This review contains spoilers
Halo 2 is def a major improvement compared to Halo CE in every way from gameplay, music, presentation and even story.
The story isn't anything really groundbreaking but it was certainly more cohesive and entertaining compared to CE and Reach for me. It was nice to actually get stuff about the covenant. The elite civil war and old grunt rebellion actually reminds me of the plot of Marathon 1 and 2 where alien species rose up against their united hegemony.
Don't like how it ends on a cliffhanger tho. You think the game is building up to something but no. It was setting up Halo 3.
The cutscenes were surprisingly good. I was not expecting them to be that high in quality on a technical level. The music is an improvement over CE both in terms of variety and just how the music is used. I can call to mind specific moments that were elevated by the sudden bombastic entrance of particular tracks.
I don't like the number of missions where its just two sides fighting each other while you walk through them. I get that the game wanted to show the elite-covenant conflict but it got too much. brutes are not fun to fight imo. The Arbiter's missions seemed oddly balanced compared to Chief's.
There is a certain lack of visual clarity at times. Its not a problem most of the time but if you're dual wielding covenant weapons it can make it hard to figure out what is happening on the screen.
Arbiter's missions have goofy visual presentation at times. They gave him invisibility instead of a flashlight but he spends a significant amount of missions in the dark making it hard to tell what is going on or where to go.
All in all, I enjoyed this game a lot despite not being that into fps games in general.
The story isn't anything really groundbreaking but it was certainly more cohesive and entertaining compared to CE and Reach for me. It was nice to actually get stuff about the covenant. The elite civil war and old grunt rebellion actually reminds me of the plot of Marathon 1 and 2 where alien species rose up against their united hegemony.
Don't like how it ends on a cliffhanger tho. You think the game is building up to something but no. It was setting up Halo 3.
The cutscenes were surprisingly good. I was not expecting them to be that high in quality on a technical level. The music is an improvement over CE both in terms of variety and just how the music is used. I can call to mind specific moments that were elevated by the sudden bombastic entrance of particular tracks.
I don't like the number of missions where its just two sides fighting each other while you walk through them. I get that the game wanted to show the elite-covenant conflict but it got too much. brutes are not fun to fight imo. The Arbiter's missions seemed oddly balanced compared to Chief's.
There is a certain lack of visual clarity at times. Its not a problem most of the time but if you're dual wielding covenant weapons it can make it hard to figure out what is happening on the screen.
Arbiter's missions have goofy visual presentation at times. They gave him invisibility instead of a flashlight but he spends a significant amount of missions in the dark making it hard to tell what is going on or where to go.
All in all, I enjoyed this game a lot despite not being that into fps games in general.