I'll keep this one short and sweet: Halo 2, for the most part, was a great improvement upon the already pretty fun model from CE and touched up many of the more sketchy aspects of the original. The alien weapons for some reason felt a lot more fun to abuse this time around; the Beam Rifle, the carbine, and the fuel rod guns are just satsfying to use to pick off and blast away at hordes of enemies. Halo 2 also has the clear advantage over the original in that I can actually drive vehicles this time around with the far improved controls! And of course, it's a lot of fun playing as the Arbiter and turning invisible to sneak up on enemies before hacking them to shreds with the energy sword.
That said, it's still Halo 2, so I ran into tons of jank from strange vehicle physics (particularly from the Ghost), some select sections of scourges of Beam Rifle aliens tearing me down before I had a chance to react, and some general frustration fighting up front brutes that just didn't seem to be downed while in rampage mode no matter how many shots they took, just to name a few. Oh, and there was this one part in the final mission where we were trying to free our comrades but one of our AI buddies kicked a piece of scenery directly in front of the jail cell so it took over a minute to free the other AI, that was pretty funny. The major complaint here perhaps, is that many of the missions start you off with the subpar plasma rifle and the extremely nerfed and generally terrible plasma pistol, so it can be a bit of an uphill battle for the first half of the mission or so getting past enemies until you manage to scrounge some better weapons from weapon caches or corpses.
All in all, this was a pretty fun time on Heroic with a friend online, and the improvements to the graphics over the original Halo (they don't look like polygonal models from Half Life with mouths pasted on anymore. Huzzah!) + the fantastic soundtrack are always a plus. Just be warned that co-op can feel a bit scuffed at times, and we had to almost exclusively avoid using the tank because it kept crashing the co-op session every time the tanks would interact with the Ghosts.
That said, it's still Halo 2, so I ran into tons of jank from strange vehicle physics (particularly from the Ghost), some select sections of scourges of Beam Rifle aliens tearing me down before I had a chance to react, and some general frustration fighting up front brutes that just didn't seem to be downed while in rampage mode no matter how many shots they took, just to name a few. Oh, and there was this one part in the final mission where we were trying to free our comrades but one of our AI buddies kicked a piece of scenery directly in front of the jail cell so it took over a minute to free the other AI, that was pretty funny. The major complaint here perhaps, is that many of the missions start you off with the subpar plasma rifle and the extremely nerfed and generally terrible plasma pistol, so it can be a bit of an uphill battle for the first half of the mission or so getting past enemies until you manage to scrounge some better weapons from weapon caches or corpses.
All in all, this was a pretty fun time on Heroic with a friend online, and the improvements to the graphics over the original Halo (they don't look like polygonal models from Half Life with mouths pasted on anymore. Huzzah!) + the fantastic soundtrack are always a plus. Just be warned that co-op can feel a bit scuffed at times, and we had to almost exclusively avoid using the tank because it kept crashing the co-op session every time the tanks would interact with the Ghosts.