Not long into the game, I took to completely ignoring my own allies and jacking one-person vehicles whenever possible. Oftentimes they would completely ignore me as I tried to get them into a gunning position on a vehicle or they'd get lost, stuck or run around in the open firing aimlessly at a wall they think someone is behind. When I did engage the enemies, they would often end up sitting in one place, facing off to the side or even completely away from where I had been shooting from, never moving until I casually walked up behind them and shot them. I can understand an AI not activating from time to time, because you were hidden or just out of view, but I cannot think of any reason two AIs should be standing directly in front of me, facing directly at me, with all of us in plain sight of the other, and not reacting until I shot one (or even both) of them. The worst problem I came across was the appearance that most of my enemies were either nearsighted or completely blind. Using suppressing fire in a different direction than you last saw your enemy or using suppressing fire directly into a wall two feet from you is not. Rolling into the wall that you're standing against, off a cliff or directly at the grenade is not. For example, rolling away from a grenade is pretty smart. The AI certainly attempts to do smart things from time to time, but fails miserably for the most part. I've read many people say that they found the AI in Halo 2 to be brilliant, and I can only come to the conclusion that they played a different game. The repetitive combat could been entertaining throughout, if the game hadn't been hampered by flaky AI. Vehicle sequences break up the on-foot action from time to time, but these are hurt in part by the controls and in part by, again, repetition. Combat can be fun at times, but the level of repetition quickly drags it down. Dual wielding or not, combat basically comes down to the same formula as Halo: Pop a few guys in the head, duck behind cover whenever your shield goes down, rinse and repeat. That, and when you're dual wielding anything bigger than the pistols, you end up with a large chunk of screen space taken up by the absurdly huge weapon models. The ability to dual wield weapons is added this time around, but you're typically better off using a single larger weapon, so you can toss grenades and kill things further away than five feet. There are no puzzles, no attempts to break out of the standard FPS mold or really much of anything to distinguish the game aside from franchise. Go to Point A, kill some Covenant, go to Point B, kill some Flood (ugh), repeat. If you've played the original Halo, you pretty much know what to expect from Halo 2 from there. Before long, the Human uber-defenses come under attack and you jump into action. Not a whole lot seems to have happened since then, with the Covenant and Humans still going at each other for not much discernible reason. You get a quick rundown on controls by a hideously deformed soldier, then get taken on a tram ride to receive a medal for blowing up the first Halo. How did I get to this point? Well, the game starts off well enough. This was a definitely a bad sign of things to come. Despite taking somewhere in the ballpark of five to six hours to beat (ignoring deaths, which probably tacked on another two hours for me on Heroic difficulty), I was starting to hope whatever segment I was on would be the end. but shall we get into the why? Single PlayerĪbout halfway through Halo 2's rather short single-player campaign, I had an odd realization: The game felt too long. Let's spoil the surprise and say the answer to both of those is "not really". Was it worth the wait and is there any reason to buy it for the PC on a $200 OS when you could buy an Xbox and Halo 2 for less than half as much? Almost three years after Halo 2 came out on the Xbox, Microsoft has seen fit to release it for the PC, but only on Windows Vista.