In terms of controls, the biggest adjustment was getting used to the movement speed. Halo 2's run speed is already relatively conservative, but playing with a mouse and keyboard under my fingers and subconsciously expecting the significantly faster movement that comes along with running in nearly any PC FPS was a very odd sensation, despite having logged no doubt a few hundred hours in Halo 2 on Xbox. Beyond that, things felt like one would expect based on the Xbox game. Those accustomed to the console game will likely have some growing pains as they mentally remap their button associations to keys, but those new to the game should have little adjustment, even though some of Halo 2's controls are slightly uncommon. By default, the left and right mouse buttons control the left and right guns while dual wielding, or the gun and grenade while not dual wielding. The mouse scroll wheel is used for zoom, which is a big improvement for the sniper rifle, as it allows quicker cycling through the multiple zoom levels--the lack of which was always something I found very mildy frustrating at times with an Xbox controller. Other keys, such as melee, are likely to be rebound based on player preference.

The single biggest joy of playing Halo 2 with a keyboard and mouse was actually feeling like a really hardcore sniper while using the sniper rifle, something that is a special event rather than the order of the day in Halo 2. This is nothing new to those of us who are long time PC gamers and masters of the rail gun, but the feeling of being able to apply my mouselook skills to the high power of Halo 2's sniper rifle--again, being accustomed to using it with an analog stick--made me almost giddy. I was pulling off last second headshots and multiple point blank shots in a row with ease. On the other hand, I did find that for some reason lining up melee attacks was more difficult than it generally is in the console game; this may simply be a practice issue, as few PC shooters implement melee in the way Halo does.