Took me about 8 hours to beat, first time thru. I have to say, overall it was great, but the ending was worse than the first one... its about equal to comparison of the matrix movies and how they end... i just hope halo 3 wont have the worst ending of them all like the matrix did. *sigh* ah well.

The single player was absolute crap, as was Halo 1's single player. Those of you who claim it to be one of the best SP titles really need to explain to me how, because I just saw it as a completelly nonsensical linear stew of polygons, mindless enemies who's AI is limited to running at you, flying around your head, and theiving your vehical.

The SP was the same old stuff, but much less balanced. The rocket launcher's heatseaking is overpowered, and a tad too accurate, and the sword is nearly unbeatable in the smaller maps. As well, there's no map I really like as much as I did the original blood gulch.

Overall, it's a better game, but isn't a game that I think is worth all the hype. Really, I didn't see why everyone was so excited, and after playing it, I'm still lost in that concept.

JediKirby

You know what they say about sequels...

That's what I was trying to tell someone tonight. That I thought Halo 2 was good (as we were playing it) but I don't think it lived up to the hype.

He said I did not understand.

Stupid fanboys.

Things are only overpowered in that game if you suck. It's sehr easy to destroy anyone with the sword on smaller maps--just keep your distance with a carbine, smgs, battle rifle, pistol(s), needlers, plasma rifles...well you get the picture.

The only things the tracking really affects are the tank and the warthog. Everything else can easily outrun/maneuver a rocket if you know how to use it.

I thought it easily lived up to the hype, but was a long shot from living up to its predecessor.

my 9 and 10 year old boys beat it.
it's a good game.

I haven't played Halo 2, but if you claim you played Halo on the Legendary or at least the Heroic difficulty setting and think the enemy AI is poor, I see three choices. Either you took one look at the game, saw someone shooting and went "Oh, they just shoot at you mindlessly. Let's play something else.", you were dreaming, or you were playing the wrong game.

I say this just because what you said isn't a question of opinion. Calling Halo's enemy AI mindless is like calling the sun cold. It's absurd, and it seems to me you just want a fight with some Halo fanboy.

You do know it's rated M... right?

-_-; and I wonder why all these little kids try to cuss me out when I walk home. Yeesh.

I played in a Halo 2 tourney the other day. 4tvs, 2 people per TV. I thought it was cool, but it seemed to have control sensitivity issues (I guess I'm just used to the mouse and CS:S :)) but soon enough I was able to keep an enemy in my crosshair no matter how many times the guy jumped around. :p

I did rather badly overall though, I placed 2nd to last, probably because it was my first time. But, still, my kill count was respectable if you take my playtime into account.

First round I got 11 kills and ended up in 8th... first few minutes I was in last with 0, but then I started catching up near the end, 7th place guy had 17 kills or something. The map had a beach area and then an industrial bit with a building you could go it, it had warthogs and some other vehicle I don't know the name of. Oh, and it had a cool spinning thingy in the middle of the map.

Second round I got 25 kills, and died significantly less. I tied for 5th. The map was set high in the air on a mountain or something, the center of the map had what looked like a large radar dish or something, with three arms.

So I had fun, just too bad I didn't play as much as I wanted to.

It's only rated M for violence against spartans, which resemble humans, and of course against aliens. There is some cussing in the game, but it's not gratuitous.

No reason not to let a couple young'uns play the game.

Yeah, I don't really care much for Halo2, but Kirby, your wrong about the AI. I've seen monsters MANY times (every battle) hide for cover, run around me and attack from the back, and just overall put up good battles.

i agree with dj yoshi.
i wouldn't let them play the hooker soliciting and then beating up game (you know the one). but halo 2 is ok. shoot, my kids have said worse things that they learned in the school yard. as long as they keep it in the school yard then that's fine with me.

Zanzibar, then Ascension, both very good maps. I suggest trying to drive the ghost/banshee--muchos fun.

if I'm not mistaken, part of the hype was being what halo was and better

I think you're mistaken. I know a lot of halo fans--all of them said it'd take a lot to top Halo. And of course, Bungie couldn't deliver that much, but they did deliver enough to make a great game.

well, most Halo fans I know are ravenous and claim that Halo is the best thing ever, and that halo 2 was going to be like heaven. So I wouldn't know.

I don't like either game enough to go out and buy an X-Box. When Microsoft ports to PC, they better not forget the damn co-op mode...

Yes, the AI will ATTEMPT to do those things, but in the end, it all comes down to how quickly you can spin around them and confuse them while shooting. Legendary mode on both games was only a fraction of how intelegent they could have been.

