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Sure, Hanabius.
It's funny. The singleplayer seems to me to be much of a more varied and immersive game than the first one; there's a much wider range of environments (urban warfare on Earth being particuarly fine), the AI teammates are much more "alive" than the first one (the kickass marine voiced by Michelle Rodriguez that follows you around for a while being one of the rare examples of a bot sidekick that is actually an amusing and welcome help rather than a awful, irritating hindrance), the levels set in the outdoors seem much more natural...
And yet, you're right. Somehow, I had a much better time playing the first one.
I would say that problem is that Bungie tried too hard to make the singleplayer game an involving story. Here comes the SPOILER SPACE...
The first Halo had a minimum of story. "You're the Master Chief, there are some aliens, you need to kill them" about covered it. The Chief doesn't have a character of his own; he's a cipher, at best a straight man for Cortana's wisecracks. The cutscenes in the first one function solely to move you from level to level. If you skipped past each and every one of them the first time you played it you wouldn't feel lost.
The problem with the second game is that it tries to immerse you in a world that I didn't really feel I needed to be immersed in to further my enjoyment of the first one. I liked that not everything was spelled out about the Covenant or the Halo. It made the game world feel more... well, alien, I guess.
Now that the second character is an alien, there's no way around explaining the alien culture so that you can empathise with him. For the first few Arbiter levels, it feels like the story is trying to catch up with the game; this is what the Arbiter does, that is why he does it, here is what you need to do as the Arbiter... This, plus the fact that it takes a while to learn to recognise your alien friend from your alien foe, actually has the effect of pulling you out of the immersion rather than furthering it. The show/tell ratio is out of whack, if you see what I mean.
Plus, as anyone who's reached the horribly frustrating coitus interruptus that is the end of the game will testify, there's actually more story than there is resolution, the most obvious flaw being: what the hell was the point of that stupid Little Shop of Horrors tentacle beast thing?
From a gaming perspective, the thing that made the first Halo so special to me were the setpieces. The first time you come out of a tunnel into the midst of a huge battle between marines and Covenant forces in a giant snowbound valley; fighting your way into the Library building past several Hunters and god knows how many other ground troops... It was just crammed with memorable events.
However, the events in the second one seem slightly... off somehow in a way that's hard to articulate. The giant alien AT-AT walker thing (I forget the name of it) that seems so intimidating the first time you see it in the cutscene, offhandedly annihilating a marine troop transport, turns out to have a hole in its back you can jump into and kill the pilots. It seems rather pedestrian that such an awesome-looking enemy should be so easily brought down. And then the Sarge gets to drive it at the end, but you don't? How disappointing is that?!?
The scene in the same level where you drive the Warthog through the tunnels seems to go on forever; likewise driving the tank over the bridge immediately afterwards.
The bits at the end of the Arbiter levels where you have to kill the Covenant leaders seem unusually forced and formulaic, the worst offender being the final battle with the leader of the Brutes (although I admit that may be down to its being tainted by association with the non-event that was the end).
Alright, that's enough. I didn't expect this reply to be so long. And I really, really did enjoy the singleplayer game. But somehow I can pick holes in it in a way that I can't with the first one. Perhaps it's simply that we were all expecting too much from it; certainly the first one is one of my favourite games of all time, so to expect better than that was rather naive.
But multiplayer, eh? It rocks bells! |
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