Halo 2

What worked: The action on this game is so intense and the production values and story is so great this could have easily been a movie. Playing this game on legendary with a friend is incredible. The graphics are possibly the best on the Xbox. And if you have surround sound crank this baby up, you'll be ducking and dodging at every bullet ricocheting off the wall. The level are incredibly huge! The missions with the SCARAB will have you looking at the screen in awe.

What didn't work: I wish the game would have spent more time on Earth fighting off the Aliens and I wish we could have seen innocents slaughtered mercilessly by the Aliens and why is this game rated M, most of the violence is against the Aliens anyway.

Overall: This game is possibly the best game on the Xbox. Recommended 10/10.

Halo is probably one of the hardest games in history to follow-up. But alas, after three years of waiting, the fans are finally served a huge amount of 'Flippin sweet' in this incredible masterpiece that shouldn't be even considered a game. Halo 2 creates a genre of its own. It's still a first person shooter, but there are so many things about this game that put it into this 'own genre' I like to call: Impossibly good. Its so awesome that it is nearly inevitable to play for hours on end just to beat your friend down for that one-millionth time in a multiplayer game. So what if the ending is a huge cliffhanger? The games story is so excellent and mezmorizing, its easy to forget about it. Awesome doesn't even kiss the feet of Halo 2.

Every new console launches with at least one killer title, but in Halo Microsoft had found one that would not only ensure the future of its fledgling machine, but raise the bar for games on every platform. This now-legendary first-person shooter even converted people who wouldn't normally look at a gamepad, winning them over with accessible gameplay, an involving story and the xenocidal charms of its protagonist, the enigmatic Master Chief.

Halo 2, then, is a sequel with no small amount of hype to live up to. Picking up very soon after the events in its predecessor, the game begins with humanity's worst case scenario: religious fanatic alien alliance The Covenant invades Earth. Reprising your role as the bio-engineered supersoldier, you begin by repelling boarders on a planetary defence frigate but soon find yourself on terra firma, skirmishing with invaders amid the ruined cities then pursuing a key Covenant figure back to their neck of the galaxy. Far more polished than the original story, Halo 2's plot line drives the action well and, thanks to the judicious use of cut-scenes, gives a deeper insight into the Covenant, evolving them beyond faceless cannon fodder and probing the reasons for their galactic jingoistic instincts.

Which brings us to the most significant change in Halo 2. After wading through the first few levels as the Master Chief, the viewpoint switches to that of The Arbiter, a disgraced Covenant Elite. Apart from coming as something of a surprise, playing as The Arbiter is a subtly different experience. Equipping you with the Elite's deadly force blade and Predator-like cloaking field, the Covenant perspective provides an interesting counterpoint to the human levels — though remembering that the aliens are now your friends and shouldn't be gutted on sight takes some getting used to. The continuing narrative doesn't abandon the Master Chief, though, and you'll alternate from one side to the other as the story progresses, until the two come together in a final, satisfying synthesis.

The graphics, while not leagues ahead, have certainly been given a boost this time around, and the fiendishly addictive multiplayer mode now comes with added bells and whistles in addition to being Xbox Live enabled. Gameplay changes include the ability to wield two weapons simultaneously — a welcome addition that rules out the need to retreat and reload, markedly changing the strategies you'll employ in the many ranging firefights. New foes, vehicles and weapons have likewise been added to the roster. Halo 2 isn't revolutionary by any means, but as the follow-up to such a sublime experience as Halo, it really didn't need to be. The sequel's achievement is to give a second helping of the most accomplished title on the Xbox, with just enough tweaks and polishes to make this experience as fresh and enjoyable as the original.

Halo 2, hmm....I thought I might try it out, I mean, I only spent 100000000 hours on the first one...

Anyway, this game is good. REALLY good. As a matter of fact, so good that if you have an Xbox and don't own this game, you should slap yourself.

I thought I might start on the story mode when i got it. Halo 2 begins with a ship orbiting Earth being attacked and of course, you as the chief, must save it. OK, and then you go down to Earth for a kick-butt battle (sorta) and then what? Well, the Covenant general in charge of protecting Halo is still alive, but he has been sentenced to death by the Covenant. However, the Prophets refute this death sentence and instead make him into the legendary Arbiter. Arbiter is the other main character introduced in Halo 2.

Chief discovers a new Halo and he is sent down to destroy it, and actually kills the prophet of regret, however, he becomes outmatched by the Prophetic Guards that guard the water pyramids. An odd creature captures him and Arbiter, so they meet for the first time. The odd creature transports them to find a key; he transports Chief to the Prophets' capital ship and Arbiter to a jungle area on Halo. However, the flood take hold of the ship and you are left to deal with both the flood and the Covenant Army. Meanwhile, Arbiter deals with the Covenant Brute Chief, Tartarus. Chief manges to escape the ship. Arbiter makes friendly with the general of Earth's army, a girl who I don't know the purpose of, and everybodys favorite character, Monitor (or Oracle, whatever). The game ends in a cliff hanger, Arbiter and the gang learn of the "Ark" from the Monitor and Chief zooms toward Earth to end the Covenant war by killing the final Prophet, the Prophet of Truth.

