Throughout the campaign you will be zigzagging through human cities, alien ships the size of planets, sprawling underground tunnels, ancient alien environments that are even alien to the aliens I mentioned before, and more, all the while punching plenty of grunts. The backup you receive is just more alien buddies, but the dilemma is that they all look the same, so just avoid looking at my accidental friendly fire kill feed. Other than a handy get-out-of-jail-free-card invisibility cloak, the Arbiter's shield-based armor remains the same as the Master Chief's, you use familiar weapons and vehicles (though alien variants are more common), and even the brawls are against the same alien species. The change is not as drastic as you think on the gameplay side, however. The game doles out alien segments to sandwich Master Chief-centric missions that are happening concurrently. To accomplish this, a significant portion of the campaign is dedicated towards playing as a high-level Covenant operative, an Arbiter.
The story campaign digs into the consequences of Master Chief and Cortana's actions in Halo: Combat Evolved, both from a human as well as alien perspective. Now, you get to witness its command hierarchy and cult-like nature, and find out all is not well within the Covenant's ranks.
The Covenant, the alien federation that wipes out human settlements and glasses planets in its free time - which Halo: Reach players should now be familiar with - isn’t just the over-the-counter baddie that you plow through while on the way to your objective anymore.
Read on to find out what I thought of this new PC port of the Halo 2: Anniversary edition by Saber Interactive and 343 Industries.Ĭompared to Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 is focused much more on giving the Covenant a deeper background, so if you've been wanting a little more context as to what is actually happening in the enemy camp, you're in for a treat. As usual, I will not be exploring the story elements too deeply in this review to avoid spoilers and retreading old ground. I was lucky enough to play Halo 2 on Vista back in the day, and although my memory of it is a little hazy, I've been very excited to find out just how much has changed in the HD remaster which finally shed its Xbox One exclusivity. But of course, being years late and lacking improvements did not exactly help the port's reputation, which ultimately became the final mainline Halo title to reach PC, until the new initiative from Microsoft.
Microsoft pushed out a port of the original 2004 Xbox game to Windows Vista as an exclusive in 2007, arriving alongside the now infamous Games for Windows – Live service. Many of you should already know that this is not the first time Halo 2 has been available on PC. Both of those ports were positive experiences to go through, albeit with a sprinkling of bugs.
The number of available games has been slowly expanding since the arrival of Halo: Reach last year, and the newest launch is here only a couple of months after Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Master Chief's return to PC continues, with the addition of Halo 2: Anniversary to Halo: The Master Chief Collection.