Halo 2 Sucks?

When it comes to the single player game, yeah, it kind of does. I just finished playing it last night (I know, I'm a little behind the rest of the world) and upon completion of the game, I think I was more frustrated with it than almost any other game I've played in recent memory. You've probably read reviews up the wazoo for this game all over the internet so I'm going to focus on what not many of them have--the story, and more specifically, the end of the story (if you can call it an end).

So as you are playing through the game, you will get your chance to play as both Master Chief and the Covenant's Aribiter. There's really no discernable difference between the two, which is unfortunate. They both have the same health/shield configuration, can only carry two guns, can only carry the same amount of grenades, and has every other attribute the same... besides what the hand holding the onscreen gun looks like.

There are two plots going on throughout the game--one involving the Master Chief and one invovling the Arbiter. The Master Chief is trying to stop a newly found Halo from being detonated, which would kill all life in a gigantic sector of space (yawn, heard this before). The Arbiter, since suffering defeat at the Master Chief's hands has been humiliated... but lucky for him, the elders of their race lets him come back as their uber-warrior. What a wonderful reward for failure! His main job is to secure all of the items needed to detonate Halo starting their "great journey."

So you play as both characters, going about blowing many things up. The Master Chief, towards the end of the game, is phased out of the story, which I found odd. After completing a submission, you'll complete the game as the Arbiter. While fighting to detonate Halo, the Arbiter uncovers a conspiracy in the Covenant ranks and has to battle a subrace of his people (called Brutes). He also realizes that detonating Halo would be a bad thing, so he eventually stops it from happening. Now this is where the story gets friggin' retarded.

So the Halo ring, which was already in countdown to explode, has its countdown stopped. The universe is saved... or is it? Apparently if a Halo ring is activated and then deactivated, it turns on a crap ton of other Halo rings that can be remote detonated from one location. This location is called The Ark. Fortunately, Master Chief is on his way there. As you see Master Chief's ship jumping into the sector where the Ark is, you hear his superiors, who are in the middle of a battle with Covenant forces, ask him what he's doing there. His response: "I'm here to finish the job." Roll credits.

WHAT THE HELL???? What gives? That's not an ending. This isn't a frickin' 1960's serial movie where you can just tune in next week to see what happens. I played many hours to get to the end of this game expecting maybe, you know, a proper ending. Instead, you get no resolution whatsoever. Everything you did in this game is pretty much for naught because you don't know if it really had any impact on the whole scheme of things. For all I know, the Master Chief chokes on a granola bar while trying to get to the Ark and a drunken Covenant stumbles onto the lever that blows the hell out of the entire universe. Good God, Bungie, you totally blew it.

Save yourself a lot of disappointment and only play the multiplayer portion of Halo 2. At least that's good and you don't need story or closure. Halo 2's ending is easily the worst ending (if you can call it that) I've ever seen. It would have been better if, when you stopped Halo from blowing, the credits simply started to roll. At least then you'd know there was an end to the story. Screw you, Hal0 2, you weren't worth the $50.