Wow, a review of Halo 2 for the X-Box. No one ever accused me of being timely. Is this the latest review ever? I only bought it a couple weeks ago so you can’t blame me too much, can you?
As I said before Halo 2 is really primitive. Halo 3 really needs to be a big jump forward in terms of the way you interact with the world and how the story is told if it wants to be competitive. When the first Halo came out FPS games on consoles were fairly rare, but now there are tons of them. The Halo franchise can only coast along on reputation for so long.
I’ve often discussed my interest in issues of race and gender in videogames. Halo 2 does have some non-white people and women in the game, and of course we don’t know Master Chief’s ethnicity. However, the Flood and the Covenant seem to be exclusively of one gender and one ethnicity which is kind of lame.
Of course the most infuriating thing about Halo 2 is the end. That’s been gone over a million times so all I will add is, “I agree. It was too abrupt.” Check back here in 2015 for my review of Halo 3! Maybe I’ll have a 360 by then… (click those ads damn it!)
The FEAR (I’m too lazy to type all the periods) expansion pack was ok. It was disappointing that all of the calls and such that were important in giving the background info in the core game was so sparse and lacking in this one. The most disappointing thing, however, was that half of the game was theoretically about recuing the lady in distress. Lame. While the gameplay was entertaining enough (if only because of those creepy guys that move really fast and you have to do bullet time to see them). It was highly mediocre. It will be interesting to see how the franchise continues since Monolith has the rights to make future games but the publisher has the rights to the name FEAR. I wonder if it will lead to competing games as in the case of the Call to Power games and the Civilization series.