People really weren't joking when they said this game improves upon the original in every way. Gameplay-wise master chief’s movement feels significantly better, vehicles are actually controllable, and levels now consist of more than one repeated room. Aside from being super fun, Dual wielding weapons also brings in significantly more strategy to your gameplan for every level. You have to pay far more attention to your ammo levels, and making calls on what weapon to use when ends up being pretty important. Now that levels consist of more than one room, finding where you need to go has been made much easier, meaning nearly all frustrations I had with the first game have been dealt with in this one. Story-wise Halo 2 is also better in every conceivable way, which made me much more interested in the game during my playthrough. The original Halo’s story definitely had some interesting aspects to it, but I felt it wasn't particularly well told. Cutscenes were basic as well as few and far between, there was only a very small number of speaking characters, and the dialogue was often pretty cheesy. Halo 2 definitely does have its fair share of cheesy dialogue, but now there are real cutscenes all over the place, some real characters with actual depth, and even more crazy and cool scifi concepts explored. The cinematography in this game has also been massively improved over the original. I still get chills from watching that opening cutscene of master chief planting the covenant bomb. It also helps that the graphics are significantly better than the original, and fairly impressive for the Xbox. It's really hard for me to believe sometimes that Halo and Halo 2 even came out on the same system. My two complaints with this game is that, one, I don't particularly enjoy running through narrow, dark, crowded corridors filled with enemies that run straight at me and can 2 shot me (especially when one of the playable characters doesn't have a flashlight), and i'd say this game features a few too many levels with that structure. Two, the story ends really abruptly and out of nowhere on a fairly major cliffhanger. All said and done however, I think halo 2 is easily one of the best first person shooters ever made. It did everything the first game wasn't capable of, and I believe it's taught me why this series is so widely loved.