Halo 2 Limited Edition
Gameplay:
INITIAL DISAPPOINTMENTS
Let’s start with the not-so-great. When you fire up the game, you’re in for some long exposition before you can even pick up a gun. There’s a lot of story to catch up on, and these clunky CG sequences cover it laboriously, following both human and alien storylines: We see Master Chief’s victory celebration, and we see the shame of the defeated alien race. It’s a bunch of hooey, and it’s difficult to follow throughout the game. I ended up skipping past most of these segments, just wanting to play. For the record, the plot finds Master Chief and Cortana (his AI guide and pal) once again battling the alien Covenant race and the awful Flood race. We get a ton of annoyingly complicated hogwash about a Covenant invasion of Earth, and a look at the inner workings of the Covenant Elite. The upshot is that you go on missions as both Master Chief and a Covenant warrior, so you get to fight on both sides of the war. However, although that concept sounds great in theory, in practice it serves only in interrupting the flow of the game, taking you out of Master Chief’s capable boots and just confusing you.
Another disappointment, once you find your way into the game, is that the missions themselves seem somewhat repetitive. Often, I found myself wandering hallways or alien tubes or barren Earth landscapes or ship corridors that seemed awfully familiar. Or I’d look left and right and just see mirror-image backgrounds, making me wish that the graphical architects had put forth a little more thought into their environments. Overall, there’s a simplistic feel to the rooms and places. Maybe I’m just spoiled by more graphically intensive games, such as Half-Life 2. Colors also seem unnecessarily bland.
On top of those initial impressions, my overall feeling about the adventure aspect of Halo 2 is that it’s a by-the-numbers shooter, dragging you from one environment to the next with not much in the way of freedom-of-gameplay. You destroy the bad guys in one scene, then move on to the next batch, and so on. You don’t really have to solve anything or be smart about figuring out riddles—all you must do is hack your way through the present alien onslaught. And although this criticism has gotten a lot of press, it bears repeating: The game ends abruptly, leaving you hanging. The creators probably wanted to leave you wanting more, but you’re most frustrated than excited for the next installment.
HELLUVA FUN RIDE
All that being said, blasting your way through groups of aliens, as well as seemingly never-ending hordes of mutated Flood, is a total kick. Even though there’s a sense of predestination for Master Chief’s route through Halo 2, and a lot of the action is repetitive, ripping your bloody way through all opponents is pretty exhilarating. If you’re familiar with the first Halo, you know how the game excels in pitting you against a smart enemy. They know how to sneak up on you, and they know how to work together when it counts. They’ll flank you and destroy you quite suddenly, in a different way each time you give the same level another shot.
There’s enough adventure variety in the game, from level to level, to keep you entertained. I particularly enjoyed overtaking and piloting alien Ghost hovercars, then shooting the hell out of all comers. And I was suitably impressed by the seemingly indestructible tanks with overwhelming firepower. One of the more fun elements of this game is hijacking vehicles. In most cases, you can just run up to a vehicle, wait for the X command to appear on screen, then toss that alien bastard out of the cockpit and hop in. Of course, they can do the same thing, too.
My choice of weapons was vast, and as with the first Halo, weapons were laying all over the damn place, and I never found myself at a loss for a weapon. My favorites were the kick-ass Covenant Energy Blade, the brutal shotgun, and the effective and reliable SMG. Oh, and that sniper rifle was very nice, with the helpful scope. One of the major advantages of this sequel is the fact that I could dual-wield weapons, and the procedure for doing so is very intuitive. You walk over a weapon, and simply press Y to pick it up with your left hand. Your left trigger then becomes the activator for that weapon and loses its functionality as a grenade thrower. You can’t dual-wield all the game’s weapons—it’s limited to the smaller, one-handed types—but you can get a brutal variety of firepower pumping from both fists. There’s also a fairly good variety of aliens that you must annihilate. You get the same baddies from the first game, including all those Covenant bipeds, as well as flying Starship Troopers-inspired flying bugs, disgusting Flood creatures, and an absolutely brutal giant at the end of the game.
