Bungie’s art team seem to have been inspired by iD’s infamous ‘brown period’ on Quake and Quake II, creating street after street of brown, boxy architecture and filling them with encounters so uninspired that it’s hard to work up enough enthusiasm to defend the Earth. The introductory section in the space station feels like a dull retread of the first game’s Pillar of Autumn mission, while the whole sequence of levels on Earth is only fitfully entertaining. It certainly doesn’t help that the opening is so flat. The structure doesn’t feel anywhere near as tight.
There are times when Halo 2 hits the same high notes as Halo but not with any frequency. On the original release I got about halfway through before losing interest and playing it again I can see why. It’s actually one of the few games released in the last 10 years that I’ve bothered to complete more than once. Innovations like the adaptive AI, the two-weapons-only carry limit and drivable vehicles were a breath of fresh air for the FPS genre, and the game had an epic, space opera feel that no other game of the time could match. The original Halo deserves its place in gaming history. And here Halo 2 has a problem – it just isn’t as good as its illustrious sire. Roll away the ludicrous hype that awaited Halo 2’s original release, and take the dated engine out of the equation for now, and you’re left with the bare game experience. No wonder the PC gaming press has taken to Microsoft’s holy cow like it was a Mexican Piñata. It’s really just the filling in the proverbial excrement sandwich. To make this worse, a game that ran fine on what was basically a 700MHz Pentium III with 64MB of RAM and a GeForce 3 GPU now struggles to run at a constant 30fps on a dual-core Athlon 64 with 2GB of RAM and a Radeon 1800. Where the art design excels – the covenant troops, technology and vehicles – Halo 2 still has the power to impress, but there are certainly times when the game looks shockingly crude.
Textures have been enhanced, but there’s little visible in the way of new lighting routines or effects, and the characters and environments are unchanged and at times painfully blocky. Now with games like Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Call of Duty 2 and Prey around, Halo 2 looks every bit as dated as you might dread. When Microsoft released a PC version of Halo in 2003, the game just about stood up to the competition.
What’s more, it was clear at X06 last year that the PC version of Halo 2 was a fairly basic port-and-polish exercise, not a major graphical overhaul. It’s taken nearly five years to convert the game, the ‘Vista Only’ restriction seems like a marketing requirement rather than a technical necessity, and the decision to link it to an online games service (where PC owners pay an annual £40 charge for facilities they normally expect for free) is disastrous. Let’s face it – Microsoft has been asking for the critical beating that the PC version of Halo 2 has received.
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