Halo 2 is on the way.

[A Black Falcon]

Right, of course, Gamespot reviews are bad, sorry for even implying that they do a good job of writing reviews...

All your attention tends to get concentrated on the action itself, partly because the action is just so good but also because there's often little of interest in the game's environments. The level design is quite striking at times--you'll find yourself stopping just to gaze at the architecture--but it's occasionally monotonous enough to be confusing. You'll sometimes wander aimlessly for a few minutes, unable to tell which way is forward and which way is backward, until you happen upon the next signs of enemy resistance. Basically, the campaign is still a linear series of shootouts, some of which are open-ended enough to afford you the ability to choose from multiple weapons or vehicles, and some of which are more rigid. If the Flood levels of Halo didn't bother you, then you probably won't mind the similar sequences in Halo 2. If you don't fondly recall those bits of the first game, though, you might find yourself frustrated that Halo 2 follows a similar formula.

Even the content of Halo 2's campaign isn't significantly different from that of the first game. Prepare to take on many of the same foes in many of the same types of situations and locales. Of course, the game does take you into some new territory and pits you against some new threats (such as some hard-to-hit flying enemies and an enormous spiderlike Covenant battle tank), and sure enough, these sequences turn out to be some of the best bits of the campaign. Early on, for instance, you'll be defending Earth itself from a Covenant assault, rampaging through the war-torn streets on foot, at the wheel (or the mounted turret) of a Warthog 4x4, or in the belly of a devastating Scorpion battle tank. All this is thrilling. Yet while it's hard to imagine a better setup for Halo 2's action than putting the fate of Earth's defense in your hands, the game turns out to have other intentions, and rather suddenly changes gears after just a few hours.

Halo 2 gives up some of its focus from a storytelling standpoint, which becomes especially apparent once you finish the campaign. A great deal of attention is paid this time around not to the humans struggling for survival, but to the Covenant and what turns out to be a major political upheaval within their ranks. You spent the first game indiscriminately killing these fiends--yet now you're expected to be sympathetic to them and their hatred for humankind. To the game's credit, all this adds some newfound complexity to the story (even the collector's edition version of the game's manual is written from the Covenant perspective), and the plot itself is executed quite well. Still, chances are you'll wish that the game spent less time telling you about the Covenant and more time telling you about the Master Chief, his trusty AI companion Cortana, and, well, the fate of Earth.

As previously suggested, easily the worst part about the story is the way it ends, insofar as it doesn't. You'll run into this game's cliff-hanger ending like a compact car into a brick wall, and you'll certainly be left aching for more. Cliff-hanger endings are not necessarily a bad thing--some of the most successful film franchises in history (Star Wars and Back to the Future, to name just two) have relied on cliff-hangers to sustain their audiences' feverish excitement over time. The difference is, those cliff-hanger endings arrived in the context of storylines that at least offered some resolution or catharsis, whereas there's little satisfaction to be found in the ending here, and there's no telling when the next Halo game will come around to potentially wrap things up. There's a good chance you'll feel emotionally betrayed by the story, and it certainly doesn't help that the campaign, at the default difficulty, is going to take an average player less than 10 hours from start to finish. Many excited Halo fans will quickly blow through it in a day, or even a single sitting. Yes, the actual gameplay of Halo's single-player campaign is a blast. But the campaign also winds up being the most disappointing part of the game--probably the only disappointing part. Fortunately, Halo 2 more than makes up for these shortfalls in other ways.