Halo 2 First Playthrough (via MCC)
0I managed to persevere through Halo: CE, which certainly seemed to have its fair share of shortcomings. Given that the first game seems to be regarded as the roughest, I was curious how 2 would measure up.
First of all, Halo 2 is a lot more interesting to look at - far more significant of an upgrade than I'd have expected to see on a game that still released on the same console as its predecessor. Makes me wonder how much of a jump there will be between 2 and 3, since that does involve a generation jump.
Halo 2 is also more interesting to play in general; it's certainly less egregious when it comes to levels overstaying their welcome or containing excessive copy-paste, but those do still occur a few times. Dual-wielding can be pretty fun, though it took me a minute to get used to the idea. I don't think I ever quite got used to the circumstances that cause Master Chief to drop his off-hand weapon - the most baffling of which is... driving? Like, what, don't tell me they ran out of cup holders?
Clearly much more effort was put into plot and cinematics at the beginning and end of levels. Heck, it got so busy that I had trouble keeping track of what was going on with the different Covenant factions.
I didn't necessarily expect the plot of the series to so quickly veer this hard into "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" territory. I also didn't expect the game to end quite as abruptly as it did, but I suppose yet another rushed development cycle is to blame for that. They certainly left themselves with plenty of room to work with for a third game...