I was curious about the mod and decided to try and test it and its many individual aspects to give some praise and criticism. I know feedback was recommended to be given on the Discord server but I would rather not join anymore servers, and wanted to drop this here on the off chance that the devs see and read this anyway.

Before I share anything however, I want to prophase this by saying that I only did some basic testing by myself. I was able to get a second "player" into the game but I was unable to get somebody to actually playtest with me, so these ae all just observations I made on my own and any talk of the balancing is purely theoretical and could be inaccurate in practice. Also I am not an expert on the Halo modding tools or the engine, so I may make a lot of criticism that would be even theoretically impossible, or at least too difficult, to act upon so feel free to ignore those. Also also I do not know 100% what the devs are and are not aware of, so again, if they are aware of an issue that I list and are working on it feel free to ignore it.

I think this is a really cool and honestly very solid idea with a lot of potential. It's a bit basic as an idea, I won't lie, people have tried things like this before, most namely the H3CE mod, but that doesn't make it any less impressive, and if nothing else I commend the effort put into modding Halo 2, a notoriously barely stable game with insane spaghetti code that will shatter at even the lightest touch, so kudos for that.

First I'll start with some good points and things I really liked about the mod:

-The 4 maps ported look and work mostly spectacularly, I found basically no issues with their collision or even any visual errors with the maps themselves. Lighting, rendering, portaling, everything looked great and could honestly just be perfect with just a few touch ups. The only real exception I can think of is the snow on Ice Fields being way too bright to the point it sorta hurts to look at, and even that is counterbalanced slightly by the ice in the caverns looking great.

-I appreciate the effort put in to molding Halo CE without just copy pasting it into the Halo 2 engine. For example, it would have been incredibly easy to just remove playable elites, and not bother with advanced armor customization like secondary colors and emblems, and yet I was pleasantly surprised to find them not only still a thing, but actively worked into the mod. Although at some points seeing elites going from Halo CE running animations to Halo 2 running animations can be a bit funky and jarring as well as the elites hand movements for guns like snipers, for the most part all the animations look perfectly fluid and natural, and I can tell a lot of effort was probably put into making them work that well for players.

-Very little about the gameplay itself feels "unfinished." It runs smooth (with the exception of a crash on my first attempt at running Blood Gulch, but that never happened again), and you could argue that a lot of the stuff doesn't work as intended or works bad, but none of it feels buggy or has any problems with it from a technical standpoint. All the guns shoot great, the vehicles drive great, the players control great, etc.

-I love the dedication put into making this mod feel like a complete package. From the images provided I knew that Energy Sword and Sentinel Beam had been made usable, both of which were good for the most part, but for the funny I decided to set the spawning weapons to be the Beam Rifle and Brute Shot just to see what the game would do with them, and to my shock I had spawned in with a Gravity Gun and a Mini Gun, and that there was a sorta battery powered carbine, the design of which was based on the prototype for the Plasma Rifle. Finding these felt very cool as they had no real reason to exist as they didn't exist in actual CE in any shape way or form, but instead of leaving these weapons in the settings menu with no purpose, they actually gave you a sorta Halo CE equivalent. And they're not just placeholders, they're actual guns that work, the Gravity Guns shield piercing at least was a really interesting idea for a weapon. You could extend this praise to the Wraith somewhat since it was cool being able to spawn in it at all, but its clear the Wraith in the vehicle selector is unfinished. The only real sad part of it all was that there wasn't something like this for the Brute Plasma Rifle, if nothing else having a red plasma in a CE game would be kinda cool, but given that these weapon additions were entirely unnecessary to begin with, it's not a big deal.

-Vehicles having destructible parts, even if the vehicles themselves are not fully destroyable, was really a really neat touch and I hope it will get given to the Ghost, Banshee, and Wraith later when the mod is done. I also appreciate the redesign to the Rocket Hog even if I'm a bit conflicted on it needing one at all, using gauss hog elements to make it look more like the E3 version of the Rocket Hog was very creative.


