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What can I say about Halo that hasn’t been said before? Halo is the game that made the Xbox – simple as that. Microsoft wasn’t stupid, it knew very well that trying to break into the Japan dominated gaming console market was going to be tough, and if it was going to make any kind of challenge on Sony and Nintendo, it was going to have to pull something pretty special out of the hat. Luckily for Microsoft, Bungie was busy developing Halo for the PC at the time, so the big MS bought up Halo as a launch title for Xbox, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In Halo Microsoft had that perfect conduit for success – a game that made the console worth buying. This is a tactic that Nintendo has traded on for years, with Zelda and Mario games standing as the reason for a huge percentage of console sales. For me, Halo was such a big draw that when the Xbox launched in the US in late 2001, I flew over to New York to pick up a console, because I didn’t want to wait for the UK launch in mid 2002 before I could play Halo.

The original game broke new ground in console gaming, helped by the cutting edge features offered by the Xbox. The Xbox was the first gaming console to offer real time Dolby Digital sound effects, and Halo made very good use of this feature. But stunning as the sound and graphics were, it was the involving storyline that made Halo such a joy to play. Halo created a believable gaming scenario that made you feel as if you were truly interacting with the game in a way that I hadn’t experienced since playing Half-Life for the first time.

So now, a full three years since I played and completed Halo, Halo 2 is finally here. The world has been waiting a long time for Halo 2, and as is always the case with a greatly anticipated event, everyone is wondering if it will live up to expectations. Well, let me put that question to bed straight away – Halo 2 is superb.

As with the first game, Bungie has worked very hard to make the single player (Campaign) Halo 2 experience as immersive as possible. From the minute you start a new game you are drawn into a storyline with more plot twists than any recent Hollywood blockbuster. Even though the storyline is a major part of Halo 2, I’m not going to expand too much on it in this review, because watching the story unfold when you have no idea what’s going to happen next, is what makes the experience so enthralling. Suffice to say that the Halo 2 story goes off in tangents that I would never have imagined prior to playing the game.

Graphically Halo 2 is breathtaking and raises the bar on console visuals, just as the original did. That said, after playing Half-Life 2, the Halo 2 graphics did lose some of their initial impact. However, I then reminded myself that I was playing Half-Life 2 on a graphics card that retails for close to £400 (not to mention the cost of the rest of the PC), while Halo 2 was being played on a three year old video game console that costs £99. Not to mention that a game console is limited to the resolution of a television, rather than a high-resolution computer monitor. So, in the world of gaming consoles, Halo 2 is the best looking game that I’ve come across.

The problem that any developer faces with a game that has a massive fan base, is creating a sequel that adds enough new elements, without changing the underlying feel of the game. It’s no good creating an entirely new playing experience, when your audience wants to recapture the original adrenaline rush that they felt when playing the first game, but a discerning audience is also going to want the sequel to bring enough new features to make it feel like a new game rather than a mission pack for the first one.

Thankfully Bungie has got the balance of new and old just about perfect. The new elements work wonderfully and blend in with familiar game play, while the original feel and strategy of Halo are carried over to give you an instant feeling of familiarity that you settle into like your favourite arm chair.

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