Okay, I've had HALO 2 for long enough now where I feel I can give a more thorough review than the initial thoughts I dashed out the other day.  I've finished the campaign mode at normal difficulty, and I'm about halfway through on heroic difficulty.  I've also played a few dozen games on xbox live as well.  Are there problems with the game?  Yes, but it's most serious problem is simply that it follows HALO--which sets an extremely high standard.  If HALO 2 had no HALO ideal to live up to, I would probably be calling it the best game of all time.  Make no mistake HALO 2 is exceptional and I know I'm going to be getting years of entertainment out of it...

Campaign Mode

NOTE: THIS SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS.  You should skip it if you don't want to know details of the storyline/campaign mode.

In the original HALO you played "Master Chief" a human cyborg with an artificial intelligence that chattered to you during the game.  HALO had a great storyline and I had a great time being Master Chief and beating up on the two principal baddies in the game--the Covenant, and the Flood.

In HALO 2 the designers chose to take a different tack and during the campaign you now alternate back and forth between being Master Chief... the savior of humanity, and "The Arbiter" who is the greatest warrior among the Covenant.  This is probably the first problem... I and the couple other people I asked about it, do not want to be fighting for the aliens.  They're the "bad guys" from the first game and I really don't want to play the "bad guy".  My wife summed it up pretty succinctly when she said "I just want to be Master Chief."

Being a Covenant character has other problems.  For three years we've been trained to shoot at anything that looks like Covenant.  Now when you are fighting the flood, or breakaway sects of the covenant, it's way, way, way too easy to attack one of your allies.  The visual cues (your gunsight changes a pale green when it is on a friendly) are insufficient for a tense battle situation.

Another flaw in campaign mode is that too little of it takes place on Earth.  The 3 minute long animation we all watched (likely multiple times) of Master Chief fighting the aliens on Earth set up an expectation that HALO 2 was going to be an urban warfare game.  Not so.  Only a few missions take place on Earth and then it's back to outer space to fight the Covenant.  The environments are rich, detailed, and highly variable, but I was disappointed that driving the aliens from Earth was such a small part of the game.

In addition, the campaign mode is definitely too short.  A good game on the default difficulty should offer about 12 to 15 hours of gameplay in order to finish the game.  HALO 2 takes about 9 to 10 hours to finish.

Further, the ending was incredibly disappointing.  The game designers went for a cliffhanger ending where Master Chief has to go back to Earth to save it from the Covenant.  Since the campaign is so short, it's hard not to imagine that originally they had indeed planned for you to actually play that mission, but then cut it from the game in order to meet their oft-moved-out deadline.  But this isn't the only reason it is so disappointing an ending, it is disappointing for two other reasons:

First, saving the Earth from the Covenant is what we were led to believe HALO 2 was going to be about.  Once in HALO 2 we find that the Covenant attack on Earth is an undersized preliminary attack which is why we have to leave the planet so soon.  In a sense HALO 3 is now promising what HALO 2 promised and didn't deliver.  That's pretty irritating.

Secondly, and perhaps further indication that this is not how the designers envisioned ending HALO 2, in the last mission of the game--the climactic final battle--you play as ... an alien.  Master Chief is perhaps the most important character in the game and he isn't in the last battle?  Just the closing cinematic?  This was a bad idea, and could probably have been easily solved simply by reversing the order of the last two missions so that the final mission is Master Chief making an against-all-odds attempt to board the Covenant ship which is bound for Earth.

You might think, since I say all that, that I didn't like HALO 2's campaign mode.  That would be inaccurate.  Despite its shortcomings I enjoyed it a great deal, and there are many things that HALO 2's campaign mode has that the original did not.

For example, vehicles take damage now.  As your warthog or tank takes hits, it will emit smoke, catch fire, and its armor plating will show wear or be blown off.  Enough damage and the vehicle will be destroyed and unusable.

Aliens are now smart enough to flip over vehicles which have been overturned.  In the original HALO a key strategy to beating some areas was to target unmanned alien vehicles with grenades and flip them over before the aliens had a chance to get in them.  Flip the banshee, and they can't use it.  Not anymore.  If you don't want the alien to get in that banshee you have to kill him, destroy the banshee, or steal it.

The ability to climb on occupied vehicles and attempt to unseat the driver or gunner is also new and very cool.  Previously if you were on foot and they were in a tank you were pretty much screwed.  Now if you can be wiley enough to get close, you can hop onto their tank, bust the hatch open and drop grenades in.  That's immensely fun and cool.  The other night I stole six ghosts from Covenant elites and lined them up like a used Ghost lot!