Now ill go over problems the mod has, errors, and things I just personally didn't like. None of the are particularly massive issues, but there is a decent amount of them (Also I won't be pointing out the obvious visual issues like the inconsistency and errors of the elite viewmodel animations or the ammo counter being bugged cause... well, they're obvious):

-The mod page and the mod in general doesn't really make it clear to just what extent it wants to integrate Halo CE into Halo 2 and it causes a lot of issues when gauging if something is a "flaw" or not, such as the balancing of weapons and the tweaking of their behavior. If the point of the mod is merely to port Halo CE with some additions those would be flaws since the weapons don't work 1-to-1 with the originals, or at least as close to the originals as possible, but if the point of the mod is to, say, polish up CE and make a more clean experience they wouldn't necessarily be.

-Speaking of balancing, some weapons and vehicles have... questionable balancing decisions, even completely separate from the previous issue mentioned:
A. The AR does a lot less (at least relatively less) damage, taking almost a full 3 seconds to kill an enemy player point blank which is a massive increase from CEs AR being a 1 second kill. And the AR doesn't seem to have been compensated for this in any significant way, the ammo and mag size are about the same, the fire rate isn't any faster, and the accuracy while appearing to be slightly better is not so to any significant degree. The AR in CE already has a lot of viability issues due to its range damage problem even if its monster at close range and provides a lot of utility, and this mod has pretty much eliminated any real usefulness it had by nerfing the its damage to the point its not even great at point blank and getting rid of its utility like quick camo and melee range (which ill discuss later).
B. The shotgun also does a lot less relative damage, not even being able to one shot at point blank range which every version of the shotgun in Halo has been able to do, even the really bad 2 and 3 takes on the weapon. I don't really see the shotgun being a very good weapon due to this, especially with other weapons keeping their previous notable kill thresholds like 3 shot head shot with magnums.
C. The Plasma Rifle in CE had a mechanic for both stunning enemy players and dealing extra damage on flesh headshots. I wasn't able to test these in the mod properly, but from what little I could test it seemed like these features were missing which heavily tanks the Plasma Rifles viability in actual combat, and the lack of stun practically nerfs the Plasma Pistol into the ground, especially with how slow its overcharge shot seems to be now. Also it still has the Halo 2 bug that makes it shoot faster if you spam fire instead of holding down the trigger.
D. The flamethrower works completely differently than it does in CE, working more akin to how it does in SPV3 or Halo 3, firing a fire projectile that sticks to targets rather than a projectile that goes through them and applies a DOT when in contact with them. My issue with this is that, like all the other weapons, it in theory tanks the flamethrowers killing ability. The fire can't pierce through multiple people and sticks to walls instead of bouncing off of them which is what made it a better close quarters option than the shotgun for dealing with large groups of enemies, You can't just spray it across a room and deal decent damage since you can no longer rely on the projectiles covering area since they stick to surfaces, you want to pin them right on someone which is probably really hard to do since the projectiles are really slow and have a very low travel distance, even lower than the CE flamethrower, and they even seem to be slightly effected by gravity which I can see being a massive pain. And just in general they don't seem to do that much damage, it taking a long while for even a large amount of fire to properly kill a player. The only thing I really see this flamethrower doing better is denying terrain from enemies, which even then is not that good cause of tis low damage, and the og one already did a fine enough job at area denial.
E. The explosions from grenades (and to a much lesser extent, the Rocket Launcher) seem to have been increased to match CEs really large explosion radiuses, but the effects have not. The grenades blast radius is easily double what the small H2 pop explosion portrays and it can make it really hard to judge when an explosion is going to harm you or not. Admittedly I'm not sure if this a Halo 2 thing I've somehow never noticed or if it's just an issue with the mod, but in case of the latter I'm mentioning it here.
F. The fuelrod gun one shots on a direct hit, and yet it seems to have the same fire rate, explosion radius, and projectile physics as it does in CE, which could prove to be an issue. I'm not 100% sure how it would turn out against actual players, but the FR in CE was unable to one shot even on direct hit for a very good reason, it simply shoots too fast for such a big radius explosive weapon and the physics of the projectiles made them really easy to land at medium range, making it a direct hit instant kill might be way too powerful.
G. The Rocket Hog has no reload on its rocket projectiles, making it spam fireable. It seems to have a lower fire rate, so it could be fine? But I would keep an eye on it just in case.
H. The plasma bolts from the Ghost and Banshee are way too slow (or at least they look really slow) and seem to have the max inaccuracy CEs do after their ramp up from the get go which is really bad. Also the Ghost has its raising the nose up button mapped to crouch rather than jump. Also also the Banshee can't use banshee bombs and is so slow it is near impossible to splatter with it.
I. It may just be me seeing things, but it feels like the Scorpion moves faster when going backwards.
J. The sentinel beam is very weak, as per usual with Halo 2, and while the Energy Sword in theory is fine it's just the Halo 2 version really, I would have liked to see it be more balanced around Halo CEs version that elites use, making it more of an inbetween of Halo 2 and 3s.

