would inevitably give away the end and ruin it for those who have yet to play and finish it. All I will say about it is that what you have been lead to believe this game is about through advertising is misleading. As far as the Limited edition is concerned; it has sleek unique packaging and a "making of" DVD, but if you don't have a DVD player or a DVD attachment you won't be able to run that extra disc. I think that's something that should of been allowed to run natively under the Xbox. I'm still debating over whether or not the extra cost was worth it. H2 is definately worth a looksey, but for those of you who haven't played the first one, go there instead.
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