Halo 2 is a decent game. It improves some things over the first entry in the series, though it's more of a partial improvement rather than actual fix of the issues with the base game design. It does significantly improve in the story department though. However, this remaster ruins some of that with some pretty noticeable technical issues.
Graphically, the game is pretty good looking, asHalo 2 is a decent game. It improves some things over the first entry in the series, though it's more of a partial improvement rather than actual fix of the issues with the base game design. It does significantly improve in the story department though. However, this remaster ruins some of that with some pretty noticeable technical issues.
Graphically, the game is pretty good looking, as much as it can be without making any notable change to the base design of the levels, etc. to keep in line with the original. It's far from perfect though. There are some mishaps, though - some floating objects, misaligned textures, etc. - some of them so obvious I noticed them even in pretty hectic moments.
Unfortunately, for this one, sound also disappoints - sound mixing specifically. Volume of music, ambience, effects, speech - especially speech - are inconsistent. Sometimes, music is too loud. So you turn it down. Then next track goes too low, so you turn it back up - but the next speech lines are too low volume and now hard to understand, so you turn the music back down to minimum, and so on. It's very intrusive, very annoying, very immersion breaking to have to pause the game every 20 minutes to fiddle with audio settings, to a point, where despite the very good soundtrack, it's just better to turn music off, if you are playing for the first time and want to catch all of the story details, dialogues, etc.
Story wise, the game is much better than Halo CE, it's more fleshed out, there is less stupid and cringy moments, it's a tad more serious, but it still has that B-level action movie thing going on with a couple one liners and tons of "go shoot stuff, soldier". Honestly, I would say this is my favorite Halo story. It's not some super deep stuff, it's got the right amount of interesting tidbits to make you invested in the universe, and the rest is just basically explaining why this thing has to be blown up or that thing captured. Pretty much spot on for this kind of game. The only really downside is the really abrupt ending - this is not a cliffhanger, it's straight up "we ran out of money and time at this specific point and couldn't be bothered to smooth it out so the ending would at least feel as something akin to a closure behind the whole game, see you in the next one" kind of thing.
Now, to the gameplay. Halo is famous for its super fun formula, and it's here for first 60-70% or so of the game. Then it goes to crap, much like Halo CE. There's less small hard to hit enemies, but others have been made into some pretty annoying bullet sponges, the level design is still very hit or miss though it has less re-used assets and layouts, and the last stages are swarming with infinite, or near infinite amounts of enemies, and it's just a slog, and I just skipped most of the combat by running because it turned from fun to a chore. Again, you get into hallway, five minutes fire down the hallway to kill all enemies, move around the corner, rinse and repeat - though to be fair, it's more open than in Halo CE so you can actually just skip it. And I could even understand a couple stages like that, where the odds are simply too stacked against you to fight them, and so you just focus on reaching the objective, but when more than a quarter of your power fantasy shooter is like that? You did something very wrong.
Anyways, this is a bit of a mixed bag. I gave it the same rating as the Halo remaster, but Halo 2 is, in my opinion, a better game. It's just that the remaster is worse than the Halo CE remaster, so what improvements there are between the games are ruined by issues with the remaster itself.… Expand
Halo 2: AnniversaryYour Score0 out of 10User Score
