There are many things to be said about the Halo series. There are people who absolutely love it to death, relentlessly imposing their hobby onto other minds. Then there are other people who shrug off the hype and realize what the game actually is (opinion depends on who you are of course). I fall into the latter category. Halo 1 was a decent game, but was marred and mangeled by horrible level design and overall sloppy work. The second entry in the series tries to change things but miserably fails to impress.

First off, Halo 2 follows the perspective of the enhanced human/cyborg Master Chief as he fights the Covenant - a religion based union of many alien races - across the galaxy. It's hard to go into the story without spoiling anything, so I'll leave the discovery up to you. The game commences, just as the first one did, on a "starship" of sorts. Just like the first, it's attacked, and you're immediately placed into the action. You'll continue your battles in this space station and then make your way to Earth and beyond.

Halo 2 is a significant improvement over Halo 1, but in my opinion that's not saying too much. The graphics look essentially the same as Halo 1, but there are 3 key differences:

1. Some of the textures, such as Master Chief and his enemies, are much improved.

2. The levels don't repeat nearly as often as they did in the first game, but I still noticed some repetition.

3. There's an annoying texture pop-up glitch which infests the game. From afar or just when something has loaded, you'll see blurry and generally disgusting textures for a split-second, then then see the more detailed ones just suddenly pop in.

Next up is sound. Well, the sound from the first one was pretty good, and Halo 2 doesn't change that. While I didn't end up liking the new soundtrack too much, many others will appreciate that it is indeed quality based. The sounds of the weapons largely retain their old flavour, but the new weapons sound so weak that I prefer BATTLEFIELD games' weapons! The SMG sounds like a rapid-farting machine and the Covenant Carbine is like a warped MIDI of a punch to the wall. Despite all this, the voice-overs were well done and many games should follow this example (I'm looking at you Deus Ex).

The gameplay is as simple as a first-person shooter would get. Essentially it's kill aliens and move to the next area. Rinse and repeat. You would think this would get monotonous, and with the rather small enemy variety this game has, it does get rather monotonous. The good thing is that the AI will always play out a fight differently, so if you died from a battle and reloaded, chances are it won't play out the same way it did previously. The AI itself isn't anything super special but in the end it still ends up being better than the majority of today's AI. However, that's not saying much.

There were some clear changes made to Halo 2, 3 of them being Vehicle Hi-Jacking, Dual-Wielding, and Online Multi-Player. The former is nothing entirely special, but it does wear-thin the advantage of having vehicles. Now if you're in a tank and fighting a lone soldier, there's no guaranteed victory.

Dual-wielding is always welcome in a game. In fact, it's certainly not done often enough, and Halo 2's take on this is definitely different and much better than other games. You can essentially mix and match any one handed pistol or SMG/Plasma Rifle to create the best combos. In single-player it's fun but definitely eats up ammunition like crazy, but in mutli-player it only adds to the fact that the first person to shoot with the biggest gun will always win. Overall dual-wielding is implemented quite well, but the weapons leave much to be desired.

Online multi-player is pretty much the only thing that will keep you coming back to Halo 2. Due to the weak single-player campaign, Halo 2 basically uses Xbox-Live multi-player as it's only crutch to prevent it from falling into the abyss of bad. It's simple, you just log into Xbox Live, and then either pick Quickmatch, which randomly throws you into a game, or Optimatch, which let's you specify the game you want to play and then finds the kind of game you want. This is another well-implemented feature in Halo 2 (or so I lead you to believe). There's virtually no lag, and it's easy to find your friends to play with. The only problem is getting into a server. First off, there's no server browsing. NO, that's too sloppy, or so Bungie thinks. Instead we get randomly thrown into servers!!! And the worst part is that it can take longer to connect to a game than it takes to actually play the match all the way through. But when you finally get into a server, the game is a blast (at least on the 3 of the 12 maps that are actually good).

Halo 2 reaches for the stars but merely reaches it's own bedroom window, as this game ends up being only a significant improvement over Halo 1. Nonetheless, if you're not expecting too much, the game probably will suit you. If you were expecting something beyond anything we've seen before, you'll be sorely disappointed. For some reason, I was part of the former group and STILL ended up not thinking very highly of this game.

-Eniac_Brainiac