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Halo 2 Review - Xbox

If there's one game that's been hyped up and promoted beyond anything ever created by man before, it's Halo 2. Bungie and Microsoft together created one of, if not the best game ever on Xbox as a launch title that some of you may know as Halo: Combat Evolved. Along with books, figurines, and many other gimmicks that followed the release of Halo: CE comes the sequel game, Halo 2. www.ilovebees.com tempted us, now activated with a countdown to the year 2052 when the Covenant attack Earth. E3 footage for 3 years in a row made us cream our pants, and the screenshots released every now and then along with the weekly update at Bungie with live Bungie web cams made us go crazy for the game. It was indeed one of the best marketing plans of all time. Before reading further, we must note that this review contains a few spoilers, but they are needed for an honest and in-depth review of the game.

Now that Halo 2 is out, what are you doing with your time? Did you read the first party reviews and absorb the hype? Did you pre-order the game before you knew anything about the singleplayer? Are you on XBL (Xbox Live) reading this review as you play Halo 2? Or are you one of the thousands of unhappy gamers with the build up and let down of Halo 2? Mixed thoughts have been coming in from all possible angles, including good and bad reports from Xbox Live, good and bad reports from Singleplayer, and good and bad reports from the offline Multiplayer There are those who said this day would never come, what are they to say now?

Allowing a game to sink in before writing a review is usually the best option, especially for one hyped up as huge as Halo 2. Writing a review as soon as you've beaten the game often leads to mistakes and an incoherent report on the game's antics. That's why we've spent over 60 hours playing Halo 2 to bring you our opinions on the Campaign, multiplayer, and of course the Xbox Live system at work. We hope you enjoy this read, and absorb everything that we say, just like you've done with Bungie and Microsoft for the past three years.

Gameplay

Picking up where Halo left off, the gameplay in Halo 2 is much the same. Bungie obviously didn't want to change too much of the game, but still add as many cool features as they could. Hijacking vehicles, dual-wielding weapons and letting the Marines drive the Warthog while you shoot are all new features of Halo 2, most of which we already knew about from the footage of the game they gave us before release. In fact, if you watch closely, Bungie give away the entire storyline of Halo 2 in the trailer they (continued next page)