Terra meter: 80%

Story/narrative - 4/5
Gameplay - - 4/5
Sound/music - 4/5
General presentation - 4/5
Overall enjoyment - 4/5

When looking at it from afar, the jump from Halo: Combat Evolved to Halo 2 doesn't seem as big as, say, the jump from Metal Gear Solid to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, but the changes that this game made to the foundation that was set by its predecessor were enough to make this feel like more than just a simple expansion or reskin of the first game. Right from the very start, Halo 2 tries to establish how much more interested it is in storytelling this time around, as its cast of characters is wider, the plot's scope is bigger, and its cutscenes are especially more cinematic. Not only did these choices make the story much more engaging than that of Halo: Combat Evolved, but it also amped up the game's Hollywood-grade blockbuster feel. Halo 2 also features much better voice acting than its predecessor, because while the actors got the job done in the first game and it was fun to hear returning voices from actors like Steven Downes and Jen Taylor, I really enjoyed the performances given by the actors playing the new characters like Ron Perlman, Kevin Michael Richardson, and especially the great Keith David.

Halo 2 made a lot of changes to the original formula of Halo: Combat Evolved, and while not all of these worked for me, I still liked a lot of what this game brought to the table. The biggest and most obvious change to the gameplay would be the addition of dual wielding, and I liked this feature a lot. The first game already had a layer of strategy to it by giving each weapon a specific purpose when it came to dealing with the Covenant or the Flood and only allowing you to carry two guns at once, but allowing you to wield two weapons at once allowed for a lot more experimentation with ways to approach each encounter. Even with this great feature, though, the game's actual weapons were a bit of a mixed back for me. While many of the new weapons, like the Beam Rifle or the Brute Plasma Rifle, were fun to use, many of the returning weapons were modified to feel way worse than they used to. The worst examples of this would be what was done to the Magnum pistol and the Assault Rifle, as the former was made to be much weaker and less satisfying, while the latter being replaced with the burst-shooting Battle Rifle made it practically useless. Like the first game, the best parts of Halo 2 would be the sprawling battle sequences involving vehicles, and it's good that they were even better here than they were in Halo: Combat Evolved. Not only were there more vehicles and more opportunities to use them, but they also had multiple abilities, which made using them in combat feel more dynamic. Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori gave yet another fantastic score here, and their uses of ambient music in the quieter moments and even some triumphant electric guitars during some of the battle sequences made those moments more effective.

When talking about Halo: Combat Evolved, the only mission that I can say I truly disliked would be "The Library", and while none of the missions in Halo 2 matched the tedium of that mission, the level design still felt a lot less consistent than that of the first game. Some of the levels in Halo 2 make you play as an Elite soldier named the Arbiter, and I don't know how Bungie did it, but they managed to make nearly every mission involving him way less fun to play than the ones where you played as Master Chief. Many of the sections in the Arbiter missions involved staying still on one platform while waves of enemies came at you, and if that wasn't boring enough, even his vehicle sections weren't as fun as the ones in the rest of the game due to their linearity. On top of that, most of the Arbiter missions involved you having to fight the Flood, and these enemies were easily my least favorite part of both of these games. Not only did it not make sense for the Flood to even be here due to how Halo: Combat Evolved ended, but they also have the ability to destroy your vehicle in seconds, which made an already unfun enemy type even more annoying to deal with. Despite all of these problems, though, Halo 2 was still a pretty good follow-up to the first game, and because of its infamous cliffhanger ending (although Master Chief's last line is really cool), I'm really curious to see where the series goes next with Halo 3.