I would have to agree that the Halo series is overrated.

The reason Halo is so popular is because of two things: the mammoth marketing machine that is Microsoft telling us how great it is, and it was the first FPS on a console that played well.

Halo was a good game, but that's it. I was just good. If you compare the game to all the FPS's that have ever been made, then it just doesn't stack up. Far Cry, HL, No One Lives Forever, Jedi Knight, Max Payne, Undying, to name a few, were easily as good as or better than Halo, in terms of both story and gameplay. Wanna throw multiplayer in the mix and UT completely blows Halo 2 out of the water. The only distinction that Halo has over all the titles I've listed is that is was a console only game. So all the gamers out there that didn't have any 'good' FPS's for their consoles got Halo and Halo 2 and assumed that it was the only FPS that is good and nothing else could compare to it.

And of course, I must address the repetative gameplay, particularly in Halo. And by repetative I mean by stacking floor upon floor upon floor that look identical. It looked like the developers said, 'Hey our game is too short, just cut and paste that section you did earlier and slap it on top, or next to or whatever you need to do to add a couple more hours.' In Halo, the Library was the worst offender of this type as well as 343 Guilty Spark. This type of design wasn't quite so bad in Halo 2 but it was still present in some of the later levels.

I also got a kick out of one of my friends when he was talking up all the features of Halo 2 and how innovative they were, for example the dual wielding of weapons. I thought to myself, that's nothing new, games as far back as Blood and Shadow Warrior let you use guns akimbo and Heavy Metal: FAKK2 let you hold two weapons and control them independantly.

Anyway, to summarize: Halo was good, Halo 2 was better. But neither game did anything that anyone else hadn't done before, unless you limit your view to consoles.