-Players don't have flashlights, which is just an nice little thing to have.

-While I said I wouldn't share any of the obvious visual errors and problems, there are some I want to mention cause they feel either hard to notice to where they could have been missed by devs, or too impactful to gameplay to ignore:
A. The bullet and in the magnums chamber phases out of the gun during the melee and fully expended mag reload animations.
B. Active camo visuals are very messed up, the needlers shards staying partially visible which they normally aren't, even going all the way into the gun itself which looks very silly, on the other hand the plasma rifles holographic display does not stay visible despite it being a staple for the gun (forgot to test the pistols but tis safe to assume its the same). The spartans have their flashlight lens on the side of their helmets stay visible with camo, making it easier to see them than elites once you know its there. The flamethrowers monitor only sorta half stays visible during the camo sequence.
C. The flametrowers monitor uses the 1749 Beta display rather than the finished Gearbox version.
D. The gravity guns light when its charged is only visible to the player that has it, and since it doesn't have an animation for it its basically impossible to tell when an enemy one is charged and ready to fire.
E. The bomb on assault doesn't have a viewmodel at all.
F. The elite health bars are normal colored whereas the rest of the UI was changed to be Halo 2s purple shade for elite stuff, it looks kind of out of place.
G. A bit of nitpick, but some weapons do a weird animation where they retreat or do a small bit of their pulling out animations when you switch to your secondary, whereas other weapons don't do it at all and it becomes a bit annoying when you notice it.

-Some aspects and quirks that make CEs game flow unique are missing. In CE weapons have different melee ranges which, on top of different melee speeds, gives the weapons another dimension of viability which is now gone with the addition of Halo 2s lunge mechanic, which ultimately nerfs weapons that don't really need nerfs like the AR that had the 2nd best melee range in the game combined with being fastest speed which made it the objectively best melee option and gave it a decent bit of viability, and buffs weapons that didn't really need them like the magnum which had the both the slowest melee speed and lowest range to counterbalance its high effectiveness as an actual gun. Quick camo is also gone, which is a mechanic that gave the weapons all different rates at which they drained your camo upon being shot, drained enemy camo upon being shot, and allowed your camo to come back while being held. Weapons like the PR and AR thrived off of the quick camo mechanic because they both allowed camo to come back really fast and didn't drain a lot upon being fired, you could argue the PR was made to be used with camo with how good it works with the mechanic, and not having all of these jabs at their viability even more. I know may not be possible to implement these by nature of this being on the H2 engine, but they at least need to be accounted for when rebalancing is done.

-The snow on Ice Fields is way too bright and way too shiny, it honestly kind of hurt my eyes when testing out the map.

-Most gamemodes seem to work fine for the most part, but assault specifically spawned in players with no weapons by default. Also the team spawns for Blood Gulch are backwards and teams spawn in the opposite base, which funnily enough results its CTF turning into a very high stakes assault, and assault into a more methodical CTF.

-The fuel rod gun has an original model, or at least a very heavily modified one, which I think is cool, and it uses the Halo 2 viewmodel animations, but with everything else using the Halo CE models and animations it feels a little out of place, and it has no effects or animation for when its overheating which is a nice bit of missing visual feedback for people not holding the gun that could change the outcomes of some fights.

-The Sentinel Beam seems to use its Halo 2 model and textures, which is fine, but like the fuel rod, it makes the weapon seem out of place. I would personally recommend doing what other mods have done and giving it a style more akin to CEs stuff.

-Teleporters sort of feel limp without the green flash that they do in CE.

And I think that about covers everything I found and what I took notes on. Despite my criticisms this mod looks great honestly and I hope it gets finished into something great, which I doubt it won't from the looks of it. Best luck to you devs, you're doing great.