It is fall 2004, and there’s one game on the collective mind of Xbox owners: “Halo 2.” The “I Love Bees” alternate reality game is in full swing, “Halo 2″ trailers are playing theatrically and you can’t watch TV for 10 minutes without seeing a spot promoting the game.

On the night of Nov. 8, dozens — myself included — lined up outside of GameStop and EB Games stores to be the first to get their hands on the anticipated sequel. Once you were allowed into the store, five at a time, you were greeted with a veritable cornucopia of “Halo” merchandise. Lined up were T-shirts, hats, soundtracks, action figures, strategy guides, special edition “Halo” Xbox Live headsets, novels and art books. As people exited the store with their special limited edition metal-encased games in hand, they let out a cheer and quickly got in their car to go home and enjoy the fruits of Bungie’s labors.

Now it’s two years later, and “Halo 2″ can be looked at more objectively. Is it better than “Halo 1?” How does the campaign stack up to not only the first game, but other first person shooters? I’m not going to touch on the multiplayer in this column, as it is extensively and unquestionably miles above and beyond that of “Halo.” It is safe to assume this column will contain spoilers.

I think “Halo 2′s” campaign has about the same ratio of good to bad as its predecessor. “Halo” was a blast for many of the game’s levels, up through the end of “Assault on the Control Room.” After that, the Flood showed up. A single Flood level might have been acceptable, but when compared to the Covenant, there’s no competition in who is more fun to fight.

The Covenant are intelligent enemies who work together. Sniping out an enemy jackal, cleverly tossing a grenade and routing a group of grunties toward it, or sneaking up behind an elite to deliver a silent coup de grâce with a blow to the back of the head — these are fun ways to take out enemies, and they require strategy and fluid thinking.

The Flood are the total opposite. They run straight at you. They are not fun to fight. It becomes a festival of running backwards shooting with a shotgun. When contrasted with the advanced, well-tuned enemy artificial intelligence the player encountered for the first half of the game, they’re just boring. The only challenge comes from making sure you don’t run out of ammunition.

“Halo 2″ suffers from the same problem. The first four levels, set on Earth against a Covenant invasion force, are a fantastic series of memorable setpieces where the player must tangle with Covenant forces in an awesome series of on-foot and vehicle combat scenarios. The next level introduces the second playable character, a disgraced Covenant elite called the Arbiter, a title given to elites asked to go on what are essentially suicide missions for the survival of the Covenant.

You’re tasked with clearing out a base of heretics, a nice way to introduce the beliefs the Arbiter realizes are true later in the game, after he and his race are betrayed by the Covenant at large. As the Arbiter, you still fight against the excellent Covenant AI and the addition of stealth camouflage opens up interesting tactical possibilities for the player.

And then the Flood shows up. Dammit.

I realize there are interesting thematic in having a force in the story called the Flood. When you consider that there is apparently an object in the “Halo” universe called the Ark which can apparently save people from the Flood, you can see where Bungie’s writers might be going with all this. However, from a gameplay perspective, the Flood are simply not fun.

“Halo 2′s” Flood are slightly more advanced than its predecessor. They, rather ridiculously, can hold guns, but they don’t hide or take cover, they just run at you firing inaccurately. The small, impossible to hit spore creatures can now infest a previously dispatched Flood enemy, raising him from the dead. This doesn’t help the Flood’s case of being annoying and no fun to fight. On the plus side, the Covenant energy sword cuts through them like butter.

“Halo 2′s” low points are once again hailed by the presence of the Flood; in replaying the game, these levels are the mostly a chore, especially on high-difficulty levels. Even when you get to the Flood levels with vehicles, it’s really a vacuum of fun. “Halo 2′s” library levels, though not as boringly designed as the original’s, still stick out as “not as much fun as I was having earlier.”

These games live and die on their AI and enemy encounters. Turning the difficulty up to Heroic yields a very different, far more challenging game when fighting intelligent enemies, but the Flood just becomes that much more frustrating.

“Halo 2″ is a worthy successor to “Halo.” Levels like “Assault on the Control Room” are expertly one-upped in well-designed sequences like the ones set on the Delta Halo or the opening Earth invasion. Though there are never any truly grand open areas like in the level called Halo in the original game, but, overall, the levels are significantly less repetitive. Hopefully, the Flood won’t find their way into “Halo 3.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 9:38 am and is filed under games, reviews.