The game is not terribly different from the first Halo. Prepare for some serious déjà vu. That being said, there are some new surprises here, such as—at one point—a huge, walking Covenant spider-tank that reminded me of a similar baddie in Crimson Skies. I did enjoy the Earth sequences early in the game, but I wanted more familiar urban landscapes. Things get alien again in this game pretty quickly. But there’s also a noticeable improvement in the scope of these battles, offering even wider vistas, a more intense array of vehicles and aliens rushing at you.
TECHNICALITIES
One of the coolest aspects of Halo 2 is its seamless gaming, letting you just continue onward without having to wait during long loading screens. Even at Normal difficulty, I was glad the game provided frequent Checkpoints, at which the game automatically saves your progress. Strangely, sometimes I noticed Checkpoints within a few seconds of each other, and other times I noticed 15 long minutes between them. At one level of the game—during a brutal firefight inside some kind of circular chamber, against two sword-wielding giants—I was quite frustrated by having to go back to a Checkpoint that seemed two or three levels behind my progress. But that happened only once.
One of the things I liked most is that Master Chief no longer must worry about his health meter. Instead, as he’s briefed at the start of the game, he recharges quickly and visibly, thanks to super-duper energy shields. Therefore, he can withstand quite a bit of artillery, then hide for a few seconds behind some kind of barrier, and rejoin the firefight.
Halo 2’s multiplayer functionality over Xbox Live and through the game’s Co-op mode is impressive—not to mention that the Xbox Live support is new to Halo 2, and therein lies probably the biggest attraction of this game. Halo 2 is, without question, one of the most impressive multiplayer games on the market. The freedom you have with this game is unprecedented—you can even customize player uniforms and patches. You have more than half a dozen multiplayer modes, and you can customize even these according to various maps and options. Oh, is this a time-waster.
Graphics:
I played Halo 2 on a 65” monitor with anamorphic video and 5.1 sound. The CG cut scenes were of very disappointing quality at this size, often appearing so blocky and awkward that I had to look away. However, the graphics of the actual game weren’t bad, giving way only to slight aliasing and retaining nice depth and detail. As I said, colors weren’t entirely impressive. The game’s outdoor vistas are very impressive, at some points—say, when the sun peeks through the distant mountains, sending beams your way—giving way to an intense sense of reality.
Audio:
Where Halo 2 really shines is in its audio presentation. The Dolby Digital 5.1 presentation is spectacular, actually fueling the experience of the game. You can hear enemies approaching from the back left, for example, and that acts as your warning to turn the hell around. As you spin and move, dialog and sound effects stayed anchored within the environment of the game, giving the game a stunning sense of depth and reality.
Conclusion:
SUPPLEMENTS
The Limited Edition of Halo 2 comes with a bonus DVD disc containing a cool array of behind-the-scenes featurettes.
Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2 is a 53-minute look at the making of the game. This piece reminded me of the typical Pixar animation documentary that takes you into Pixar headquarters and introduces you to its employees and shows you what each one contributed to the finished product. In this case, though, we’re not talking kiddie fare. We’re talking Bungie. But in the end, they’re a similar level of very talented nerd.
Developing the Game is broken down into three featurettes—Visualizing the Story, Designing the Levels, and Beyond Single Player: Multiplayer & Live—that total 16 minutes. It’s a more in-depth look at each aspect.
Under Bonus Materials, you get four more supplements. Cutting Room Floor provides a look at some deleted cinematics (8 minutes) complete with visual commentary, as well as deleted weapons, vehicles, and characters (5 minutes). Cool stuff there, including a vicious-looking alien wolf. Commentaries gives you a 4-minute free-for-all discussion over an early Halo Origins video test, and a similar 4-minute conversation over a First Look: Halo 2 video.
Gameographies is a series of biographies of the creators, and the disc ends with an Art Gallery of Halo 2 conceptual art.