Monday, November 22, 2004

Halo 2 review
My apologies for not being on the Otaku for a week, but this review of halo 2 might make it worth it. (Most of the review is from the point of someone who played the first Halo.)

First off, what is Halo 2? I know most of you that have a Microsoft Xbox, know what Halo and Halo 2 is, but not everyone has an Xbox, or even a game system.
Halo 2 is the sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, (The highest selling game on Xbox) a FPS (First Person Shooter) That takes place 500 years in the future, where you play as John-117 a 7ft. tall “Spartan” and fight a powerful fellowship of alien races known as the “Covenant” bent on mankind’s destruction. (If you want to see what John looks like go to my fan art page and look for ”Earth’s Last Hope”)

Does Halo 2 live up to the hype? I think halo 2 is about 90% of what its hyped up to be, in other words yes.
I have seen several reviews by Halo fans that Don’t like the game, But most of them where for some stupid reason most of the time it was because the pistol was redesigned and striped of its 2X sniper scope and lowing the killing power, you see in the first Halo the pistol was over powered 3 shots to the head of a shielded enemy would kill it. (For those of you that don’t play Halo, here is an analogy. The first pistol is to the new pistol like Wing 0’s buster rifle is to the head mounted Vulcans. As you can see there is a big difference.) I think this is a good change; it forces the player to think a bit more on what weapons he uses. Here is an example, in Halo 1 I basically only constantly* used 3 of 8 weapons available in the game, those weapons are the pistol, plasma pistol, and shotgun. In halo 2 I constantly use 11 of 14 weapons
*(I say constantly because there are other weapons I use, like the sniper rifle and rocket launcher, but you can’t use them through the entire game.)

Some of the cool new features of Halo 2 are
Duel-Wielding (Holding a gun in each hand.)
Boarding (Being able to take over an enemy vehicle and use it for your self.)
Playing online via Xbox Live

Now With D-W (duel-wielding), you just can’t pick up just any weapon in both hands, say the rocket launcher, sure it would be cool, but a tad bit too unrealistic, and unbalanced, what you can D-W are single handed weapons (here is the full list)

Plasma pistol (Covenant)

Plasma rifle (Covenant)

Needler (Covenant)

M6C pistol (Human)

M7 /Caseless Sub Machine Gun (Human)

When you D-W you can’t use grenades, but it’s worth it, most of the time.

As for boarding, lets just say it’s a real treat. If can imagine an Elite (Covent bad guy, for those who don’t play halo.) in a Ghost (a Covie hover craft.) tries to run you over but you doge, when he slows down to make another pass at you, you run and jump on the Ghost, and kick the Elite out and then run HIM over, how cool (or sometimes funny) is that!

I don’t have any thing to say about playing online because I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m sure it’s fun.

That’s all for now, but I might be posting more later.

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