Patch 5.3.2 was released for ADBZRPG5 on 3/24/09. You may see a full list of changes here.
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Halo 2
Review Written By: Alex Hinkley
6/8/07
Halo 2 is quite possibly one of the most played first-person shooters ever. With hundreds of thousands of matches logged everyday and professional gamers making millions by playing it, Halo 2 is seen as one of the upper-tier FPSes by many. As pointed out in my review of Defense of the Ancients, simply because a game is well liked does not mean it is a good game, and Halo 2 is the worst game I have ever played.
The single player in Halo 2 is barely even worth mentioning for the sake of this review. The storyline has so many twists and is so convoluted, that even a devoted fan who has played through the game half a dozen times might even be confused. Besides a crappy story, the single player missions are okay, but nothing special. This review will be focused mainly on what has driven Halo to be so popular - the online multiplayer.
There are so many problems with the game online it's not even funny. I could go through an entire list of personal gripes about the game such as why there are so many button glitches in the game, but since other people like things like this, I'll stick to the more general stuff. One of the main problems with Halo 2 online is the tremendous amounts of bullshit you will inevitably run into. It never ceases to amaze me how random things happen nearly every life you have. Something that might kill a person one time might not kill him again. Sometimes you will hit another player and it won't register and the spawns are so horrendous because they are reliant upon enemy player positions. So if you stand in a certain spot, as an enemy, you can control where other players spawn, thus instantly kill them upon spawning. When I was playing, I once got killed, respawned in the very same spot I was killed and got sniped. After this I respawned in the same spot again!
The one feature that I believe ruins this game online is that there is no health. Unlike in Halo: Combat Evolved where you had a health bar, there is none visible in this. You might think that it is just invisible but it's not. There's no health at all. This means if you take down a guy’s shields and then light him up, unless you kill him you might as well have not even shot him at all, because he'll come back at you just as strong when his shields regenerate. Having shields is one thing but having infinite health when they are down is another. What were they thinking when they implemented this into an FPS? It doesn't make any sense. The guns in the game don't really help, either. Most of the guns, including the one you start with (SMG) are completely useless. The only guns worth carrying are the rockets, sniper, and battle rifle. If you run into a guy with any of those and you don't have one, you're dead. I guess this was to promote the usage of grenades to your advantage, but they aren't any exception to the inconsistencies of the game. Sometimes a grenade might not hurt you at all but yet other times it can instantly kill you even if you have a full shield. You can carry up to eight grenades at once which is a hell of a lot compared to other FPS games like Counter-Strike where you have one. I can just picture someone strapped from head to toe with grenades and throwing them off randomly as they prance into battle. The frag grenades take such random bounces that they are impossible to avoid and the sticky grenades go through people more often than they stick them.
The only thing that saves Halo 2 from getting zero stars is that it's very addictive. I don't even know why. Sometimes it’s fun when you get those rare times without bullshit or you aren't emptying hundreds of shells into people and not killing them. I've found myself on countless nights yelling at the TV because the game seems to have no conventional gameplay rules it abides by. Literally anything can happen at any given time. Here's an example: one game I played team rifles, meaning that everybody has a battle rifle. I had 200 shots hit and only 3 kills. The battle rifle clip holds 36 shots, so apparently I had to empty an entire clip into a guy, reload, and then do it again to get the kill. My advice would be to steer clear of this game regardless of anything good you hear about it unless you want to play a game where shooting someone in the chest doesn't hurt them at all and you constantly want to hear people screaming "What! How?!" into the headset.
Rating: 
Top
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