538th played so far
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: Xb0x
Year of Release: 2004
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
And here we finally return to the Halo series. We’ve played the first and ODST spinoffs of the series so far and have a few more coming up.
The first was an exploration of a nice, large world, fighting weird aliens in something other than the dark corridors we saw in many other games. The second game? Well, we’ll see.
Our Thoughts
One of my biggest annoyances when playing games is when it’s too dark. I wonder if they expect us to play at maximum contrast or brightness, or whether you’re meant to guess where everything is, but there were stretches where all I could say were vague black shapes. Add to that repetitive environments in places early on in the first level (a necessary shortcut in large games like this, and they make sense on a space station, but it got a bit confusing at times – changing your props a bit are all you need!).
Oh yeah, and those large planet levels? Not seen those yet. You start off on a space station, then go to battle in a couple of narrow alleys. It may change later, but man, take your time to show off instead of dragging that out for a few hours. The second level felt really bad for it. There were a few streets and I felt I spent ages waiting for different scripted events to trigger – almost at random, because I managed to sequence break a few times by moving to the wrong part of the map.
That’s not to say the game is bad (other than the lighting. That was abysmal in places). It’s just not what I was hoping for out of a Halo game. On a technical level, it feels good. The destructible environment feels better than many other games and help a lot to increase immersion. It feels like there are lot of great things in there. The game just doesn’t take the time early enough to show off, instead taking too long on more boring parts of the game and story.
Final Thoughts
There is a good game in Halo 2 somewhere. The first few levels – which I have to go on, and which have to keep me interested to keep playing – don’t show it, but only offer glimpses of it from bit to bit. I’ll need to try further at some point, but at the moment I think Halo 3 might offer me a bit more of what I want.