Halo 2, on the face of it, isn’t a particularly well crafted game. It lacks the simple finesse of Halo 1, with its more open level design far outscaling the capabilities of the once competent AI. It lacks the refined balance and scripted flow of Halo 3, as you get teleported randomly from place to place whenever the plot demands it. Two of its most significant additions - dual wielding and boss battles - actively detract from the experience. It all clings together awkwardly, the product of a rushed development cycle and poorly thought out ideas.
The lack of playtesting becomes apparent in Halo 2’s legendary campaign. Jackal snipers that instantly kill you from across the map? Check. Ridiculously agile bugs that drive by gun you down after spawning behind you? Check. A level where you immediately get shot to pieces as you spawn in front of multiple brutes with just a crappy needler to defend yourself? You better believe that’s a check.
And if you have the hubris to think that having a friend along with you will help, Bungie has helpfully disabled respawning. If either of you die, you get zapped back to the checkpoint. When any enemy is capable of killing you in a heartbeat, it all adds up to an absolutely infuriatingly difficult campaign - some levels, and even subsections, can take hours to defeat.
It's not always like this, of course. In between the deviations towards insanity is the beloved tactical back and forth that the series is known for - breaking jackal's shields, stepping out of the way of lumbering hunters and sticky grenading an elite from miles away. There is a baseline level of functional gameplay here, but it's very rough around the edges.
But you know what? Halo 2 on legendary is far and away the most fun you can have playing a Halo game with a friend. All of its problems transform into something quite different when you actually start to battle through them. And it never becomes so broken that it descends into pure nonsense - the strategic gun fights hold the game together like glue. The right amount and type of jank can elevate a game above and beyond what might otherwise be possible. This is the Jank Equilibrium.
The level design principles of 3D worlds were beginning to crystallise in 2004, when Halo was released. Developers had realised that pesky players loved ignoring the carefully laid path for them, intent on abusing geometry and rocket jumps at every available opportunity. When Quake did this back in 1996 it was barely a problem, but the advent of scripting made it very easy to completely break the game in half.
The solution? Invisible walls! Magical doors that can only be opened by NPCS while you stand around twiddling your thumbs! Sheer cliffs on either side of you that wouldn’t be out of place in New Zealand! And, most importantly, a linear path for you to follow, lest you get confused and take a single wrong turn. For the game to go as planned, the player needed to be in the right place at the right time, and if that cost them their agency and freedom, it was a price that the developer was willing to pay.
Bungie didn’t really care.
It’s not that Halo 2 isn’t a linear game, or doesn’t have clear scripting, or anything like that - it’s that Bungie were not really interested in clamping down on the 5% of players who decided to do stupid things and sequence break their game. Instead of weighing you down like in Call Of Duty, they instead made the Master Chief light as a feather, with a 6 foot vertical jump. Instead of creating skyboxes to give the illusion of a larger world, they actually put in hundreds of physical pieces of scenery that you were never intended to reach, but that you could walk along all the same.
As a consequence, there are parts of levels that you can skip entirely by jumping up and onto the natural environment, like in Outskirts or Delta Halo. Half the time you don’t even need to grenade jump to get there, it's simply a matter of getting the crouch-jump timing down. On Quarantine Zone, you can skip a lengthy defence section against the Flood on a gondola by jumping up a pylon to hide above them. There are large parts of Gravemind where you can casually stroll along the roofing, surveying the chaotic infighting between the brutes and elites from above.
And these are just the obvious tricks! There are hundreds of little skips you can do to bypass areas without deigning to actually shoot your guns. Some of these are riskier than others, and will probably cost you more time trying to accomplish them than just playing the damn game (as my co-op partner often complained) - but they are there if you choose to pursue them.
It feels very cheeky and satisfying to use extreme climbing as a method to beat the bad guys instead of killing them. You see, what you’re doing isn’t technically an exploit or bug abuse. You’re simply using the mechanics at your disposal in a creative way. The goal of Halo isn’t to kill 100 enemies, it's to reach the end of each level, and that is precisely what you are doing. You are, however, doing it in a way the developer didn’t intend - thus the feeling of smugness I feel as I turn my nose up at Bungie.
