Halo 2

The Halo franchise seems to sell on one thing and one thing only - the Master Chief, the iconic game character that, to me, isn't all that great.

He has no health, just a 'shield' that takes about five seconds to recharge after you get hit.

I'm just wondering whether it was Halo that introduced what I like to call 'Threshold health', where you don't have a health bar per se but you can tell your in danger, usually by something flaching on your screen or, in the case of MW2, blood all over your face.

Anyway, back to Halo 2.
I noticed that there isn't the usual "This game is awesome" quotes from gaming websites, and I imagine Microsoft pays for all the 'reviews' anyway, so why not include them?

I actually don't know. Maybe because everybody thought the same wahy I do about Halo 2 and said they wouldn't defile themselves by taking a bribe, or more likely Microsoft/Bungie knew that this game would sell like hotcakes wrapped around a stripper regardless of internet reviews, so they just didn't bother.

Oh, the game? It's shit.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to sugar coat this just so I won't hurt some ten year olds feelings or enrage a rabid Halo fan - This. Game. Is. F%#king. Terrible.

Right off the bat, I'm beset by hidious textures covering the walls around me. And I'm insulted that they included a tutorial that, no jokes, makes you look up and down three times. That's it. Considering that they think we're that stupid, why not explain to us in that greater detail how to press the forward key or how not to break your keyboard trying to figure out where the hell to go next.

So, got past the tutorial bit, and there's a sort of playable cutscene, than a not playable cutscene, then another, then they actually let me play the game.
Finally.

So, after finding out that Bungie forget the Sprint button and coming to the horrifying realization that I had to literally walk everywhere, I plunged myself head first into the combat, firing on all cylinders with my Battle Rifle.

At first, I was alomost impressed by the Dual Weild capability, until I figured out that you drop your secondary weapon if you do one of the following;
- Switch to your other weapon
- Throw a grenade
- Attack with melee
I thought that was pretty damn bad. And I thought the worst thing that I could possible think - "How could this possible get any worse?"

Well, can you say 'No clear objectives?', because I certainly can.
In MW2, your given a decent UAV minimap to mark the floor plan of the map, including the edges, and tells you where the next waypoint is so you can get to those objectives easier.

In Halo 2, you get no radar. You get this sensor thing that pings every three or so seconds to tell you where the good and bad guys are, but it only effects the direction your facing, so you can't make sure your corners are safe. And don't worry about telling me where the enemies are right in front of me Halo 2, because the sensor's range is roughly 15 feet in front of you, so it's of bugger all use and should either be severely improved or removed altogether.

Then I get out of the space ship. Up until now, I assumed that Master Chief did that slow, bouncy kind of jump because he was in space. Makes sense, right? I even went out of my way to not notice the fact that artificial gravity had clearly been used inside the ship.

But then we get onto Earth where miraculaously, a bunch of marines walked out of the crashed Pelican dropship unscathed. Now, I watched Black Hawk Down the previous night and that helicopter want down a lot lighter than the Pelican did and everybody early died, apart from the pilot (I think). That thing flipped and buried itself in the ground, and people made it out of there. Hell, you can tell the crash was bad because Master Chief was shaken up.

The town thing I've crashed into... how do I describe it? Doom II pisses over the textures here.
It's like they didn't even try. Fallout 3 had pretty bad textures and some of it was a little blocky (on a machine that's roughly four years old), but at least you knew that it looked great on a proper computer.

Halo 2 looks like the texture artist did everything in Paint. Bland, blocky, and wears the 'no effort here' label like a f&@ing crown.
The street I was fighting in was a sandy colour all around, and the buildings were simple boxes fitted into the square city blocks. There was no colour, apart from the bodies of the marines and covenent starting a sprinkle the ground.

But the excremental graphics wasn't the worst part of the game for me, although it did come very close.
The fact that there's no clear path or objectives pretty much killed it for me. You could argue that Halo 2's levels are pretty linear, but at one point I was fighting off a group of covenent, trying despratly to figure ou whether I was supposed to do something or if this was how it played out.

Since there isn't any Ghost or Soap on the other end of the line talling you what the deal is, I just sat there, confused, waiting for someone to communicate to me.

I've gotten up to the beach bit where you got into the Warthog and are driving around everywhere, until your team mates inevitibly die, and your forced to procede on foot. I do remember a concrete tower with no cover inside the walls or on top, and I kept getting attacked by Elites in Ghosts. At that point, I gave up. Maybe I'll try the multiplayer, but I'm not holding my breath.

So that's my take on Halo 2, quite possibly, and I'm pre-quoting this so you can rant about it on forums with minimal effort;

"Halo 2 is the worst game I've ever played of any genre. Ever."

Overall, I'd give Halo 2 two stupid Dev Teams and level designers out of ten. Just save your money - don't even buy it to see how bad it is, because that way your giving Microsoft more money to make even more terrible Halo games.