Rating: 
Summary: Master Chief at his finest!
Review: If you are a fan of the game you're going to love this book. You'll get a lot of behind the scenes information.
Rating: 
Summary: Really Bad Book
Review: I was excited to read The Flood because I really enjoyed the Fall of Reach (the first Halo book) and was looking forward to a new installment in the Master Chief's adventures. The great thing about the Fall of Reach was the creative license taken by that author to create a new universe and to explain the origins of the Master Chief as well as the war with the Covenant. Unfortunately, The Flood is more of a walk-through of Halo, the video game, then a good story. In my opinion, the author abandoned artistic license in his attempt to reproduce a level by level description of the game. At many points while reading the book I found myself wondering if the author wrote the story based on notes he took while watching someone play the video game.The story-line in the book suffers from several major defects, including, but not limited to: (1) stilted adherence to the many missions and sub-missions found in the video game, including the necessity in many cases that each wave be separated by a door which the Chief must open, (2) the inclusion of automated non-player dialog found in the video game, (3) repetitious battle scenes between the Chief and the unending waves of enemies attacking the Master Chief (even the author starts describing these as "all too familiar"), (4) repetitious descriptions of weapon selection (switching from shotgun to rifle and back again) and reloading, (5) the Master Chief's unexplained inability to carry more than two weapons at time, even for short distances (even though the armor provides him with enough strength to flip over a jeep laying on its side), and (6) the ever present availability of reloads and replacement weapons. These aspects may make for great game play, but they make for a lousy book. A better story would have been one which follows the essential elements of the game's story line but which provided a more detailed account of the actions taken by the Master Chief, the Marines and the Covenant. When a movie is made into a video game, the video game must make certain sacrifices from the original story so as to improve game play. The opposite is also true: an action oriented video-game does not contain the level of character development necessary to support a written story line. In the case of The Flood, the author should have eliminated most of the game-play scenes (which provide minimal detail and maximum action) and created a more detail oriented story with better story and character development. I would recommend another of the author's books "Legion of the Damned" as a good example (think: The French Foreign Legion in space). Do we really need chapter after chapter of the Master Chief shooting up wave after wave of the Flood, then Covenant, then Protectors, then all three combined? Much of this could have been eliminated in favor of a few strong chapters of story development. The story is so stilted in remaining loyal to the game that an observant reader can almost detect where level changes and cut scenes would have occurred in the video game. I strongly recommend against this buying The Flood and I do not consider it to be a true sequel to the Fall of Reach. Play the game instead, you'll get the same exact story either way. Buyer beware.
Rating:
Summary: For Halo Adicts Only.
Review: Love the game. The Fall of Reach was actually pretty good considering it was a game tie in. The Flood is terrible as a literary work. It reads more like a synopsis of someone playing the game than an actual book. William C. Dietz continues to prove he is a second rate author which is why is sticking to mostly franchise novels. Go read David Weber and John Ringo for some good military SF. This book is only for those addicted to Halo even then you can't be too picky about your storylines.
Rating: 
Summary: Halo: The Flood
Review: I thought the overall rating of the book is four out of five. The book didn't seem as great as the game. Eric Nylund did a better job with the first book than William Dietz with this one. The book would have just been as good as the first one if Eric Nylund wrote this one. It seemed as though you were going through the first book on a hard setting. Then in this book it seemed like it was on an easy setting. The author didn't go through each part of the game. Instead he just wrote "and the Master Chief battled his way through the rest of the maze like corridors until he reached his destination" or "the battle took a full two minutes". In the game it takes longer than just two minutes to get through a corridor from my first hand experience. The Master Chief's battle armor has a shield around it so that he is better protected than anyone else since he is carrying the ships A.I. construct. When he was finding a way to get off the Pillar of Autumn, a group of grunts jumped on top of him and trying to take off his helmet. Hold on here! First the Chief's shields hadn't been damaged so he wasn't unprotected from them, and second if his shields were up how come the grunts wouldn't just slide right off him? I think the author did a very poor job of contrasting things from last book to this one. Well that is all I have to say. HALO rocks!
