kenjisan

Review: Halo 2 Campaign

Chris Freed and I took this game on Saturday afternoon (and on into the night), beating it in about 10 or 11 hours (give or take breaks for dinner/popcorn/Ho-Hos). My initial reaction is, "wow, that was short." After speaking with a number of people, I was assured that it was about as long as the first one was. Go figure.

This game sure is beautiful. On a number of separate occasions, I found myself standing on a ridge looking out across the Halo ring, or at the earth city across the river. Bungie spent a lot of time making this game look good and they don't disappoint. There were a few rendering glitches when we played through (detailed skins took a few seconds to load onto close ups of the models), but we figure that may be due to his dated Xbox (one of the first).

The story itself is good. It picks up immediately after the last one and goes into much greater detail about the motivation behind the Covenant and their obsession with the Halos. My main gripe here—shared by many, I understand—was the abruptness at the end. No spoilers, but you'll see what I mean.

As good as the game play experience was, I share Justin's opinion that Bungie may have spent more time on the multiplayer aspects of the game than the campaign. Maybe I was just spoiled by the first—best of its kind. Or maybe I'm used to playing 40+ hours of an RPG. Or maybe I've been playing World of Warcraft too much. I don't know. The campaign was good, I'm just glad I have the multiplayer game as well.

Follow-up: Halo 2 Online

Apparently I'm not the only one who shares my multiplayer, optimatch woes. There is a solution, although it's a little half-assed.

I'm still hoping for a patch though.

Review: Halo 2 Online

If we're talking about gameplay, Halo 2 does not disappoint. Not only is the game faster and more fluid than its predecessor, but Bungie's added more weapons, more well-designed levels (and some of the old), and the oft-talked about ability to dual wield.

If we're talking about stat-tracking, I've never seen an FPS more thorough than this one. You can log on to bungie.net and check your stats there, and we're not just talking about a simple kill-to-death ratio. No sir. Each game is logged, keeping track of all the stats you see at the end of the game (i.e. average life, best killing spree, hit %, head shots, most killed, most killed by, etc.—all in addition to kills and deaths). And even then, Bungie must have thought it wasn't enough. You can actually get a map of the level you played that tells you where the action happened for that game. It's nuts, man. Nuts.

If we're talking about the campaign mode, I can't really comment since I haven't played a minute of it. I'll have more to report back on later this weekend.

Finally, if we're talking about XBox Live convenience, we're talking about Halo's fatal flaw. Playing against friends in unranked games is easy. Really easy. Like any other Live game, you can invite friends to a "party," pick the game type, and go. If you have any desire to play against strangers, then get ready for a mountain of frustration. The only way to do this is through their "Optimatch." Optimatch pairs you up against others around your rank for a random type of game. One of the nice features of optimatch is that you join games with a party, rather than individually. That's about the only nice feature. Try as we might, we just couldn't figure out a way to actually choose the game type. The best we could do was pick "skirmish type games," which features anything from team CTF to team Conquest. All we wanted to play was some team slayer. Alas, of the slew of games we played through optimatch, only one was of the slayer type.

Maybe if we knew the maps and game types better, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but I just can't believe that Bungie neglected to provide such a basic option as picking the kind of game you'd like to play. It's almost as nuts as the extent of their stat tracking! Hopefully we'll see a patch to fix this problem. That, or we get better at these games, because a few of the matches last night were, well... what's the opposite of fun?