Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the series’ second entry, Halo 2! Like I said in the first entry, I had played a bit of Halo 2‘s multiplayer back when we did LAN parties at my church, but other than that, I had very little first-hand experience with the game. I didn’t see past the campaign’s opening cutscene, and I didn’t get that far into the novels to reach any Halo 2 content, so nearly all my knowledge of the game was just general cultural osmosis (Arbiter, the cliffhanger ending, etc). Would it be able to improve the rough edges of the original game? Read on to find out…

Love

• Major Gameplay Improvements – It’s hard for me to really describe how much better Halo 2 feels to play compared to Combat Evolved in nearly every facet. Let’s put it this way: when I was playing through Combat Evolved, I’d be able to stomach one level per sitting before I’d want to turn it off. For Halo 2, I blitzed through three levels the first time I sat down to play and the only reason I didn’t play more was because I really needed to sleep. So I went to bed, and then I blitzed through another three levels the next day. Throughout this playthrough, I was gleefully playing two-to-three levels back-to-back whenever I could get the opportunity, it is that much fun. Knuckling down to specifics, major improvements include:
  • Vehicle handling is similar to Combat Evolved, but so much tighter and more responsive. No more crashing into everything because you can’t control your damn vehicle (plus, it also confirm that this was not an engine issue, it was very much a Combat Evolved issue, because vehicles are a blast here).
  • Explosives are far less oppressive now. You’ll still die to the occasional rocket launcher or plasma grenade, but the combat actually feels fair now.
  • Weapons held by allies can now be taken, meaning that you can customize the support that they provide, and you can get yourself a better weapon if needed (you are, after all, the best warrior in the room, so why are you stuck with the needler!?).
  • You can also hijack enemy vehicles now, which makes for some epic moments on its own, but it also means that you aren’t necessarily left flailing around if you have a weak weapon and some Elite is charging at you with a Ghost or a Banshee.
  • I also like the changes made to health. In Combat Evolved, you had a regenerating shield and a health bar which would be depleted when the shields went down. In theory, this sounds like a good system, but in practice, it means that you have very little margin for error. Shields down? You need to hide IMMEDIATELY or you’ll die in one hit next time your shield goes down, and who knows how long it will be before you find a med pack to restore those lost health points. Halo 2 simplifies this to just be a regenerating shield and then a set amount of damage you can take before your health and shields fully regenerate. It makes taking damage more forgiving and makes you feel like more of a badass, since you can choose to take that risk to take some damage if it means that you get to kill the last couple enemies in the process without punishing you for it.
• Dual-wielding! – Easily the coolest new feature in Halo 2 is the ability to dual wield any one-handed weapon. I was grinning ear-to-ear like an idiot as I blasted away with dual SMGs in the opening levels. Granted, you can’t throw a grenade or melee when you’re dual wielding, but it’s very much worth it and, with this franchise’s strategic weapon-based combat system, it opens up so many options. You can choose to double-up your damage potential with a second copy of a particular weapon, or you can choose to shore up one weapon’s weakness with another (eg, SMG in one hand for Grunts, plasma rifle in the other for Elites). This is such an inspired feature and just another aspect of what makes combat in Halo 2 so goddamn fun.
• New Weapons – Halo 2 introduces several new weapons to the franchise. My favourite is, without a question, the energy sword, which kills almost everything with one melee strike and which closes the distance with an enemy if you swing while close to them. I also really love the beam rifle, which is kind of like a plasma sniper rifle. The battle rifle is also excellent, leaving Combat Evolved‘s assault rifle in the dust where it belongs and I also rather enjoy tearing through Grunts with the SMG.
• Level Design – One major reason why Halo 2 is so much more playable than Combat Evolved today is that they completely fixed my issues with the first game’s level designs. The way that levels are designed is far better at directing you to where you need to go next, to the point where I never got lost.
• Graphical Leap – Graphics only matter so much, especially when comparing two twenty-year-old games from the same console generation, but it is notable just how much better the graphics of Halo 2 are compared to the first game (I played both games with original graphics, so their anniversary updates did not factor into this assessment). The character models are so much better and environments are all much more detailed than before, making the opening warzones and areas like the Covenant holy city truly awe-inspiring in open vistas.
• “Blow Me Away” – As a big fan of Breaking Benjamin, the hype was off the charts when I was playing through Gravemind and this track started playing during one of the toughest battles in the game. You’d think that a post-grunge rock track might feel out of place, but no, it’s easily one of the highlights of the campaign.

