I recently played through Halo 2’s co-op mode on Legendary. I realized a couple things while playing. First, while graphics are an essential part of a game they are not the primary factor in what makes a game fun. Despite the fact the game is a few years old now and the graphics are not as nice as newer games like Gears of War or Rainbow Six Vegas I had a lot of fun playing through the story again with one of my co-workers. Second, Legendary is long when the person you are playing with dies a lot.

The gameplay stands up to these current releases because it is well designed and balanced. There are a lot of ways to make a game fun. Halo 2 does it by giving the player a combination of enemy strength and intelligence to deal with. The strongest enemies are not the smartest, but they make up for that being only vulnerable on a few spots. On the other side, the smartest enemies are vulnerable to attack everywhere . There is a good balance here. The AI in this game plays fairly smart. Enemies roll out of the way of grenades and if they get hurt they will go hide to get their shields to recharge. Overall it plays really well.

Split screen co-op brings a couple extra difficulties. First, it is hard to tell which player the audio alerts are for. Many times I think my shield is down when it is my partners and vise versa. However, the biggest difficulty factor on co-op Legendary is that neither of you can die. On easier difficulty levels if one of you dies then you just re-spawn in when there are no enemies around. On Legendary there is no re-spawning. This makes levels with a lot of Jackal snipers very difficult because they almost always get you with a head shot if you stop moving. You pretty much have to play through those levels a few times and learn where all the snipers are and pick them all off one by one.

Halo set the bar for co-op gameplay and Halo 2 builds on that perfectly. The single player story if fun to play alone, but it is even more fun with a team mate.