I like both, but now I really wish CEA would have been faithful along the lines of H2A. H2A nailed it imo.
I thought that H2A would have nailed it, but I walked away pretty disappointed. The new audio is a bangy headache-inducing soup, the environments didn't always translate well in the "barren but high-quality textures and a little frilly stuff" approach, and the new lighting and materials is often a very garish and Halo 4-ish metallic interpretation of the old and more stone-like (and I'm not just referring to stonerunner) stuff.
Visually it's not always well-designed for gameplay, either. Things like oversized dynamic lights and huge muzzle flashes add all kinds of visual noise.
And the Blur cutscenes? Their asset artists did impressive work, but their editors are awful (especially where sound is concerned), and they're not aesthetically consistent with the game. They also have transitioning issues to and from gameplay.
All in all it's an annoying and choppy experience compared with the original game.
Now some people have taken issue with the OG mode as well. it differs from the Xbox CE version in certain ways I can't recall now, on account of CEA being a port of the Halo PC campaign.
https://halotupolev.wordpress.com/2...anniversary-comparison-review-and-analysis/6/
All kinds of missing and broken transparencies, replaced assets, lighting and shading is weirdly calibrated, choppy transitions to and from cutscenes, terrible cutscene framing, original audio not available, hideous HUD.
Perhaps my evaluation was a bit harsh but a lot of the things I don't like about it could have been avoided if someone checked in on it more often or allowed a little more budget.
I wouldn't fix the issues of direction, but CEA wasn't released in a particularly finished state. More time would have helped.
You can see all kinds of things in CEA which are at different stages in development. A good place to compare is the 3 different chasms on AotCR. Or, for something that directly caught everyone's eyes, consider the cutscene animations; development was cut short when they were trying to meld hand-animation fixes with their mocap results, which is why cutscenes characters are sometimes horribly choppy and sometimes ridiculously overacted.