Halo 2

Halo 2
' "When you first saw Halo, were you blinded by its majesty?" — Prophet of Regret
Protagonist(s): Master Chief Genre(s): First-person shooter Platform(s): Xbox Microsoft Windows Release Date: Xbox NA: November 9, 2004 EU: November 11, 2004 Microsoft Windows AU: May 17, 2007 NA: May 31, 2007 EU: June 8, 2007 Engine: Blam Engine Developer(s): Bungie Publisher(s): Microsoft Game Studios Country: United States Series: Halo Predecessor: Halo: Combat Evolved Successor: Halo 3

Halo 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios. Released for the Xbox on November 9, 2004, the game is the second installment in the Halo franchise and a sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved (2001). In 2007, a sequel to this game, Halo 3, was released on the Xbox 360.

Why It Rocks

1. The graphics are a major step up over the first game, such as more detailed character models and vehicles that have actual damage modeling.
2. An awesome Multiplayer mode, which kickstarted the Xbox Live service, which continues to this day.
3. There are new online multiplayer additions, such as adding ranked matches and easy play with players from far away.
4. 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.
5. A stellar soundtrack, composed by Martin O'Donnell, Michael Salvatori, and Steve Vai, especially "Reclaimer."
6. The multiplayer includes some areas exclusive to this mode.
7. There are more weapons, such as the Covenant Carbine 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.
8. There are many new enemies to fight, such as the ape-like Brutes and the bug-like Drones.
9. 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.
10. The game features a new game engine, as well as using the Havok physics engine for its ragdoll physics.
11. The story is really good, with likable characters both new and old, such as the Prophets, The Arbiter, 343 Guilty Spark, Tatarus, Master Chief, and Sgt. Johnson.
    • The Covenant, in particular, is given more character development, such as the Elites talking English, and the fact that an 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.
12. 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 as the Gravemind, Keith David (who also voiced Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog, Childs in The Thing, Husk in Hazbin Hotel, Streaming in Regular Show, President Curtis in Rick and Morty, the fictionalized version of him and Julius Little in the Saints Row and series, and King Andrias in Amphibia) as the Arbiter, and Ron Perlman as Lord Hood being standouts too.
13. Every one of the levels 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.
14. There are multiple power-ups such as increased energy shields and invisibility.
15. Improved gameplay 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.

Bad Qualities

1. 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.
2. The notorious demo was shown at E3 2003, which had many features scrapped due to the Xbox being unable to handle the original version.
3. There are unpopular changes regarding the weapons, most notably the absence of the assault rifle. The shotgun and the magnum were downgraded in clip size and firepower (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).
4. 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 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 duck hunt.
   • 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.
   • The Iron Skull is automatically turned on and can’t be turned off. On co-op, the Iron Skull makes it so that if anyone 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 this summer where someone would speed run the game on the mode, and would need all but one skull on (the one being the envy one), with absolutely no dying. By July, this challenge was, unsurprisingly, never accomplished by even some of the best players out… until recently this August.
5. The Spanish dub is horrendous, it was announced as a neutral Spanish dub, but in reality, it has a lot of Mexican slang that can be annoying for some people and the voice acting is terrible, most of the characters sound as if they were on drugs and some quotes are incredibly cringe-worthy.
6. 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.
7. It has a few backward 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.

Reception

Halo 2 received critical acclaim. On review aggregate sites GameRankings and Metacritic, the game has attained overall scores of 94.57% and 95 out of 100, respectively.

The game has also received multiple 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.

Trivia

• After the servers for the game were shut down on April 15, 2010, 14 players were still logged into the servers, until May 11, 2010, when Apache N4SIR, who was the last player online at the time, was kicked off the online service by Microsoft. The group is known as the "Noble 14".
  • A slightly similar thing happened 14 years later, after the Nintendo Network servers were shut down on April 8, 2024, a group called Nintendo Network After Hours was founded, which was a group that tracks players who are still on the original Nintendo Network servers after the shutdown. Currently, it only tracks 1 known player who is online.

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