Mixed

• The Arbiter – One of the most interesting additions in Halo 2 is that you have a second playable hero: the Arbiter, the Elite who was in charge of the Halo ring that we blew up in the first game. A lot of the most interesting world-building and narrative beats comes from his perspective, as we get first-hand insight into the Covenant hierarchy and society. He also plays somewhat differently to Master Chief, getting access to an active camouflage system which encourages more stealth gameplay. That said, his levels suffer somewhat due to us not really having much investment in the fate of the Elites initially, as our concerns are on the fate of humanity. This improves over time, but it takes a while to really appreciate this side of the story. Arbiter’s gameplay can also be less enjoyable than Master Chief’s… I wasn’t able to find anything to confirm it, but I swear that Arbiter has less health and/or shields than Master Chief, meaning that you’re going to die way more and have to play much more carefully when playing as him. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not communicated well and, since you swap between the two characters throughout the campaign, the difference in health is going to throw you off every time you swap back and have to remember to play more conservatively again. It’s just kind of a bummer in a game that otherwise makes you feel like a total badass.
• The Story – This is a true “Mixed” section for me, as the narrative of Halo 2 is extremely polarizing. It’s simultaneously one of my favourite and least favourite aspects of the game.
  • On the plus side, the presentation is way better. The opening sequence of Master Chief’s award ceremony, contrasted with Arbiter’s shaming, is downright cinematic and demonstrates that Halo has some of the best narrative presentation in gaming. In accordance, the narrative scope has expanded to the point where it is downright epic. We’ve got the fate of Earth hanging in the balance as the Covenant launch their final offensive on humanity, we’ve got Master Chief trying to stop a second Halo from firing, we’ve got Arbiter being sent to quash heresy and the getting caught up in a full-on Covenant civil war with three different factions involved. It’s extremely impressive stuff, especially for a goddamn first person shooter from the early 2000s.
  • That said, the way that this story is told is extremely confusing. The story is far more complicated, but the way that it is communicated to the player is often unclear, making it difficult to follow at times. For example, the first Arbiter missions take place on a second Halo installation, but the game takes a while to actually make this clear, and never really confirms if this is supposed to be the same installation that Master Chief and his allies are fighting on at the same time. Similarly, the Flood Gravemind just kind of shows up with zero foreshadowing or explanation. This is arguably the most dangerous being in the galaxy and we don’t really get any indication of what it is until very late in the game (hell, you’d need to use context clues to even clue in that this thing is a “Gravemind”). The way the game switches between Master Chief and Arbiters’ campaigns also doesn’t really help, as you’ll probably forget some of the details of what was happening in each campaign by the time you switch back to the other character.
  • Oh, and I’d be remiss to not mention the cliffhanger ending. I didn’t mind it, especially since I’m playing this game years after we’ve already had follow-up to it, but I can see how the story just suddenly ending with no resolution would be a problem for some people.

Hate

• Energy Sword Lunge – As much as I love the energy sword, the way that its lunge has been implemented is a goddamn liability. Getting close to an enemy and then swinging will launch you forward in a lunge attack, even if you’re in mid-air. It’s really helpful and helps make the energy sword an absolute beast, but my God, you will launch yourself off the side of the map several times when you first get the energy sword until you come to grips with how it works. I swear, during the first couple Arbiter levels, I died more to the energy sword throwing me off the map than I did to Flood and heretics, combined. I did eventually get used to it around the time when the game stops having so many lethal drops around every combat arena, but it was infuriating for a while.
• Weapon Balancing – Bungie were clearly aware of how overpowered certain weapons were in Combat Evolved, because the nerf bat has come for them. The shotgun is, sadly, the most nerfed. It’ll kill a Flood in one shot still, but it struggles to down Covenant outside of point blank range (and even here, you’ll likely need a couple shots to do the job) and its damage drop-off is pitiful. The magnum has also been made basically useless, and the plasma rifle’s damage is lower. Beyond general nerfs, there’s a pretty big gulf between the good and bad weapons in Halo 2. The brute plasma rifle, for example, is a weapon you never pick up unless you have no other option – it’s literally just the regular plasma rifle, but it overheats twice as fast. How exciting!

Halo 2 is a triumph. The original game was already acclaimed and revolutionary for its time, but Halo 2 absolutely blows it out of the water in nearly every regard. Everything has been tuned to make you feel like a total badass while playing and the campaign is simply enthralling. If Combat Evolved set the bar for quality, Halo 2 cemented this franchise’s place in gaming history. I’m so glad that I finally got the chance to play this game in full and I hope that I get the chance to relive one of those LAN parties someday soon to really enjoy that multiplayer carnage too.