Since the game's release, Halo 2 has received a lot of criticism regarding its campaign mode. These criticisms are generally unfounded and generally a waste of time. The campaign is at least as good as the first game's, but Halo 2's real purpose is as a multiplayer game. It's for this effort that the game deserves serious critique.

Though the first Halo has its own problems with balance, it's still an example of multiplayer game design worth aping. The game's Pistol is the focus of most complaints about weapon balance, but the gun acts as a necessary equalizer; spawning with the Pistol and a couple of grenades, anyone can stand up to compete with anyone else, no matter which weapon or vehicle the competition has managed to snatch. The Pistol is by no means the best weapon in every situation, but it is undoubtedly the most well rounded, and capable of competing with just about anything else. One of the major problems with Halo 2 is the lack of a comparable equalizer.

The default spawning equipment in Halo 2 is the terrible SMG, a weapon that's pretty useless until paired up with another equally worthless (and spam-happy) weapon for dual wielding. And while there are options to switch up the starting weaponry—in fact, Halo 2 sports some awesome customization—there is no weapon tantamount to Halo's Pistol, and no options to set up the same solid balance of the first game. The result is a lot of battles being won by the player with the on-paper-better weapon, not necessarily by the one with the better shooting skills.

Because there is no weapon as universally capable as Halo's Pistol, one-on-one shootouts are almost always determined by the weapon equipped and not the player. At mid to long range, nothing really competes with the Battle Rifle or Carbine. With a decent zoom and relatively quick killing power, these two weapons will win almost every encounter, given the distance between players is to their advantage. At close range, the Battle Rifle and Carbine become pretty weak competitors, and lose hard to dual wielded spam shooters. And because there's no starting equipment quite like Halo's Pistol, snipers in Halo 2 can run rampant with long range kills that are impossible to counter until someone grabs another weapon with a scope.

As much as the missing Pistol hurts Halo 2, it isn't the only blow dealt to Halo's rounded weapon set. For questionable reasons (the boring dual wielding), Bungie removed the effectiveness of a lone plasma weapon. Originally, the Plasma Pistol and Plasma Rifle weapons both had a stun effect on their targets, giving skilled players the chance to move in for a quick melee kill. Using this side effect against opponents not only made the plasma weapons effective on their own (in Halo 2, they're almost useless without dual wielding), but it also made for interesting and exciting gun battles with a very unique tactic. Unfortunately, it's all absent from Halo 2. What's left are boring dual wield spray battles with just about zero fancy grenade play.

The Energy Sword and Rocket Launcher are both more evidence of poor weapon balance by Bungie. On two levels in particular (Midship and Lockout, both tight areas that force constant close range combat), the Energy Sword is a monster of a weapon, and overpowers just about every other weapon combination without question. Only the Shotgun stands a chance against the Sword, though there's rarely more than one Shotgun to share between every other player that's not abusing the Energy Sword. A Sword wielding combatant can easily enter a confined area with two or three enemies and have no problem laying waste to them because the weapon is so undeniably better than anything else in that situation. It's hardly a matter of skill (unless a Shotgun gets involved); the success of the Sword abuser is essentially predetermined because, on paper, the weapon trounces everything else.

The Rocket Launcher suffers a similar problem, though it's not quite as poorly balanced as the Energy Sword. The instant kill of the Rocket Launcher was already annoying enough in the original Halo, but Bungie actually managed to make the weapon even more skill-less. The blast of a Rocket does less damage to the person firing the weapon (compared to the same blast in                          

Halo), making it significantly safer for someone to throw caution in the wind and blast away with the Rocket Launcher in close quarters. And in an attempt to balance out the souped-up vehicles, Bungie thought it was a good idea to give the Rocket Launcher a lock-on shot, making the weapon an instant trump card against vehicles that requires absolutely zero skill or technique. Not only is it annoying to die to, but, more importantly, it's totally unrewarding. A well-aimed Rocket shot across the map to take out a Scorpion tank in Halo—that was rewarding, but getting Rocket kills in Halo 2 is just boring.

Even worse than the weapons are the crimes against vehicle balance. Though Halo's vehicles weren't perfect, they didn't give the pilot a guaranteed kill versus on-foot soldiers. In fact, anyone spawning with the Pistol and a grenade could handle a Ghost—the game's iconic single-pilot hovercraft—in a head-on duel. Drop the grenade beneath the Ghost and the vehicle flips, dumping the pilot and leaving him temporarily dazed for a couple of follow-up Pistol shots. Of course, the Ghost had its own advantages, and it wasn't a necessarily easy kill for either party involved. It was challenging. Rewarding. Fair.

Enter the Ghost of Halo 2. Due to changes in the game's physics, that well-placed grenade no longer flips the vehicle (and it only mildly damages the pilot). And now that the Ghost's mounted plasma blasters are significantly more powerful than before, that on-foot soldier no longer stands a chance in the duel unless armed with the Rocket Launcher. Again, the outcome of the duel is decided by the weapons equipped and not by the execution of the players. That's unrewarding.

Both tanks in Halo 2 are also excessively powerful, as they totally protect the driver from outside damage. No longer can accurate Pistol and Sniper Rifle shots take care of a Scorpion tank, and again, the only weapon that can effectively handle these vehicles is the boring Rocket Launcher (a weapon the game limits to one spawn at a time). Bungie knew that the flying Banshee wasn't suited for balanced multiplayer combat in Halo, but ignored their better judgement by throwing it into Halo 2. Perhaps the addition of boarding—all vehicles can be hijacked from their pilots—pushed Bungie to soup-up the game's vehicles, but the broken jacking system only serves as another failure of Halo 2.

Vehicle boarding is a good idea. Scratch that. Vehicle boarding is a great idea. Unfortunately, boarding vehicles in Halo 2 is almost entirely ineffective. The major problem with the system is the victim's ability to hop out of the vehicle while the hijacker is in the middle of the boarding animation. As soon as any decent player realizes he's being boarded, he can hop out of the vehicle and start firing on the helpless hijacker that's stuck in animation. It's amazing that Bungie missed this obvious flaw that completely ruins the otherwise well-implemented boarding system. And because this exists, the vehicles are even more unbalanced than intended (though even if boarding was effective, it wouldn't make up for the vehicles' new strengths, and the on-foot soldiers new weaknesses).

The game has other issues, such as poor weapon placement on maps (the large map Coagulation has a virtually limitless supply of Sniper Rifle ammo, and the best new weapon of the game—the Brute Shot—isn't a default weapon on any of the close quarters maps, the only areas where it would actually be useful), but that's not to say the game is completely worthless. Halo 2 succeeds in many ways by offering even better multiplayer support than the first game, and as with the original Halo, the game controls exceptionally well. It's because of these obvious successes that the damaging flaws in the game's balance are so apparent, and it's sort of amazing that Bungie could get so many things right and at the same time fail so hard. Had more consideration been put into the game's balance, Halo 2 could have easily toppled its predecessor. But as the game exists now, my love affair with the first Halo will have to keep me satisfied.