Very good shooter. The quality of the game steps up from the first. The remastered graphics are good in this as well.

The sandbox was improved from the first game. The weapons are much more balanced and useable.

The downside is legendary. Halo 2 is regarded as one of the harder games to play on the hardest difficulty. Much of it is extremely unbalanced and completely limits the sandbox's potential.

Still as much of a slog as the other one but it only became boring half-way through instead of a few missions in. I also had the benefit of going in and not knowing what the fuck the arbiter was and actually being intrigued by what's going on with him. It was a real breath of fresh air especially since mister chief himself is still doing the same boring shit.

The battle rifle is such an improvement in terms of raw feel and feedback that it makes you forgot every other weapon is like shooting the nerf guns they resemble.

builds from the first one in almost every way. while still somewhat uneven in terms of it's difficulty and level design, and lacking a lot of the more freeform nature the larger areas in CE have, halo 2 manages to improve on the variety of gameplay, narrative structure, and all around pacing of the series.

i'll start first by addressing the gameplay and level design as i feel like this is perhaps the biggest improvement (while also having some sacrifices i'm sad to see go). halo 2 has a much more linear structure than it's predecessor, streamlining the experience by having almost everything laid out in front of the player and having a much more natural flow to its level progression. while this somewhat robs the game of the more open areas that are present in CE, such as "the silent cartographer", and as such limits the freedom of choice the player is able to bring to combat encounters, this also dramatically fixes my biggest problem with the first game which is the fact that i would constantly get lost within the incredibly similar looking hallways that populated that game. the gunplay remains mostly the same (which is to say absolutely excellent) but the addition of being able to dual wield smaller weapons while sacrificing melee and grenade quickness gives a nice extra layer of strategy to weapon choice and deciding whether the trade off is worth the increase in rapid fire capability. the game also manages to break things up nicely with a lot more vehicle sections than the previous game which were at times incredibly challenging (for some reason had a lot of trouble with that first banshee sequence) but also very rewarding in allowing the player to choose whether to slowly and methodically work through a level with a tank or to speed through it quickly with a ghost or warthog ignoring most enemies but being able to take way less damage. my only recurring gameplay problem from the previous entry is that the game will still just throw mobs of enemies at you and expect you to fight through them no matter what your supplies may be at the time, though i feel as though the ammo pickups were more plentiful here and the addition of more factions constantly jockeying for power allows the player to wait until they thin out each other's ranks before swooping in to mop up the stragglers, or simply sneak by while two different types or enemies are engaged with each other.

this is also a major step up in terms of narrative from the previous entry. functionally halo 2 operates through two main plots, that of master chief and that of the arbiter, constantly swapping between the two viewpoints before meeting in the middle for the final stretch. i do love all of the arbiter stuff here, getting a closer look at the covenant power structures and the way that faith can be exploited to help further entrench powerful people within their own positions of power. chief's storyline feels somewhat like a rhyme of the original game, but without ever really feeling stale mainly because of the new abstract locations and additions of both johnson and miranda keyes to help create new dynamics within the human characters. i played with the original graphics rather than the remastered ones but was still incredibly surprised to see how much more cinematic this one felt than the first one, cutscenes using angles never shown before and setpieces just feeling larger and more impactful than anything CE was able to pull off. at the same time, i do wish that the story was able to let itself breathe more and explore the world a little more in depth, but i also didn't find a terminal until the 11th mission and it's clear that finding these would have given me a lot more of the kind of stuff i was looking for here. with all that said i actually did really like the infamous cliffhanger ending and it made me beyond excited to see how this fight is finished, although i'm sure the feeling would have been different had i not had the third one immediately at my fingertips after finishing the second.

unfortunately have not had a chance to check out the classic multiplayer for this game, though it's hard for the master chief collection matchmaking to find anything that isn't a halo reach or halo 3 match (not that i'm complaining about how much halo 3 i've been playing recently)

unmeasurable nostalgia here. I somehow ended up with three copies of this game. this game was THE game that made me the gamer I am today. I thirsted to be the best I could. I played until 1am on school nights. I was in a clan and took it seriously 😆 I made so many friends on this game. it's so weird going back to and it feeling nothing like I remember, but that's part of what's cool about it right, that it lives on in another part of my brain. I played the campaign several times. I would play custom glitch matches for hours just getting out of maps and doing the same super bounces over and over again. man it's all flooding back. I can never go back.

I get the hype now.

I think every problem I had with Halo: CE was fixed with 2. In fact I would say everything about this game besides the ending is perfect. Particularly I want to praise the level design (which is a SERIOUS upgrade from CE) and the two perspectives between Chief and Arbiter through out the campaign. I haven't had this much excitement to get into the next entry in a series since Marathon... I should probably replay all the Marathon games after I get through the Bungie Halo games.

Anyway yeah, this game kicks ass. Go play it.