A Look at HALO 2 - The Enemy
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Some new additions here. In HALO all we had to worry about is a few different types of Covenant, some weird-looking Flood specimens and occasional flying Sentinels out there to destroy all that moves. Now we have the same covenant races with the addition of a few little tweaks, such as Grunts with shields and Jackals with alien Sniper rifles.
The concept of an alien being able to snipe at you from afar is staggering. If you try to play the game on legendary difficulty level and think you can be John Rambo, you got another thing coming. In the Outskirts level where you have multiple alien snipers on the rooftops, you'd better play strategy and not stick your nose out on the street unless there is a roof above your head. It’s one shot, one kill for these sharpshooters.
Flood is here as well, and as annoying as ever with their ability to rise from the dead after being shot down. No major changes to the Flood race, however, it looks like some of them received an energy shield upgrade.
The new races that we meet are the Brutes and the Prophets. Brutes are the major obstacle in the single-player game, since in the old HALO substitution for Big Bosses was made with an increased number of strategically placed Elite Covenants. This time around you have Brutes who can be really tough to beat at times. They usually appear in numbers and use a grenade launcher from afar. If in HALO little grunts were throwing grenades, and they were horrible shots, here it is not uncommon for a Brute to toss one all the way across a large map and hit you in the face with it. Brutes also possess the new guns called the Brute cannon, which is a grenade launcher and delivers quite a punch.
We also come across a number of flying evils called the drones. The drones only carry plasma pistols, but are very agile. They are hard to hit and are more of an annoyance than anything else.
Generally, the hardest thing about killing enemies in HALO was figuring out how to kill them in a quicker manner; in HALO2, a lot of times its about trying to survive the alien firepower.
Overall, putting the Brutes in the mix balances the rest of the weaker alien forces. Prophets are another new addition to the game, but you don’t see much action from them; they seem to be the major players in the plot behind the scenes.
I thought Bungie did a great job changing up the enemies in the game; the environment became more diverse and less repetitive when plugging your way through legions of hostile species.
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