It's important to note that if I could platform my way across every level that it would be nowhere near as enjoyable. If Halo 2 was so broken that you could easily avoid every single battle, then it would be a pedestrian and unexciting experience. It would just be clambering from start to finish across grey terrain, with no challenge of any kind. It would still feel somewhat cool to break the game in this way, but it wouldn’t be much of a game.
Being able to do so sporadically, then getting forced into extended segments of battle, makes finding new shortcuts all the more joyous. Getting frustrated at the 18th time I fail a difficult grenade jump makes my eventual success all the more gratifying. There needed to be a level of care put into making sure the level worked as intended for subverting them to be meaningful. This is the perfect equilibrium, the magic point of balance between jank and structure that makes Halo 2 so special.
Cairo Station begins with a couple of hilarious jokes. In the tutorial, the soldier introducing your new shields calls them “extremely resilient”. The penny immediately drops when you fight the first wave of covenant and die almost immediately. The second joke is when you’re playing co-op and that death leads to you restarting to a checkpoint. At first, you’ll assume it's a bug, until reality sets in, and you realise you’re going to have to deal with this for the entire game.
The Halo games are no stranger to challenge. Escorting Captain Keyes with his stupid needler on Truth and Reconcilliation is no walk in the park. The thing that sets Halo 2 apart is less the level of difficulty (although it has plenty of that) and more the particular flavour that it forces upon you. And that flavour tastes an awful lot like bullshit.
The most famous foes in Halo 2 are definitely the Jackal Snipers. The jackals in Halo 1 were extremely annoying and accurate with their plasma pistols, dropping your shields with ease, but in Halo 2 they’ve discovered hitscan weapons. That one shot you. At ludicrous ranges. With basically zero acquisition time. If you do not take them out the exact moment they drop into your vision, you are going to die.
Less notorious but just as deadly are the swarms of bugs that ambush you from every conceivable angle. They are lightning fast, shoot barrages of fire with you while moving, and can come from literally anywhere. And while you might be able to kill two or so, good luck killing 6 of them with no way to retreat if you even think about leaving cover for half a second.
Nowhere is the stupidity of Halo 2’s difficulty more pronounced than the opening section of Gravemind though. Allow me to explain exactly how this sequence goes:
You are teleported into the middle of a room, right next to 2 brutes and a couple of grunts. You have about half a second to duck behind a crate or you will die. Sometimes, you die regardless. If you manage to scramble behind that box, your next objective is to kill the two shieldless, tanky brutes. Luckily, you spawn in with the strongest weapon possible for this exact situation: a single needler.
Let's say you somehow manage to kill these two brutes after 30 tries. Maybe you even luck out with a checkpoint.
You’re just getting started.
You get assaulted with 6-8 waves of brutes and grunts, with no carbine rifles, rocket launchers or sniper rifles to easily take them down. Every now and then you get gifted a plasma grenade or a brute shot with 5 rounds of ammo, that you desperately try to maximise in the hope of surviving a few seconds longer. You will die, die, and die again in this ridiculous fight that has you outgunned, outmanned and outplanned.
So it sucks, right? That was the verdict my co-op partner and I agreed on when we finished the game. We excitedly installed Halo 3, ready for a fresher and more fun experience. Then something horrible happened.
Halo 3 was boring.
It wasn’t unfair. It didn’t put us in stupid situations with no real fighting chance. I wasn’t getting instantly killed from across the map. And I was bored out of my mind as I shot endless rounds of rifle fire at Brute’s heads.
For all Halo 2’s wild imbalance, it was enormously fun trying to overcome its challenges. Turns out we had a secret weapon all along, one most people are unaware that exists - infinite lives. Playing Halo 2 requires you to fail a thousand times, but if you’re paying close attention you’ll learn a lesson every single time.
It's all about progress through iteration. A death to a jackal sniper has revealed the position of that one jackal sniper next time you round that corner. An ambush from bugs lets you know where they’ve come from, so you have your guns trained on the sky at the right time. Sometimes it's about evasion, turning on that cloak at exactly the right time to slip past the flood undetected. Other times you just need to nail the execution - one part of Regret has sets of Jackal Snipers and Honour Guard Elites spawning at opposite ends of a large room. There are no tricks here, just repetition until you nail your shots and land those stickies.
Finishing a game feels good. Overcoming a game’s challenges feels amazing. Halo 2’s difficulty is definitely on the bullshit side of difficulty, but rarely feels impossible. It somehow manages to give you those intoxicating highs, without making you give up during its demoralising lows. It somehow strikes that balance without even trying to do so.
