First time (classic) Halo player, didn't enjoy Halo 2.

[Shot of Depresso]

Me and a friend are going through all of the canon Halo games (CE-Reach/ODST). We really enjoyed Halo 1, despite some minor frustrations that come from quirks of being such an old game, but neither of us liked Halo 2 much at all. We're playing all of the games on Heroic difficulty instead of Legendary, since I've only ever played 4 and Infinite (and didn't much care for them)

Here are some contributing factors:

Compared to Halo 1, there was SO MUCH standing and waiting around for triggers to happen. We once waited 2 minutes with no enemy spawns before the game finally let us progress, I think this was on Metropolis, waiting for the bugs and hunters to spawn.

Compared to the other Halo games, hallways were more cramped, more fights were just straight slugging matches, slugging matches where we have way less health, and the enemies do way more damage than we do with the same weapons.

That's another thing, most of the guns in Halo 2 are complete peashooters. In Halo 1 and 3, I feel like I can pick up anything and do pretty well with it, but in Halo 2, most of the guns hit like nerf blasters. Just about everything that could be dual wielded felt completely wimpy to shoot, brutes would take 4 overheats from plasma guns, elites took 2-3. The plasma pistol was completely neutered, lost its homing, did almost no damage, sometimes didn't even bust shields with the overcharge shot. The magnum went from being one of our favorite guns to something we avoided at all costs, even when dual wielding it was just useless. The only dual wielding guns we ever got consistent use out of were SMGs (if nothing else was available) and Needlers. Battle rifles, cov carbines, bruteshots, shotguns, beam rifles, snipers were about all we used, because everything else was just pitifully weak. Thankfully, this is WAY better in Halo 3.

Dual wielding in general seemed like it actually took away from the experience more than it added. Guns were so undertuned BECAUSE they could be dual wielded that we never wanted to pick up any of the guns that allowed it. The fact that you drop your akimbo any time that you melee, throw a grenade, use equipment, etc made it super unsatisfying and a little frustrating to do so.

The game was super punishing with it spawning 6+ jackal snipers in a single encounter OFTEN. Walk around the corner, both of us are immediately dead and all we can do is jiggle peak the next time trying to spot the snipers before they beam us down.

The energy sword, though a cool addition to be able to actually use, was absolute garbage compared to 3 onwards , often taking 2-3 swings to kill a basic Elite, where they could just backhand you once and more often than not outright kill you. To me it seemed like it actually did less damage with the sword when playing as Chief, which makes sense on paper since the Arbiter has more experience with it, but in a gameplay sense did not feel good.

There are a lot of smaller things, like plas nades not seeming to stick reliably, often phasing straight through enemies and players alike (not being stuck when we watched the nade pass through our viewmodel) everything just felt super rough around the edges. Some of the setpieces were cool, but it was also mostly corridor/railroad levels. The art direction was improved from CE, which was nice. Aside from a few notably confusing level layouts in CE, felt like CE had better playspace design than Halo 2 did, which was a lot more rigid and offered less cover in general.

We like a challenge, but toward the end of Halo 2 we were begging for it to be over so we could move onto the next game. The only thing we really liked from 2 was the music and the story progression.

[Shmigged]

Автор сообщения: Card-Holding LeMat SImp

Автор сообщения: Lil Femboy Toes

Halo 2 heroic is on par with legendary in CE ik you already said you wouldn't revisit the game on normal but I HIGHLY recommend you do so since most of your problems would be solved by just lowering the difficulty a bit. On normal you have much more room to experiment with other weapons (especially the sword) and some encounters are shorter including the courtyard battle. You also never mentioned what you thought of the story, most people say Halo 2 has the best story in the series so if all your issues are with the gameplay then definitely lower the difficulty so you can enjoy the story more.

Only thing that can't be changed is dual wield and linear level design

No offense but I don't want to take advice from someone named "lil femboy toes"

Based.