Halo 3 made the biggest mainstream ripples of the series with its release, but only because of how massive Halo 2 was three years earlier. Halo 2 defined online multiplayer on consoles for an entire generation, even finding a place in the next with the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility. Halo's reign as the multiplayer king on consoles wouldn't be challenged until Call of Duty 4 well into 2007, months after the release of Halo 3, and wouldn't feel dethroned until Call of Duty racked up a couple more sequels. Halo 2 is, more than any other game in the original Halo trilogy, a monster with two heads. The original Halo was a flawed but incredibly fun single player with a shockingly addictive multiplayer, with minor bumps in the road in the form of no online play and some imbalanced maps. Halo 3 we will discuss another time. Halo 2 had a somewhat notoriously difficult development, and for half of the game it really shows.
Halo 2's campaign is a frustrating beast. It's obvious when playing it that they took several criticisms from the first game seriously. The almighty Halo pistol was neutered and replaced with the iconic Battle Rifle as the go-to precision weapon, the story let go somewhat from its roots in Aliens in favor of telling a more original story, and they went out of their way to avoid the repeating rooms issue with Halo 1. That latter bit, however, came at quite a cost. Rather than having you enter identical rooms over and over, Halo 2 uses the "waves of enemies" design, where you will, almost once per level, be locked to a particular area and forced to fight waves of enemies. It certainly feels different than Halo's limited design, but it hardly feels any better. Making things worse is how the AI in Halo 2 feels shifted rather than improved. Enemies don't seem as good at ducking and weaving, dodging my grenades and bullets while routing me out of a stationary position, but in its place their accuracy has improved. The difficulty in being able to dodge enemy fire is also why Heroic and Legendary difficulty in Halo 2 feels significantly more difficult than in Halo or Halo 3. Fighting waves of enemies no longer has that hectic, firefight feel, rather a duck and cover system similar in shape to Call of Duty, but not nearly so pronounced. Jumping around and actively engaging with the enemy is still viable most of the time, but you'd be hard pressed to keep it up throughout the campaign the way you could with either of the other two games, which is a shame because the new approach to your health feels like it was designed for more engaged fights. Health has been removed, and in its place your shields now both deplete and regenerate faster, making you still rather vulnerable, but with a quicker turn around time. Playing through Halo 2's revamped AI makes you realize this change was definitely necessary rather than a tasteful choice to keep you in the fight when the enemies seem so precise.
Just about the only place Halo 2's campaign comes close to excelling is in its story, but even that comes with some pretty heavy caveats. The covenant have found earth, and start an all out attack that Master Chief must now defend before following them out to another halo ring. It turns out there are several of these things, and for the first time we are allowed into the covenant perspective to understand their position on the Forerunner relics. The covenant, it turns out, are being led by a species of alien simply called The Prophets, who tell that the rings are meant to lead them to some sort of holy land, a transition from this mortal world to some hereafter. With our knowledge that the rings are actually weapons meant to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy in order to starve out the parasitic life called The Flood, their error is apparent.
Spoilers for the plot of Halo 2.
The game opens surprisingly, showing us the Elite responsible for the halo in the first game. With the sacred ring being destroyed at the end of Halo, this elite is sentenced to death. Secretly, however, he is to become the Arbiter, an honorary title for a sort of holy knighthood, and sent on a mission to kill the rebellion within the covenant. Master Chief's story and the Arbiter's story are told simultaneously, with us playing as both of them in turn. The Master Chief's levels are notably better, usually having more open level design (such as the excellent bridge sequence), while the Arbiter has more restrictive levels reminiscent of the original Halo's levels inside of the Forerunner ruins. The enclosed spaces do little in favor of the new system in Halo 2, usually making these levels more difficult than they should be, and making them the primary levels you fight the Flood, easily the worst enemy in the Halo games, doesn't do it any favors. The parallel plots try to show us that the Elites, the squid-faced race of aliens that were the Big Baddies in the first game, are being phased out in favor of the gorilla like race called the Brutes. The internal politics on show are interesting, if a little surface level. The Arbiter takes the entire game to realize that the Prophets have been lying or are otherwise horribly, tragically mislead. Meanwhile, Master Chief goes from one slaughtering to another, in search of some of the Prophets so he can, what else, kill them. The game comes together finally in its last three or so levels, where the Master Chief and the Arbiter come face to face with the Gravemind, the hivemind leader of the Flood who realizes, smartly, that they all have at least one goal in common: stop the activation of the halo rings. This temporary alliance leads to thwarting the covenant's plans and leading to the infamous cliffhanger where Chief plummets to earth stating he is going to "finish this fight".
Halo 2's plot is a lot better than its reputation would have you believe. The stakes are made apparent early on, and there is a Shakespearean weight and dramatic depth to the covenant that wasn't there in Halo 1. The plot's execution and lack of final act is primarily where it falters. The world building comes in densely, often too dense to properly sparse between the minute-to-minute action that is the actual gameplay. The context it provides helps give the game a strength it didn't have before, but it's a weight difficult to properly hold in your head. Halo 2 has one of the most difficult plots to remember, even as you are playing it, and largely this is due to the execution and the lack of particularly interesting set pieces for most of the game. The scarab fight is memorable, but hardly interesting to play. The big set piece that seems to stick out as a particularly inspired bite of quality is the bridge sequence, where you are given a tank and must travel it along an exceptionally long bridge shooting down enemies as you go. The set pieces do little to reinforce the plot, outside of some dull boss fights. I'd forgotten that you killed a prophet in this game, even as I was playing. It feels more like you are being read the significance of things during loading screens more than you are actively playing through them, which is a shame since the cut scenes are of a particularly higher quality.
But Halo 2 isn't remembered, at least fondly, because of its campaign. Halo 2's multiplayer is something to behold. It's the odd case of a nearly perfect multiplayer coming out of something with severe flaws. Halo 2 was fast paced, well balanced, and extremely addictive. Some of the greatest maps in multiplayer come from Halo 2: Lockout, Zanzibar, Ivory Tower (maybe, depending on the gametypes you like), and Midship. Halo 2 also boasted some incredibly fun yet incredibly flawed maps in Ascension and Terminal. Halo 2's multiplayer gameplay certainly had its flaws, however. The BR cancel allowed some quick and dirty kills due to a glitch that became a mainstay in the meta, and for the cheaper, fun-ruining player you could always pull off a superjump glitch out of the map, sniping players from your safe place where no one could get you. Halo 2's rough development showed on just about every inch of the game, but it left the least substantial mark on its multiplayer, which is still lauded over today. Halo 3 would slow multiplayer down some, while also adding nearly superfluous equipment that seemed to detract from the primary core gameplay rather than enhance it. Halo 2 wouldn't have the most featured multiplayer, but it would have the tightest rendition in the series.
And so we come to the controversial crossroads, where we need to asses a game with a 10/10 multiplayer (9.5 if you want to be stingy) and a 6/10 campaign. The sheer impact of the multiplayer gives the edge to the game in my opinion, but my rating will be controversial nonetheless since the multiplayer component has snuggly situated Halo 2 as many fans' favorite game in the series. Taken as a whole, however, Halo 2 was a flawed game with a particularly weighty contribution to the series. The plot thickened, the multiplayer nearly perfected, and while the series would see some steps back in the later entries (eventually some serious leaps back), Halo 2 doesn't quite muster the sheer joy I have playing either of the other two titles. I'll concede this is the best the multiplayer would ever be, but it was far from the best game.
8.5
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