I have to jump in here and give my review of the Halo Series -
Halo: Combat Evolved - Quite possibly the best FPS I've ever played. Challenging, long, and a great story-line. If you want to get the full experience of what this game has to offer, I challenge you to put the difficulty on Legendary and play through The Two Betrayals, and do it solo. This will take you, depending on your skill level, anywhere between 4 to 6 hours...for one level of the game. The weapons in this game are all equally balanced...with the exception of the Assault Rifle's accuracy being a little off. That is the only thing I would tweak...even though with the accuracy sucking, it is still a fairly decent gun.
Halo 2 - This was the biggest let down of my life, aside from learning that women don't give you sex upon request unless you empty your bank accounts into their ever growing volcano they call a vagina. They changed all that was good in the original to anything bad they could come up with. Dual Wielding one handed guns and Rocket Launcher Lock-on, wasn't nearly the upgrade that I was hoping for when you look at all they took away. They give you a Battle Rifle and take away the Assault Rifle...the Battle Rifle is hardly a comparable weapon; the Magnum does little to no damage instead of the original which actually made you believe it was a magnum because of it's ability to take down enemies left and right with it's power; they took away the power of the Needler, I guess in an effort to balance the fact that you could dual wield it now. The campain is lack-luster in that it is very chaotic and disorganized. They introduced 2 new guns, the Brute Shot (grenade launcher) and the Brute Plasma Rifle (faster firing plasma rifle)...these 2 weapons were no match for the guns already set in place by the original game. The campain felt more like a chore or work instead of fun. It was just something I felt I had to beat because I played the one before it. I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment after finishing it. Nothing can replace Halo: Combat Evolved. They should have never made a sequel. The campain sucked so much that Bungie themselves came out and appologized to the gaming public about it, and said that Halo 3 would be much better, too bad they lied to us...speaking of the devil.
Halo 3 - Yatzee's review of Halo 3 was right on. Glad they gave me SOME of the Magnum's power back and gave me an Assault Rifle that was better than the one in the original. They nerfed the Needler again; we are back to single wielding it, yet they didn't give it back the power it had in the original game. None of the 1 handers can zoom in anymore. Most of the new weapons you end up doing more damage to yourself and your teammates than to the enemy (i.e. gravity hammer). They took away the Arbiter's ability to cloak. The flashlight was useless. But honestly the only reason this game wasn't as big of a let down as the second one, is that the Halo 2 got me prepared for this game. I hated Halo 2 and I was fully prepared to hate Halo 3. If I wanted a game that was so dark that I couldn't even see the damn ground I was walking on I'd play the original Half-life.
You want to know where Bungie went wrong? How about making you turn up your brightness setting on your TV so high that the game looks like shit, before you can see the ground you are walking on. Made you empty 3 full magazines of Assault Rifle into the Brute/Flood creatures before it even looked like you were hurting them. The second player of Co-op Story mode always starts with the weapons that are useless against the Flood and the Brutes (i.e. Convenant Weapons), which are all you fight in this game. The Covenant weapons are for fighting the Elites, but the Elites are on your goddamn team in this game, so why even have the fucking things in the game at all then? I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Bungie should have called it quits after Halo: Combat Evolved instead of embarassing themselves with Halo 2 and 3. If they make a Halo 4, I'm not going to buy it or play it...that's right if they make another Halo game, Bungie can go fuck themselves.
So in closing...Yatzee, I applaud your having the nuts to cut this game down, because to be honest the whole franchise needs to be taken down a peg or 2. If you want to review a real Halo game and understand why the game has such a huge following, play Halo: Combat Evolved...the game has no online Multiplayer, so you don't have to worry about people claiming that you are giving a half assed review because you refuse to get online. Besides the online Halo world sucks anyway. It reminds me of what you said about Team Fortress 2, where people with no lives are mastering the damn things while the rest of us are out having sex with girls.
I do hope that if you take me up on this offer, that you won't let the piss-poor Halo 3 get in your way of really enjoying a real game that unfortunately has the same name.