Yes, you do not end the crisis in Halo 2. However, I didn't beat legendary mode yet...(!!!) But anyway, I was sooo disappointed with the end, I ran to multi player. multi player online in Halo 2 is utterly so INCREDIBLY AWESOME I don't think that there is one word in the dictionary that can explain it. Let's just leave it at that.

Story: Ending: 1/10 Sniff, sniff Story: Other than Ending: 9.4/10 Co-Op- 10/10 Online: 10/10 because ratings unfortunately cant go higher... OVERALL: A+

Except for the ending.

I can't think of a single thing that's wrong with this game. Even Half-Life (both 1 & 2) can't achieve this level of absolute perfection. While the gameplay mechanics have mostly been recycled from the original Halo (and that's a good thing -- after all, it's not a very good choice to try to fix something that isn't broken, only to break it anyways, like many developers have done in the past with sequels), Halo 2 does add some new tricks to the already excellent formula to create perfect gameplay. You are a cyborg named Spartan 117 (AKA The Master Chief) that was one of many Spartan cyborgs that were built by Humanity in an attempt to win a losing battle against an evil alien race known as the Covenant. And I mean "evil" -- these aliens just started a war against the humans because they thought that humanity was an affront to their gods. All the other Spartan cyborgs were blown up by the Covenant while they were being cryogenically frozen. In fact, you are the only Spartan cyborg left, and Humanity's only hope. People who have played first-person shooters for a long time may not notice anything new in Halo 2's storyline, but who cares? There's probably no other storyline to use for a futuristic, sci-fi themed game that takes place in deep space.

Gamers have been sick of always playing as some kind of "tough guy" who can take 40 bullets to the head before dying. Yet, when games like Splinter Cell incorporate a "one-shot, one-kill" rule into the gameplay, they become frustrating for unexperienced players. While Spartan 117 can only take a shot or two before dying, he has shields that protect his body from damage. So, technically, you are another "tough guy" in Halo 2, but there's a realistic-enough excuse for it. Since your shields recharge to 100% a few seconds after you've stopped taking damage, there are no "med-kits" in the game, and there doesn't need to be any med-kits, either, since your shields recharge like that. This is a superb gameplay mechanic -- I haven't been sick of playing as a tough guy, but I've been sick of when you waste a med-kit or other object because, let's say, you had 99% of health and the medkit only restored 1% of health because it didn't want your health to go over 100, but you couldn't use the medkit again to restore 24% more health. What annoys me just as much is when you make a little mistake (like taking damage from a fall) and have to backtrack to find a medkit to restore your health. With the shields system, restoring your shields is as easy as them automatically recharging to 100% a few seconds after you made that mistake, and you also don't have to worry about wasting a medikit just to restore 1% of health.

Adding to the realism, Spartan 117 can only carry two guns at once. They don't have to be a specific kind of gun, they can both be anything you want to carry. If you want to carry another gun and already have two other guns, you must discard one of your weapons to make room for that weapon. I mean, Gordon Freeman from Half-Life can carry over 20 guns at once, a cliché carried over from the earliest days of first-person gaming, and that's just unrealistic. Another cliché that was carried over from the earliest days of first-person gaming concerned melee fighting. You could only use one weapon for melee fighting, which was usually a knife or brass knuckles or a sword, and they packed much less of a punch than in gun-based combat. Did someone not realize that you could swing the guns themselves at opponents, which packs MORE of a punch than in gun-based combat? Apparently, the people at Bungie realize that very well, because that's what you do in Halo 2 for melee combat. And that's realistic. Spartan 117 can't sprint, but since he moves at a fast-enough pace just walking, you don't need to sprint. Grenades are not handled as a separate weapon in Halo 2 -- rather, you store them in your left pocket to throw simply by pressing the left trigger, which is realistic, as opposed to having to switch to a separate weapon to throw grenades (as in Doom 3).

You simply pick objects up by walking over them. While this may be the only thing that's not realistic, it is appropriate for the fast pace of the game, where it would be somewhat frustrating to have to manually pick an object up in the heat of battle. The only exception to this is when you swap one of your weapons for another weapon. After all, nothing is more annoying than having the game automatically swap a weapon when you didn't want to swap it, or if it swapped the weapon you wanted to keep. In Halo 2, you press the action button to swap weapons. This allows you to switch to the weapon you want to swap, and decide if you want to swap that weapon for the new weapon you'll get. The game will tell you via a message at the top of the screen if an object can be used with the action button, so that you know what you're doing.

Such excellent attention to realism means that you will be immersed into Halo 2 for a long, long time. Other excellent features include some of the best graphics, audio, physics, and AI ever in a video game (The graphics are so good, I almost threw up when I started riding an elevator in the game). Only one thing is certain: If you don't play Halo 2, or if you don't like it, then there is something wrong with you. A definite 10 / 10 to this one!