I am happy with the length because my attention span is short, having been permanently scarred by the Xen levels of Half-Life 1. After the first or second week, I start to glaze over and I just want the game to be over.

Also, I work in software, and I can imagine various ways in which the three years of development could have been filled with things tangential to the actual development of the game itself.

The Covenant in the original game were basically ciphers. The sequel sheds much more light upon them as a society. It’s hard to hate them, or at least all of them, by the time things have played out. (Although it might also be difficult to believe that they’ve held together for millennia, given how eager they seem to be to stab one another in the back during the relatively brief period in which you observe them.)

The visual design of elements throughout the game, both small and large, is beautiful. I loved the ceremonial armor the armor worn by the Elites guarding the Prophets, and the scale of the elements in the Gondola sequence literally took my breath away.

Not so good:

I think that “the game is too short” is a compact way of saying “it should not be possible for me to finish a $50 game that took three years to make in three days of casual play, while holding down a real job, and I sure as hell don’t want to wait *another* three years before finding out how all of the plot threads that were left dangling in mid-air are resolved.”

Also, the lack of co-operative multiplayer absolutely broke my heart. It defies rational explanation. The game has co-operative play. It has multiplayer code out the wazoo. Why, oh why, doesn’t it have co-operative multiplayer?