Jim Rossignol reviews the PC port of Halo 2, and he isn’t impressed.
Halo 2 is a lazy port of a less-than-perfect sequel to an FPS that was pretty good on a console and only average on a PC.
As he points out, what’s particularly bizarre is the fact it’s a Vista-only release, so you need Microsoft’s latest shiny OS to play it at all. That’s just silly: this time last year I wrote that Halo 2 was the best game on the Xbox 360, but that was more because there were sod-all Xbox 360 games out. A year back, Halo 2 was in the bargain bins at £4 because it was an old, old game – and now it’s been released for the PC, the platform of choice for cutting-edge gaming and graphics cards that cost more than your house.
I’m sure the reason Halo 2 is Vista-only is because it supports multiplayer over Live, but whatever the justification the result is that you’ve got Vista-level hardware requirements and normal retail pricing for a previous-generation Xbox game. If the plan is to sell lots of copies of Vista on the back of Halo 2, I think Microsoft will be disappointed – and if people buy it in the belief that this is the cutting edge of PC gaming, they’re going to be even more disappointed.
Please God, let Crysis live up to the hype…