And still no one can explain to me how and why the levels are so freaking horrible. Honestly, do people in this world not have fingers to push buttons? Apendages to climb stairs? I'd assume not everyone can jump 40 feet in this world. Really, it seems like the game designers just build levels around what would look cool, and not at all around what would be fun, or what would be sensical. If I have to shoot around crates one more time, I think I'll shove the X-box off the table.

Overall, I wasn't impressed with the SP. MP was pretty much the same as halo 1, except for 3 major, major, MAJOR downfalls:

Horrible weapon balance. I'm saying this from the perspective of a good player: A lot of people ended up banning me from using the rocket launcher in our games, as well as the sword.

You can't ride a vehical with the flag. This completelly destroys all forms of strategy that you could derive from the game.

I can jump 40 feet in the air, and I don't get hurt from jumping off of the highest peak of the highest map, yet if I stop on a dime with the ghost and jump out, and I hit a wall, suddenly I die. The physics have been raped up the butt. That was my favorite thing in Halo, was the physics.

Last, but certainly not least:
WTF DID THEY DO TO THE WEAPONS!? The pistol was the greatest gun alive, and now I can't use them, let alone duel wield them? No. No. No.

JediKirby

Dude the pistol was the most unbalanced, unrealistic, crappily whored gun ever. I'm glad they got rid of it and replaced it with the magnum.

Not to mention, you call yourself good, and yet you have no proof to back this up. I know 'good' people who I then played, and they suck horribly. They tried using the rocket launcher and sword, and sucked at both (like you probably do.)

You can ride a vehicle in the game--the warthog. If you didn't know that, I'd hate to see how 'good' you are.

Not to mention enemy AI is fine, you're just picky because...hell I don't know why you're picky, when one of your favorite game is JK. Does it have awesome AI? Hell no. Does its AI even compare to Halo 2's? HELL NO.

Lastly, the weapons are very balanced. The SMGs are perfect, the Battle rifle is awesome, the Carbine is great, the Sniper Rifles are finally balanced, every gun is made exactly as it should be, and is balanced out by other guns. Anyone who says the sword rapes obviously sucks.

GEARBOX. GEARBOX. GEARBOX.

Microsoft has very little to do with the game!

Microsoft just slaps their name on it because they own bungie, and the fact that its an xbox game. so yeah.

The hooker soliciting and beating?

yeah. they're learning how to barter. :p

I have to agree on the hype, even being the halo fanboy i am, Halo one was awsome dispite poor AI and such. Halo 2 prevailed in everything except replay-ability i think, sure MP is fun, the maps are decent, and lots of people will play it live, but its not like the first... the first was a monument... this is just a continuation of a story with some smart bad guys.

I dont think gearbox will be porting Halo 2, not after everyone complained last time, and how microsoft dictated thier release of the HEK until it was too late... not to mention the fact you HAD to have 3dsmax to edit it... games need their own standalone editors, IE Sandbox (Far Cry)

I really thought the single player portion was great, with exception of the ending. The ending sucked, but I thoght the single player part was better than the original Halo in every way. The maps were just more chaotic and all... It seemed more like a full scale war going on.

The multiplayer, yeah it's great. I seem to be the only person that thinks the weapons are completely balanced. A few nights ago I was playing against my friend, and no matter what gun he had, I could pick up any weapon and kill him. It didn't make any difference. The magnum is NOT useless. In fact, I like it more than I did the pistol. Dual weild that sucker, and you can kill people REAL fast.

Now the problems. Where are all of those things they promised us? They just stopped trying. At E3 they said we would get real time shadows and reflections and everything else. Huge amounts of destructable environments. Things of that nature. Where are these things? There is no real time lighting to speak of, no real time reflections. The only objects that can be blown up are entities like enemies and a few static objects. Sure the physics affect a few objects here and there, but that's it. The single player portion really lost steam toward the end too. It seemed like it was building to this massive conclusion, and then nothing happened. They even specifically state on the special features that the game was supposed to end with a huge battle on earth. Where did that go? They got rushed.

By promising the game on November 9th, at a time when the game was less than half finished, they made a promise they could not keep. This is VERY similar to what a certain pc game company did a year and a half ago... Anyone remember a "September 30th" promise from Valve? The only difference is, come September 30th, Valve said, well we're going to have to delay it... We have to make this game great. Bungie said about November 9th, oh no, we can't make it. Time to prune the game.

