Halo 2 (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.0 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jeff Gerstmann
• Reviewed on: 05/25/2007
• Released on: 05/31/2007
• Originally published on GameSpot: Halo 2 (PC) Review

Halo 2 was released on the Xbox back in 2004, and as you're probably aware of by now, it was a huge success. The first-person shooter added online multiplayer to the proceedings, and despite a universally reviled cliff-hanger ending, it was really something special on the Xbox. Three years later, it's now available as one of the first Vista-only PC games. It's still easy to see why this game was so loved on consoles in its day, but when you put it in direct comparison with recent PC shooters, it loses a ton of its appeal, making it best suited for Halo fans who want a good way to play or make custom maps.

The single-player campaign in Halo 2 isn't particularly lengthy, and it should take the average player 10 hours or less to crawl through on its default difficulty setting. The story starts you out as the Master Chief, the intrepid space marine that blew apart the Halo ring, a devastating galaxy-destroying weapon, in the first game, much to the dismay of the Covenant, a group of alien races who regard the ring as a religious artifact that will send them on "the great journey." The plot of the second game deals with the Covenant attempting to go on this great journey using another Halo ring, called Delta Halo. But there's plenty of political upheaval going on in the Covenant ranks, making it tricky all around. Add in a Covenant invasion of Earth, and you've got all the pieces required to throw these factions together again for another round of fighting--though since some of the Covenant races will be fighting each other, too, it's often easier to just run past all of the action. Even though the hour count for completing the campaign is already low, at times the game feels like it's dragging on, repeating the same corridors and same enemies a little too frequently. Toss in a couple of extremely underwhelming boss fights, and you've got a pretty solid campaign, with some good vehicle sequences to break up the first-person action, but it's also one that feels like it could have been a lot better.

The multiplayer side of Halo 2 is the part that still gets attention to this day, and it translates to the PC fairly directly. The game has support for 16 players. Halo's multiplayer moves relatively slow when compared to other popular shooters, giving it a more methodical, tactical feel. You really need to know the capabilities of all your weapons to succeed with any regularity, as at any moment you'll be able to toss grenades, fire one of your two weapons, or close in for a melee attack, which satisfyingly kills instantly if you hit someone from behind. Death comes quickly if you're left exposed for long, as your shield drains quickly and takes some time to recharge. This, too, forces you to play somewhat carefully.

There are plenty of game types built into Halo 2, and these games work on any of the 23 included maps. Aside from standard deathmatch, called slayer here, most of the modes are team games, like capture the flag, team slayer, and so on. There are also a ton of built-in variants for the modes, such as team shottysnipers, which arms every player with a shotgun and a sniper rifle and removes all the other weapons on the map, or rockets, which is a game of slayer with only rocket launchers. All this variety is nice, but it can also get supremely confusing, because you can make your own variants, too. What, exactly, is RumbleSWAT X? The game doesn't offer any immediate clues, so in some cases you'll just have to jump in and find out for yourself.

As a Games for Windows-branded game, Halo 2 has full support for the Xbox 360 controller. While the game plays just fine with a mouse and keyboard, playing with a controller is a bit closer to the original console experience, right down to force-feedback support. This creates some really weird and potentially unbalanced trade-offs in multiplayer. By default, a player with a mouse will be able to turn more quickly and, if that player is skilled, more accurately than a gamepad user. Gamepad players can increase the right-stick sensitivity to turn faster, but they also get another benefit that feels downright dirty. Like the console version, the PC game employs a certain amount of auto-aim when you're using a gamepad. This makes sticking to other players for up-close shotgun blasts or melee attacks significantly easier with the gamepad, and there doesn't appear to be any way to disable it or even detect that another player is using a pad. After pumping up the gamepad's sensitivity, we found ourselves doing more damage when armed with a gamepad, which makes the two control schemes feel unbalanced, is sort of crazy when you consider how tournament-focused the current Halo 2 Xbox scene is these days.

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  "Enjoyed it more than Halo1"

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