It is disappointing that the Grunts are nowhere near as amusing as they used to be, but they do still offer up the occasional gag.  The marine banter is likewise less polished and in some cases too long to be able to appreciate during a fight, but there is still a lot to enjoy there. While playing a mission where I had to drive a tank across a bridge I noticed that one of my marines looked very familiar to me.  Her face reminded me very much of the actress Michelle Rodriguez.  So much in fact that I was struck that the game creators would probably face copyright issues if anyone noticed.  As I was making this observation I was inspecting the marine very closely instead of playing the mission, and she suddenly looked at me and said "Go ahead.  Take a nice long look, but between you and me?  You couldn't handle it."

The marine was voiced by none other than Michelle Rodriguez!

In fact the game boasts many well known talents as game characters.  Keith David, a favorite actor of mine since I first saw John Carpenter's The Thing, provides the voice of the arbiter.  The lovely Laura Prepon of That 70's Show provides the voice (and yes, also the face) of one of the marines.  Ron Perlman plays Lord Hood, commander of the Earth fleet.  Jen Taylor returns as the voice of Cortana, the artificial intellligence that accompanies, assists, and advises Master Chief.  Ms. Taylor has provided voice talent for many games and apparently recently landed the leading role in a feature film... "Inheritance"... a horror flick no less!  Definitely one I'm going to have to check out.

Yes the campaign mode of HALO 2 disappoints in some areas, but it is still an excellent game that beats anything else out there.  As I said, the primary flaw of HALO 2 is that it has to live up to the reputation of HALO, which is nearly impossible.

I've heard tell that HALO 3 will be slated for the next generation of xbox, so it may be a long time before we get to enjoy it. We can always cross our fingers and hope that Bungie will release one more campaign mode mission that you can download on xbox live.  Keep your fingies crossed.

Multiplayer Play on Xbox Live

Compared to campaign mode, the live play mode is much more polished.  The maps appear to be well laid out and navigable, and ideal for combat.  In UT speak I would say that the maps have "nice flow".

You will find immense enjoyment in multiplayer HALO 2.  It is very enjoyable.

HALO 2 offers much that I've not seen in other multiplayer games such as built-in clan support, and player matching.  The latter is really neat.  As you play, the servers track your skill level and assess your abilities.  When you enter a random match, the server will attempt to match you up with a player who has a similar skill level.  As a result you end up playing against someone who is neither too easy to defeat nor impossible to win against.  This means that on average your games will tend to be more enjoyable.

So far I've only played head-to-head matches and 8-person deathmatches (what they call "rumbles").  The servers track your game statistics and you can review individual games or check your standings online via Bungie's website.

The primary problems with multiplayer HALO 2 are the same problems that dog any online multiplayer game--players are rude, immature, mouthy, and annoying.

Another problem that you will likely notice is lag during times of peak load.  At such times it may take a few minutes for the server to match you up with other players, or a game may halt in the middle while your connection is reestablished.  So far it happens infrequently enough that it doesn't bother me, but if it happens regularly Microsoft is going to need to provide more and higher speed servers.  I haven't noticed lag affecting gameplay itself other than disconnects (people don't jerk around the screen and hits don't turn into misses)... which is not to say it doesn't happen, only that I've not seen it yet.

The only other problem I've noted is that some of the weapons appear to be unbalanced.  This may be due to my own inexperience... typically it takes me a long time to get good at a game.  It took me years to achieve my current level of expertise with UT, and I expect it will be a long time before I will be content with my performance in HALO 2.  With experience I may learn tactics to deal with unbalanced weapons... find their weaknesses.

Right now the most unbalanced weapon appears to be the alien energy sword.  One hit and it is basically over for you if you are on the receiving end.  The nature of the weapon allows the attacker to close the last ten feet of distance with the target at lightning speed, and the only way to properly deal with someone carrying the sword is to put a great deal of distance between them and you and hit them with distance weapons.

My problem with all such games is that I am no good at distance weapons... I don't have the accuracy for them, so I've always preferred close combat or combat with weapons that have a blast radius.  There aren't too many of the latter in HALO, which puts me at a disadvantage.

There's definitely something wrong when at the start of a game on a map that has a sword on it, EVERYBODY runs to get the sword, and the first person to get it is likely to win.  However, I'm not too worried about this.  Eventually people will figure out how to deal with it... we're all new to HALO 2.

In conclusion I am happy to recommend HALO 2 to just about anyone.  It is almost as good as HALO in many ways, and even better in some others.  It is definitely worth the $50, and I'd even recommend spending a few bucks extra to get the collector's edition.  The making of halo featurette on the bonus disc is definitely worth watching, especially if you are a computer geek like me.