They even talk about on the special features game how they cut HUGE amounts of content from the game, including a proper ending. This really annoys me. They don't even care about making a proper game. They just want to meet some deadline. I can tell you this, even though Half Life 2 is coming out 14 months after it was originally supposed to, at least it will be a complete game. Sure they had to delay a year, but that time went into making the game as good as it should be. Bungie jumped into this without any forethought. If you watch that dvd you'll see this is the most unorganized production of ANYTHING the world has ever seen. The way these guys work is seriously a joke. I mean they must have just said

"Well we don't have the time to finish this, so lets cut EVERYTHING that makes it better than the original game, and just for good measure, we'll cut the ending too... I mean it's not like the last level is important or anything."

They spend that entire second disc basically complaining about how they weren't prepared, and they had alot of hard work to do... How hard it was, and how many problems they had. You know what, they can get stuffed. It's not my problem that they didn't test the E3 demo on a real xbox. It's not my problem that they broke a half dozen promises to us, just to keep one. I am seriously disappointed with this game, and personally, I am really disappointed in Bungie.

i played it last night... i still like the first one better:D

Jedi Kirby, many of the levels in the original Halo and Halo 2 were structures designed only for the sentinals. They're floating robots, they don't need stairs.

I thought it was just special that they called the sentinals too.

I tired it at EB and I was reminded how much I hate FPS on consoles. I cant even move in a freakin straight line and look around freely

you=suck at controllers. Losar.

I am not amazing, but I'm proficient. I do decently.

after racking up 50:1 kill ratios with the pistol from Halo1, thank god its gone.

It's a matter of getting used to it.

Oh man, me and some friends had a Halo 2 party, and we acquired a projector.. man, that was NICE. It was like having a 10' by 10' bigscreen

Now that sounds like fun... itd have to be a good projector though, would hate to have 4 players all with 27" screens or bigger (using split screen) and still not be able to tell what 'that blur' is.

even if the ending was cut to make the realease date, it can give them a chance to milk the game, maybe release Xbox live content like the extra levels and modify other parts, i don't own the game, two friends do, but i think i read in the manual that they have Xbox live that you can download content later.

if thats so, you may just get your broken promises fulfilled by downloading patchs from Xbox live.

either way, the game is pretty awesome, Beaver creek (you just KNOW a canadian mapper made this one ;)) was exactly like battle creek and i loved that map (but they got rid of the annoying stairs... they caused a few headaches and easy kills while trying to get up there)

taking the falling damage out was ok IMO, gettting in a banshee and flying above the map firing at someone, you see a rocket fly after you sure enough to kill you... so you bail out and live to fight another day, I love not being hurt by falling... c'mon, Cheif is a cyborg.

the weapons are quite balanced, using the SMG and an energy rifle or magnum i've racked up alot of kills, duel weilding is fun and if you do it right and are good enough can easily kill someone who is out gunning you, more fire power does not mean an easy kill.

if you can do it right, you can also keep your distance from a sword weilder and kill them before they lunge and get the one hit kill on you, shot guns work nice, as do rocket launchers

Bill: It wasn't a matter of being rushed in numerous cases. It was a matter of what felt right, what was balanced, and what flat out sucked after it was finalized and implemented. The 'peaking' was cut because it just didn't feel like a Halo trait. The sprinting was cut because of the same reason. I'm willing to bet that numerous ammounts of the destructable environments were cut because in many cases it gave the player an unfair advantage.

Alot of you guys are bashing this game and what was left out of it, but you don't know most of the story behind it. Yes, you might hear them explain it on the DVD if you got the LE version, but if you've read all the Weekly Updates and such, you get a much broader picture. Things make more sense when you see everything that's going on.

pft, consoles suck at first person shooters.

seriously, if xbox had a keyboard and mouse controller, i would tear my friends up. instead its like "hey i thought you were good at videogames"

The Xbox actually DOES have a keyboard and mouse now. Actually it's more like an adapter for a PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard.

Grant: The only content comming out of Live for Halo 2 is multiplayer stuff, and maybe patches for single player problems. There won't be any single player additions. That's official.

halo 2's multiplayer is really fun and is where i think most of those guys spent there time playing rather then the SP experience which is probaly different then the first time around. Halo 2 was played on an xbox though i thought at e3....?? And everyone watched past teh ending credits right?

I thought it was pretty fun. beat it in 6 days on normal. trying it on legendary....now that's more like it...tho dunno how in the hell i'll get past any brutes on that setting later on...multiplayer is really where this game is at though.