I've both played Halo and Halo 2, and I can say they aren't bad. They are in fact quite good in some areas, but also very boring on some. But, as far as I seen it wasn't special by no means. Want vehicles? Get Operation Flashpoint. Want guns? Goldeneye is the best hands down there.Want realism? Go grab Rainbow Six(The first, Rogue Spear and Raven Shield, not the newer crap.) Want something in between? Go grab any of the CoD series.
Want story action? Play Halo.
It's that simple to me.
It's difficult to comprehend just how ridiculous that statement is. Rather then just shout "Go play Deus Ex!" ad infinitum*, I'll list a few titles that are in fact primarily shooters (unlike Deus Ex**, which is more of an FPS/RPG hybrid, same thing goes for System Shock 2 (only more so)) which you really should play before saying silly things like that.
A game that doesn't have to rip off Aliens because it IS Aliens:
Aliens vs Predator 2. Playing as the Marines is harrowing, playing as the predator is a blast, and playing as an alien is one of the more unique FPS moments as you can literally walk on the walls....or the ceiling. All 3 campaigns have a good story that interweaves with the others.
The game with Clive Barker's name in the title that doesn't suck:
Clive Barker's Undying. Scary is an understatement. Story is excellent.
What you get when you mix elite paramilitary groups with creepy japanese horror movie elements:
F.E.A.R.. Note that I'm not talking about the substandard expansion packs, just the original game. The firefights in F.E.A.R. are a thing of wonder, and the atmosphere is creepy to the extreme. My brother would play this and be freaked out and on edge for hours afterwards.
A hilarious send up/homage to the 60s spy movie genre:
No One Lives Forever. Awesome firefights, hilarious gadgets, great cinematics, and dialog that would have me bent over laughing so hard it hurt. Picture the Austin Powers movies, only actually funny instead of an embarrassing morass of stupid. By recent standards it's an incredibly long game, and unlike the original Halo the developers didn't achieve that by making you run down long identical alien hallways. Instead you'd infiltrate and shoot your way out of beatnik-infested night clubs, escape sinking ships, fight in/jump out of airplanes (without a parachute!), break into vaults, or visit 60s style space stations...and blow them up. And that's just a handful of the locales you'll visit as you try to stop the nefarious plot of H.A.R.M. (they never actually explain what that acronym stands for). The sequel is also a very good game, though much shorter and not as hilarious as the original (but with better graphics, and of course the level in a trailer park during a tornado where you fight ninjas).
A good Star Trek game and its sequel:
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force and
Star Trek: Elite Force 2. While the first one has to overcome the fact it's part of the Voyager setting (which may or may not make you hate it), the sequel has Picard (huzzah!) and is set in the good old Alpha quadrant. If you like Star Trek at all then you'll doubtless enjoy the story, which enfolds as the action is taking place for the most part, so it's like being in an episode (or a bunch really) of the show. Plus the sequel has some nifty set piece battles. Even if you aren't a trekkie they are worth playing.
A video-game sequel to the 1982 nerdy classic:
Tron 2.0 It's entirely possible some of you have never even heard of Tron before, and that's a crying shame. The game just oozes style, and settings and mechanics defy my ability to describe just how cool they are, and it's jam packed with things that make nerds smile.
One of the more unusual FPS adaptations in recent memory:
The Wheel of Time. Turning Robert Jordan's fantasy epic into an FPS is one of those bizarre ideas that actually works.
As for why people like to gang up on Halo, I present you with this
Zero Punctuation article on the new Turok game which also critiques the FPS genre itself and recent design trends, where Yahtzee boils down most of the recent problems with FPS games to their designers saying "Lets be like Halo" which he refers to as "that inexplicably popular festival of mediocrity".
*
Not that it's a bad idea, because you really should.**
Deus Ex was technically the second FPS I ever owned***, though Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight really stopped being an FPS once you could use the lightsaber, as the 3rd person perspective was so much more useful for that. This made it the first FPS I played through, endowing me with rather high standards as a result.***
The first game I ever purchased was actually Descent, which I realize is played from the FPS perspective, but is not really an FPS. Starting out with Descent biased**** me against ground-pounders for years to come (I originally played Jedi Knight because one of my relatives brought it to my house to see if it would work on my PC, years after the original release. I pretty much skipped the Quake era entirely.), and my devotion to that series is one of the reasons I tried out the Freespace universe in the first place (as Descent's development team had split into Outrage and Volition).
****I have played classic Doom era titles like Heretic, I just found them annoyingly primitive when compared the the holy grail that was Descent. It was fun turning people into a chicken in multi-player though, back in the good old days of serial port network gaming and DOS. I just craved my 360 degrees of freedom.
