While not bad at all, the game is made far weaker by it's copout cliffhanger ending and a boring and washed out multiplayer.

The story is excellent, giving more character to the covenant gives the player a entirely new cast of interesting characters, good as the first game killed most of the few characters it had. The levels are alright, but far too many of them have you stand in a big room fighting waves of enemies like it's firefight for ten minutes, the level where you fly a banshee and chase the heretic is a great example as you have about ten seconds of excitement followed by twenty life-draining minutes of flying around and killing the same three enemies forever.

The multiplayer is a step down from Combat Evolved, but by no means is it a disaster. The battle rifle sadly overshadows almost every weapon as instead of making everything strong like in the original, everything shoots pool noodles except the BR and power weapons. The levels have begun to lose all the gimmicky, party-game charm already, and are now just boring octagons of nothingness outside of the big-team battle maps. And I know people love their high-skill buggy game mechanics because it makes them feel just another step above everyone else, but things like BXR end up making the strong weapons stronger, and do next to nothing for the weaker weapons that actually would need such a boon.

The big new feature for multiplayer is dual wielding, and I am sorry to say that this only further weakens the already pathetic pool of weapons. Weapons like the smg and pistol are weak enough at their ""full-potential" when dual-wielded, and neigh-unusable when held alone, meaning to stand any semblance of a chance against the weapon everyone starts with in most modes, you must handicap yourself by being unable to use grenades/equipment without dropping your other weapon.

This may be the second ugliest Halo game, though still miles above Halo 5. Unlike the original, which played the weaknesses of the original xbox to it's strength with a more cartooney and shiny aesthetic, Halo 2 just looks like they found stretched stock art textures over everything and it ends up looking muddy and ugly all throughout.

I see no reason why they should not have just waited for the Xbox 360 to release a full, unbroken, balanced, and high-fidelity game. And so, for me, while it is not terrible by any means, there is little to no reason to play Halo 2 over most other Halo games.

The game is just bad.

There's not much more to say about the campaign. Even with the interesting premise of a rogue Master Chief (building off of 4,) the execution of the story was bland and without stakes. I don't think Locke is a bad character at all, but there's not really any difference between playing him and playing Master Chief. I do like the team roles and having a game where you constantly have a team is pretty interesting and new. I also think the level on Sanghelios is brilliant.

People say the multiplayer is great but I honestly still don't love it. Halo 4 has it's uniqueness within the series to carry it, but this game just feels completely tasteless, complete rubbish. The shooting mechanics like ADS feel like there was no interest in keeping baseline Halo mechanics at all, and the new stuff could have been in any one of thousands of FPS games. The maps are just diametrically opposed to everything I like about Halo map design, I think this is the point where I could not name five maps off the top of my head from a Halo game, whereas before I could list off all of them one after the other. Why remember these maps when they all boil down to the same thing, and all to appease competitive players that account for what would be a rounding error of the player base.

The lootboxes are atrocious. You should not have to rely on complete luck to see if you can get a good weapon in your next game of warzone, that is something traditionally left to Vegas and Mobile Games. Beyond that, getting the armor you want is a complete crapshoot, potentially never getting the armor you want before you finally get tired of playing this game for good. Not that you would have a preferred armor set in what may be the worst art direction of any shooter game.

The art style is so horrifying, it makes Halo 4 look like Michelangelo painted it right on the Sistine Chapel. I don't know why they took a look at the overly-greebled mess of the prior game, and decided that the best course of action was to remove all the textures on everything but leave the models as overly-complicated as they were. It is not possible to make a spartan that doesn't look like they came right out of Splitgate, which is also where I think the gun designs were taken from. The levels, both multiplayer and campaign, look stunning much of the time, and the eyesore spartans prancing about manages to make even that horrible. I would honestly rather the levels looked terrible, as at least there would be some consistency.

There is so little to like about this game, but there is something that does impress, being the forge. This is when forge levels went from boxes placed around until you may see something if you squint, to things that could really look like they came from the devs directly, at least, geometrically. To fit in with what I've said previously, the untextured levels actually fit perfectly with the complete disaster of an art style everywhere else, so now the game just looks hideous, instead of hideous and clashing.

All-in-all, pretty bad game, and there's no local split-screen.

The most interesting and fun campaign in the whole series, every level can be replayed a million times without boredom (even that one.) While the story is better in 2, this game manages to have a beginning and an end, and the twist is pretty good and not that predictable.

On the multiplayer side of things, this is also my favorite out of all the halo games. Every weapon is at its peak and so you can use just about anything. I don't really feel that the magnum is so overpowered that nothing else works, indeed I feel the strength disparity between the magnum and the other weapons is weaker than the battle rifle and the other weapons in Halo 2 & 3. The maps are charming and before a time where every shooter needed to have perfectly symmetric layouts gone over with a fine tooth comb a thousand times for the sake of "competitiveness," they are gimmicky but extremely unique which is why they are so well known decades later and I can scarcely remember the names of half the Halo Infinite maps (except the ones that take a page out of this games book.) The weakest part of the multiplayer is the vehicles, they were made so much better in later games, be it variety, or the fact that you can damage them in those.

Every Halo game has something in it that brings you back to it specifically, and for me it's the campaign that has not been replicated in level design and unique and fun environments, and the party-fps gameplay of the multiplayer.