Halo 2

When I first saw Halo, I cannot tell you how blinded I was by its majesty. When I saw the second installment in the Halo franchise and the sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), I have seen that it has received multiple recognition and awards, including Best Console game and Best Sound Design from the Interactive Achievement Awards. According to Xbox.com, the game has received more than 38 individual awards.

The game partly suffered from a rushed development, which caused a few flaws despite Bungie's efforts at making an excellent game. This resulted in the notorious cliffhanger ending and the Brutes being overpowered. Many levels were also scrapped because of this. Also, the notorious demo shown at E3 2003 had many features scrapped due the Xbox being unable to handle the original version.

With a really stellar soundtrack I truly consider to be one of the finest in gaming (especially "Reclaimer"), and graphics being a major step up over the first game (such as more detailed character models and vehicles that have actual damage modeling), the gameplay has improved from its predecessor including the ability to swap weapons with your team-mates and the ability to hijack enemy vehicles. The first allows the player to make some sort of strategy since your allies have infinite ammo regardless of the amount in the weapon you give them; meaning that you can create an advantage for your team if you give a powerful weapon such as a rocket launcher to an ally. In addition the game features a new game engine, as well as using the Havok physics engine for its ragdoll physics.

The story is really good, with likeable characters both new and old, such as the Prophets, 343 Guilty Spark (one of least favorite), Tatarus, Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson (both those last two are my most favorite). The Covenant, in particular, are given more character development, such as the Elites talking English, and the fact that a Elite named Thel Vadmee, who failed to protect Installation 04 from the first game and gets vilified, is given a second chance and becomes The Arbiter (another least favorite). Additionally, the voice acting is amazing, with Steve Downes as Master Chief and Jen Taylor as Cortana not only reprising their roles, but also well known actors such as Dee Bradley Baker (Number 4 from Codename: Kids Next Door) as the Gravemind, Keith David (Barricade from Transformers) as the Arbiter, and Ron Perlman as Lord Hood being standouts too.

There are even more weapons, such the Covenant Carbine, the Battle Rifle, and the Brute Shot grenade launcher and vehicles, such as the Gauss variant of the Warthog, than its predecessor. You can even dual wield many weapons, something that was also featured in Halo 3. There are also multiple power-ups such as increased energy shields and invisibility. There are, however, unpopular changes regarding the weapons, most notably the absence of the original assault rifle. The shotgun and the magnum were downgraded in clip size and fire power (especially the latter) from the first game, which unpleased a lot of players. One inaccurate aspect about weapons is that you can't reload plasma rifles when you play as the Arbiter (or Elite in multiplayer).

There are many new enemies to fight, such as the ape like Brutes and the bug like Drones. Even the Elites, the enemies from the story mode, are now playable for the first time in the multiplayer mode and even use human weapons as well, which is questionable.

The game’s campaign on Legendary difficulty is considered one of the hardest FPS campaigns in video game history. To summarize:

• The shields of Master Chief and the Arbiter are now insanely weak, often going down in a single burst from an Elite with another killing you instantly.
• Enemies fire much faster and from multiple directions and can even constantly shoot at where they last saw you, making it impossible to attack head on without having to retreat constantly. They are more tougher than they were on CE's Legendary difficulty (although they aren't complete bullet sponges). This makes sections such as the High Charity prison on "Gravemind" impossible, as the enemies notice you in the gravity lift and kill you before you can even land.
• Some weapons are almost useless on Legendary, so you will always have to rely on the Battle Rifle and Plasma Pistol combo or Covenant Carbine for headshots, while staying behind cover constantly, as trying other options such as charging with dual SMGs will just get you killed. This also takes away the feeling of being a badass super soldier like you were in Combat Evolved, and devolves the game's enjoyable combat sandbox into a duckhunt.
• The Infamous Sniper Jackals. They have insane accuracy and can kill you in one hit regardless of hit location. (which is ridiculous since all NPCs, including enemies and your teammates can resist a single shot while Master Chief, with his new armor and hardware, always dies in a single shot) So unless you know exactly where they are, you’re going to get killed a lot. To make matters worse, they will always respawn 20 times in many levels, especially in the "Metropolis" level.
• Vehicles feel more like they're made of tinfoil and are often destroyed after just a couple of hits, making many of the driving sections incredibly tedious.
• Oh, and every one of the level includes some hidden Easter eggs, such as the introduction of skulls, which give interesting effects to the campaign similar to mutations in Unreal Tournament and the powerful Scarab Gun. In Legendary, the Iron skull is automatically turned on and can’t be turned off. On co-op the Iron skull makes it so that if any one in your co-op squad dies you’ll all reset to the last checkpoint, and on single player it restarts the entire mission. All of this makes Halo 2’s Legendary campaign incredibly frustrating to the point of being unfair. Because of this, MoistCr1TiKal created a challenge the summer of 2022 where someone would speed run the game on the mode, would need all but one skull on (the one being the envy one), with absolutely no dying. By July that year, this challenge was, unsurprisingly, never accomplished by even some of the best players out… until recently in August that year.

As for multiplayer, it's an awesome multiplayer mode, which kickstarted the Xbox Live service from 2002, which still continues to this day. There are new online multiplayer additions, such as adding ranked matches and easy play with players from far away. There are even new maps to play on, such as Coagulation, a remake of the Halo 1 map Blood Gutch, and many more that were added through the Multiplayer Map Pack. The multiplayer even includes some areas exclusive to this mode.

The Windows version was forcing you to use Windows Vista, which was considered to be one of the worst Windows versions ever. Because of this, fans tried making patches and finding exploits to run the game on Windows XP, which was the best selling operating system at the time. Other operating systems still popular and in use at the time include Windows 98 and ME/2K.

It has a few backwards compatibility issues on the Xbox 360. Performance issues happen on the Backwash map and at times, the player may observe "ghost" images displayed on the screen. Microsoft's workaround for this issue is to return to the Dashboard and restart the game.

One final thing I will point out: the Spanish dub is horrendous, it was announced as a neutral Spanish dub, but in reality, it has a lot of Mexican slangs that can be annoying for some people and the voice acting is terrible, most of the characters sound like if they were on drugs and some quotes are incredibly cringe-worthy.

This is Microsoft Games at their very best yet.