Being from an overwhelmingly Sony devoted country, my exposure to Halo at the peak of its cultural impact was always one of looking over the fence at the neighbor's garden, indirectly consuming it through magazines, the internet or looking at its intriguing box art at the store. Eventually I would buy Halo CE for the pc many years after its time in the sun and neglect the boring campaign for the addictively fun throw plasma grenades at your own teammates online multiplayer, and only recently have I played it from start to finish, an experience which I can only describe as a Sonic the Hedgehog 1 situation where its couple of highs greatly diminish and disguise its numerous lows.
Historical hindsight had already prepared me for Halo 2's rushed development and anti-climatic ending, but it was still interesting and surprising to witness how many of its steps forward are undermined by a couple of steps back. Presenting a much tigther content-filled campaign with varied environments that lend themselves to more unique combat situations and replace the onslaught of endless corridors and enemy fodder of CE, Halo 2 quickly reveals the cost with its lack of sandbox-y freeform missions that defined its predecessor, and the iconic moments that seamlessly transition into big combat setpieces, greatly elevated by the haunting soundtrack, are severely gimped by the artificial difficulty that has enemies hit scanning you on sight and the baffling new HP system that puts you behind cover for long boring stretches of your playtime.
This sentiment even ends up extending itself into the story of Halo 2, a plot that, even with the introduction of much appreciated new intrigue with its Convenant inner conflict, isn't able to avoid making the illusion of scale and grandeur feel small and inconsequential, revealing a universe already running out of ideas. Halo 2 was a second awkward step from CE's first, and not the solidification of an identity for the franchise that sophmore sequels are known for being in the realm of videogames. Still, that only further cements how much of a big deal its online component was at the time and the transformative influence it had on the online console videogame landscape that is still felt to this day, considering it turned what was otherwise a fairly good-ish FPS series into the biggest franchise on Earth.
Walking around its now empty and quaint servers inhabited with Halo 2 online purists that break you into submission on sight, it's impossible to get a sense of what it represented in 2004, being just a relic of simpler and more exciting times for videogames, and in the same way you will never again experience the Pokemon mania of the 90s or the early exciment of playing an MMO for the first time, Halo 2 is one of those cases where "you just had to be there". And I wasn't.
PS: finding out in real time that "Blow Me Away" was actually from Halo 2 all along is one of those special rare moments in life where you feel like you just gained a better understanding of the universe.
Historical hindsight had already prepared me for Halo 2's rushed development and anti-climatic ending, but it was still interesting and surprising to witness how many of its steps forward are undermined by a couple of steps back. Presenting a much tigther content-filled campaign with varied environments that lend themselves to more unique combat situations and replace the onslaught of endless corridors and enemy fodder of CE, Halo 2 quickly reveals the cost with its lack of sandbox-y freeform missions that defined its predecessor, and the iconic moments that seamlessly transition into big combat setpieces, greatly elevated by the haunting soundtrack, are severely gimped by the artificial difficulty that has enemies hit scanning you on sight and the baffling new HP system that puts you behind cover for long boring stretches of your playtime.
This sentiment even ends up extending itself into the story of Halo 2, a plot that, even with the introduction of much appreciated new intrigue with its Convenant inner conflict, isn't able to avoid making the illusion of scale and grandeur feel small and inconsequential, revealing a universe already running out of ideas. Halo 2 was a second awkward step from CE's first, and not the solidification of an identity for the franchise that sophmore sequels are known for being in the realm of videogames. Still, that only further cements how much of a big deal its online component was at the time and the transformative influence it had on the online console videogame landscape that is still felt to this day, considering it turned what was otherwise a fairly good-ish FPS series into the biggest franchise on Earth.
Walking around its now empty and quaint servers inhabited with Halo 2 online purists that break you into submission on sight, it's impossible to get a sense of what it represented in 2004, being just a relic of simpler and more exciting times for videogames, and in the same way you will never again experience the Pokemon mania of the 90s or the early exciment of playing an MMO for the first time, Halo 2 is one of those cases where "you just had to be there". And I wasn't.
PS: finding out in real time that "Blow Me Away" was actually from Halo 2 all along is one of those special rare moments in life where you feel like you just gained a better understanding of the universe.
Reviewed on Feb 09, 2022