Easter Eggs are one of my favourite things about the Halo games. Halo 1 had a few, with MEG being the most convoluted, but Halo 2 embraced them with a fervour never seen before with its skulls. With the exception of two, they can only be found on Legendary difficulty, and they add a variety of gameplay effects. Some are actively negative (like famine), some make the game easier (grunt birthday party), while others are just quirky fun (IWHBYD). But for my money, the best easter egg in Halo 2 is without a doubt the Scarab Gun.
The Scarab is a giant walking covenant tank that you encounter a few times during the opening missions on Earth before you finally board it and wipe out its crew. It has a deadly laser that tears through tanks and even the environment with ease. And on Metropolis, if you’re able to reach it, you can find one, conspicuously floating over a traffic cone so you know it wasn’t left there by mistake.
There’s a problem though. It sits up on a bridge far beyond what you could normally reach with grenade or rocket jumps. The only way to realistically reach it is with a banshee. And there are no banshees on that section of Metropolis. Unless…
There is a banshee on the previous section of Metropolis, but you’d need to somehow take it through the debris littered tunnel to take it to the next area. You can’t get in the banshee, because it will either ricochet back to the bridge area, or failing that, explode. So you carefully lure the banshee into the tunnel, dodging its fire and clearing it of enemies (and allies) so it doesn’t accidentally get destroyed.
Problem 2 is the subsection of tunnel you need to lead it down to the next area. The banshee is reluctant enough to come down, and it barely fits through the tunnel as is. No problem! Just carefully (carefully) shoot off both its wings so it can fit. Problem 3 is the big one though. If you can just get the banshee to follow you to the next section of the map, you should be able to hijack it and fly to the Scarab Gun right? Except that when you cross the loading zone, the banshee instantly despawns, just like the rest of the bridge vehicles.
But, if you can somehow manage to hijack the banshee at the precise moment you cross the loading zone, it will neither explode nor de-load. You won’t have time to ricochet back or explode and the banshee won’t disappear because you’re sitting in it. And voila! You can go get your prize, and laugh your way through the rest of the level with your weapon of mass destruction.
It seems insane to me that any of this could possibly be intended. More likely, I think, is that Bungie put it there in the knowledge, and expectation, that players were insane, and would somehow figure out a way to get to a place they had no business getting. And get there I did, marvelling all the while how this was a real thing.
It was fun. It's a curious thing, but these easter eggs and exploits all come together to make a wholly unique experience as you break the game in a specific way to get a particular reward. Halo 2, for some unknown reason, provides this harmony of exploit and reward in spades.
Take sword flying, which has unfortunately been patched out. With exact timing, if you can swap weapons and swing with a sword at the right time, while your reticle is over that enemy, you will lunge to that enemy, regardless of distance. This leads to some fairly hilarious shenanigans, as you fly across and above the map. Or another fan favourite is the duplication of Sergeant Johnson on The Great Journey. With some adventurous driving, you can drop a wraith into the final boss room. When Johnson gets inside, the game helpfully spawns another copy, since you need him to drop the shields of the final boss,Tartarus. You end up with 4 Johnson’s, all rapidly firing at Tartarus with their beam rifles, and the easiest boss fight in the game.
If these bugs were more common, the whole game would descend into disaster. But their existence, combined with the careful placement of easter eggs, leads to something special. The jank level is just right to enhance the overall experience, and the game is better for these exploits existing.
Halo 2 is a paradox. It's both the worst of the first 3 Halo games and the best. It's messy and imbalanced, but fun to interact with. It's way too hard and makes victory all the sweeter for it. The exploits to break the game are infrequent and difficult enough to do that they don’t ruin the basic experience, while producing incredible effects when they do.
For a long time I thought Halo 2 was a great game in spite of its flaws. Now, I think something slightly, but fundamentally, different. Halo 2 is a masterpiece because of its flaws.
If we were to ‘fix’ Halo 2 - reduce the difficulty, put invisible walls up everywhere, remove the exploits and easter eggs - you would have an entirely forgettable game. Halo 2 is a game that should be remembered not for the game it presents on face value, but for the experience you have while playing it. It hangs there, in balance with itself, defying understanding and beggaring belief, making a mockery of reviews, sitting perfectly at the centre of the Jank Equilibrium.