Rating: 
Summary: A letdown
Review: William C. Deitz is undoubtedly a fine author, and I don't mean to say that he isn't when I say that this book simply isnt all that great. The book is basically a scene for scene translation of the game played on an easy skill level. There is plenty of bloody violence, but there is so much that it is not described in detail and basically leaves it all to the imagination. While the Fall of Reach was harrowing, this gets tedious. Unless you have played the game, you arent going to have the first clue what any of the environments are like, as Deitz only gives cursory details to the rooms, and forget about sustaining a mood, such as the one conveyed through music and lighting in the levels 343 GUILTY SPARK and LIBRARY. Deitz should have opened his mind not stuck so rigidly to the idea that he must write the book exactly as if playing the game. Less encounters could have yielded more detailed ones, and perhaps lent some room to pay more attention to the vastness of the some of the environments, and the queasy tension provided in some of it. The Mater Chief loses whatever personality he had in Fall Of Reach and simply becomes and walking gun that occasionally talks to Cortona. The descriptions of the human survivors and Captain Keyes are far more satifying in the human department. The "human" touch also comes through in the descriptions of the grunt named Yayap and his leader Zamamee (or something) on their quest to stop the Master Chief. However, this is still Halo. FALL OF REACH may have been great, but this is what we have REALLY been waiting for; the OFFICIAL tie in to the game that is truly as awesome, and familiarity with the game will propel the reader through many of the book's tedious sections. A missed opportunity, but one that is forgivable simply by the nature of the source material: HALO!
Rating:
Summary: Really expands upon the gaming experience
Review: This should be actually *** 1/2 stars... I've been up all night reading "Halo: The Flood." Of course, I have a graveyard job with about 7 hours of uninterrupted reading time. Even so, this book is an interesting addition to the prequel, "The Fall of Reach." As a novelization of the videogame, there are creative and narrative limitations that Dietz had to deal with. There is a lot of shooting and a good deal of repetition. It should be noted that Nylund had much more free reign to craft a novel, since his book was all-original. Still, "The Flood" gives us an expanded look into the events of the (inter)stellar game, with some new glimpses into "new" battles we weren't aware of before. We are treated to many more exchanges than the in-game dialogue and cut-scenes allowed, and even get to see from the covenant's point of view. This proves hilarious when it comes to Yayap, a conniving Grunt, and his wily exploits. The book is worth reading for this alone. But it also fleshes out the supporting cast of Marines, and Cortana has her day in the sun. I also appreciated the few references to Nylund's book, which add continuity. If you have never played Halo, I can't recommend this as a stand-alone, but with the prequel thrown in, you should be able to track in pretty well. Long live the Master Chief!
Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: a real breathtaker! i thought the first one was good! absolutly perfect! some people may not agree, but i am a halo freak! anything with halo in it is good! the first game is great, but the second game will be ... better. ....
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Rating:
Summary: awesome book from an awesome game
Review: If you like the game Halo, then you'll surely love the book. It is the same story with a lot, if not all, of the game's dialogue in the book. But that is not all of the dialogue for it goes much deeper; in fact, you even get to see the action play out from the Covenant perspective, and, yes, even a flood perspective. These different views allow you to get a much broader grasp of the overall operations including what the soldiers are doing without the Master Chief, the Xbox game's main character. Speaking of the Master Chief, you get a lot more insight into his character and the history of the SPARTANS of which he is one. For those of you who know the game, be prepared to see it in a well told new light, for those of you who don't, you need to buy this good quick sci-fi action book for the story alone.
Rating: 
Summary: Okay, not nearly as good as The Fall of Reach
Review: This book is an acceptable action romp, with plenty of action and gore and etc. However, it suffers from two major flaws. Both can be overlooked, but this book isn't going to be winning any awards. First, the author just isn't that good. The Coventant aren't very convincing, and the marines hollow stereotypes. The description of the actions scenes is passable, but all two often degrades into "Master Chief shot so and so, then turned and shot so and so." Hardly what we want when we can just play the game and get the same effect. Which leads me to the books second major flaw: it's basically the game translated into book form. The parts with the marines are interesting, and fill in some of the background material the game was missing, but the parts with the Master Chief (comprising probably 70% of the book) are scene by scene adaptations of the game, with very little new. The final word? For the average reader, not worth the time. For Halo fans, buy it used.
Rating:
Summary: It's ok....
Review: It's not as good as the first one. They make everyone seem dumber and Master Chief a lot weaker and reckless, like jumping straight in with [firearms]blazing. He doesn't seem to careful like in the Fall Of Reach. The author keeps on confusing the gender of some of the characters, but if you ignore that little problem the book it alright.
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