Controls, saves

Occasionally you have to pilot a Warthog buggy or a Ghost hovercar through areas so tightly scripted that you can practically read page numbers flipping by at the bottom of the screen. Other than that, though, you just trudge from one ambush to the next, fighting the same three or four Covenant opponents most of the time. Even the missions where you play a Covenant warrior don’t mix up the opposition, as you’re mostly fighting fellow space bugs who have embraced some sort of heretical beliefs not all that well explained in the cutscenes. Essentially, you blast nothing but the same Covenant Grunts, Hunters, and Elites that you did in the first Halo, albeit with the new options of double-fisting with a weapon in each hand, and using the Covenant’s seriously nifty energy sword.

Saving Lives

Save checkpoints might actually be the biggest contributing factor to the intensity of firefights, as there just aren’t enough of them. In the first couple of levels, Halo 2 automatically saves your progress practically every couple of feet. But these save points soon become fewer and farther between. They also seem somewhat erratic. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Certain areas—such as the long, long bridge in “Ladies Like Armor Plating”—forced me to do a lot of backtracking the first couple of times through, sending me all the way back to the start of the section, but later started giving me checkpoints much further along. Feature? Bug? Who knows?

Halo 2’s multiplayer is pretty cool, thanks to a pile of game options, stellar Xbox Live support, and a co-op mode (which only works in split-screen, though, which is hard to understand). But even this only stands out if you don’t have a PC. There are at least a dozen PC shooters with superior online multiplayer modes, and they don’t charge subscription fees a la Xbox Live. Also, not being able to use a mouse and keyboard is a real issue. At least it was for me. The almost relaxed pace of the campaign disappeared when I faced off against human opposition, so I no longer had that extra second or two to get an enemy in my sights (crucial when you’re playing a shooter with a gamepad).

Unless you’re a really skilled FPSer with a gamepad, the frustration factor is crazy high. There are mouse-and-keyboard combos available for the Xbox, although there isn’t anything here that you won’t find in a PC shooter. So it doesn’t make much sense to go through the trouble and expense, unless you’re a serious Halo fanboy.

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