6 of 6 thought this review was well writtenThe last bullet from the assault rifle ends the bitter war that has carried on for centuries. The epic battle has come to a pause. The death of the innocent is over. Master Chief takes a breath of relief and plugs in his headphones. He's about to listen to the most kickass soundtrack of all time.
Thus is my opinion (as well as Beyond the Blue Print’s, he came up with that intro) of The Halo 2 soundtrack for the 2nd game in a series that is the only reason the Xbox is still around. This soundtrack features music from and inspired by the video game. Steve Vai, Breaking Benjamin, and Incubus are a few of the musicians that are on this soundtrack. Coming in at almost one hour and ten minutes long, many people won’t be able to listen to it straight through, but for me it was easy because of the variety I found listening to this soundtrack.
There is plenty of music on here that is from the game and the first track is the theme for this video game.
Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix, featuring those classic ahh’s and some nice guitar work from Steve Vai. There’s nothing wrong with the track and is the obvious choice for starting off this soundtrack.
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Other songs that are in the game on the soundtrack and written and orchestrated by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori are
Peril, Ghosts of Reach, Heretic-Hero, Flawed Legacy, Impend, Ancient Machine, In Amber Clad, The Last Spartan, Orbit of Glass, Heavy Price Paid, Earth City, High Charity, and Remembrance.
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Most of these songs are instantly recognizable from the game and range from being 1:18 to 3 minutes long, most averaging out to two minutes. The best of which are
Ghosts of Reach, which has a different type of “whooing" in it, with some great orchestration as well as good percussion.
Impend is a classic that I hold dearly to my heart because of the wonderful orchestral intro and then the heavy beat that it has before going into a full on techno beat. I usually hate techno and electronics, but this is quite the exception. The music in
Ancient Machine is so eerie that it makes me paranoid when I hear it when I’m playing Halo 2. It isn’t that good because of shortness and repetitiveness, but I thought it was worth mentioning for it’s spookiness.
A few more mentions are
The Last Spartan and
Heavy Price Paid, they are both favorites of mine for their great orchestration, both are obviously meant to be heard in this game and are beautiful, especially the piano in Heavy Price Paid.
Earth City is probably the best written original song for the game on here, but strangely I find it rather boring and mute.
Remembrance is made up of voices only and is still rather enjoyable, but not something that I want to listen to more than once. The only two duds to me that are from the game are
Orbit of Glass and
High Charity neither of these songs really hold a presence ever and are quite boring.
Breaking Benjamin contribute one song called
Blow Me Away, which is actually in the game and is also my one of my favorite songs that they have written. It lasts for three-and-a-half minutes with a slow start, but soon gets heavier as the song goes on and has some rather good lyrics to it. Incubus has four songs on here, each being titled as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Movement of the Odyssey. The first movement is also called
Follow (1st Movement of the Odyssey) and is also the only song by them on here with Brandon singing. In my opinion, Follow is the best song on the entire soundtrack and in my eyes, a masterpiece. Brandon only sings the word “Follow" and also does his take on the classic “ahhings" that are part of the main theme to both games. The guitar on this song is absolutely impeccable and the drums are another big part of why I think this song is the best on here. The song never gets boring with great instrumentation from all members. The other three parts from Incubus are scattered throughout the album and are generally different from each other. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th movements are different from each other, but feature some good instrumentation from all the members at certain points in the songs. The drums and percussion are likely the most impressive thing that Incubus offer in this soundtrack.
If there was one song that I wished wasn’t on here at all it would probably be
Never Surrender, which is strictly a techno song that features the voice of Natarj and is written by Nile Rogers, who is the producer of this album. Cortana (sorry Halo fan boys if I misspelled her name) also makes an appearance on this song with random lines such as “Alert, I’m detecting Covenant movement", “Analyzing", and “Get ready to move in". The classic chanting voices from the theme song make an appearance or two as well on here. The only thing that Natarj does is say “Never Surrender" multiple times throughout. Steve Vai works the guitar in here, but it isn’t to noticeable, which is probably good because he doesn’t do the best job anyway. I apologize if anyone isn’t to happy with how I described this song as I’m not to familiar with this type of music. One last thing to mention is the last song,
Connected that is performed by, (sigh) Hoobastink. This song isn’t to special and is generally a repetitive song, but the riffs that they have are slightly heavy and the lyrics are okay.
Top Pros:
-Gotta love that chanting.
-The best of the best music from the game is on here.
-Incubus wrote some stellar (>pardon me< for using that word) songs for this soundtrack.
There are hardly any faults, as well as a fairly long soundtrack coming in at 69:28.
Top Cons:
-A couple songs from the game are boring and shouldn’t even be on here.
-The song Surrender is really bland to me; people that like electronic and techno music will like it however.
Overall, while I generally don’t care for soundtracks, this is something that many fans of the game as well as fans of both Techno and Rock will like. There are some fantastic performances from the likes of Breaking Benjamin and Incubus. By the way, on the cover it says that this is just volume one of the Halo 2 soundtrack so be expecting a second release of a Halo 2 soundtrack. It is tough for me to give this an overall rating of this, but I think that overall, this gets an easy 4 out of 5. Feedback is welcome and I suppose that you can talk about the game as well if you want to.
