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Halo 2 Review |
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Halo 2
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The X-Box has brought created a legacy of high profile action games to the market in the past few years that will change the gaming world forever. Title such as Dakar 2, NASCAR 2004, and Pro Cast Sports Fishing have been able to step up and bring the gamers more than they can handle. Although Microsoft’s quality control seems to be tight, keeping poorly created games from ever making it to the shelves, but every now and then a Halo 2 slips through the system undetected.
After the miserable failure of the original Halo, Bungie Software came back to put the nail in the coffin and sink themselves under once and for all. Halo 2 picks up right where the first game left off, in some made up space aged future with a bunch of silly French characters running around attempting to recreate a scene from A Tale of Two Cities. If you’ve played level one in Halo you’d might as well hire the neighbor kid who usually mows your lawn to come and play level one in Halo 2, because it’s the exact same thing; run around a ship and try to fix the flux capacitor and escape before it blows up.
There are dozens of bugs and glitches that bring game play down another level, one including a glitch where if you time it out just right and push the Y button while you’re already wielding a weapon the game will allow you to pick up two at the same time. This makes killing enemies entirely too easy and adds to the unrealistic nature of the game, how in the world could a person hold two massive weapons and manage to reload them both or even just one with their hands full? I guess that’s why it’s a bug; it wasn’t supposed to be in the game. Another game ruining coding oversight is the ability to mount a vehicle while another character is piloting it. Has anyone heard of finders keepers? The game just doesn’t seem to be able to recognize that the vehicle in question is already in use and allows others to hop aboard and take their place.
The environments in this game must have been created in the hopes of forcing the players to lose interest and quit, because they’re so massive that I recommend hiring a Sherpa to help you find the mission objective. Not only that but the levels are so detailed that it creates the illusion of actually being in these different worlds and takes away from the effect of playing a good old fashioned video game. This of course is nothing in comparison to the horrible voice acting and cut scenes in between missions, with over 20,000 lines of recorded dialog in the game, it quickly goes from a first person shoot em up to the worst episode of Star Trek Voyager you’ve ever seen.
Overall the game has a collection of flaws larger then the void in place of the souls of the developers who created it. Sixteen player party mode? I haven’t been to a party with 16 people at it in my entire life, let alone 16 Halo 2 playing role playing Star Trek nerds. I really don’t believe this game is going to sell many copies; it was doomed from square one when they tried to build upon the title of one of the worst games in the X-Box console history.
Additional Problems:
- When I try to jump the A button sometimes sticks
- ‘Ghost’ vehicle doesn’t touch the ground, awkwardly floats above
- Lack of asterisk in character naming screen
- Soundtrack sounds like 16th century monk choir
- Loading time too long to wait, too short to dig own grave
Review By: Travis Parrott
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