1. Halo: Combat Evolved is a groundbreaking game from the early 2000s, primarily loved for its multiplayer experience. I'm reviewing its single player campaign in 2019. I can't explain how my life got to this point.
2. You can actually still play multiplayer if you really want. You need to either play couch co-op, which requires friends you don't have and a couch, or you can play online which requires a complex process to simulate a local area network over the internet and friends you don't have.
3. It's the single player campaign of a multi-player focused game so we're not talking Bioshock in terms of environmental storytelling but the combat mechanics are exceptional and it's extremely important historically so definitely worth a run through.
4. You play as a space marine in a special suit of armor that makes you kick ass real good. You have an AI companion named Cortana who now wants to use all your PC's idle processor cycles to send personal information about your family to Microsoft.
5. Your enemies are an alliance consisting of every non-human sentient species that you see in game. No human is on their side and not one of them sides w/ the humans. People suck, I guess.
6. Combat is a high point, it being what has evolved after all. The specific smoothness of how you move in Halo makes it feel like a thoroughly modern shooter. This said, the original Xbox controller has only one set of shoulder
buttons and so some controls are mapped in weird spots. I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to aim down
sites and accidentally threw a grenade.
7. The middle of Halo drags
a lot. It starts to feel like every time you fight your way through
a string of similar looking metal tunnels, enemies are
going to respawn and you will have to fight your way right back out of
that string of similar looking metal tunnels.
8. About two thirds of the way through though, a wrinkle in the story appears that amps up the tense atmosphere and pulls you through the rest of the game. W/ this wrinkle, you run into enemy types that use the same weapons as you do. You can always pick up the alien weapons in the game but the
only place you ever find ammunition for the human weapons is at crash
sites or whatever pre-set area the developers chose to have that
ammunition in. Having enemies show up all of sudden where you start
feeling like you no longer have to preserve ammunition for your favorite
gun mixes up the gameplay nicely at a critical juncture.
9. Changing the difficulty improves enemy AI in addition to changing how tough they are, which is awesome, but I found myself
wishing for some more granular difficulty settings. I got kinda sick of
some of the bullet-spongey enemies at higher levels but didn't
necessarily want to make them less aggressive and more stupid to lower
their HP.
10. It is possible to auto-save yourself into a really bad situation. You can get stuck w/ low HP and low ammo and if you're stuck, you're stuck. You can't drop the difficulty temporarily to get out of a pickle so you have to restart the level unless you can find a way to cheese yourself out of your conundrum.
11. And, yeah, cheesing the AI is 101-level science in this game. Even on higher difficulties, it can be pretty easy to attract attention then run away to string enemies out and pick them off a few at a time. In fairness, doing this is sometimes how I got myself auto-saved into really bad situations.
12. The theme to Halo is an iconic piece of music but most of the in-game soundtrack is forgettable. Great sound design mostly makes up for this. Directional sound worked beautifully through stereo speakers and some of the enemy yelps are pretty much hilarious.
13. Playing through Halo for the first time now is hardly the ideal way to experience it but I suppose that and memories is what we are stuck w/. If it came out today, I'd tell you the story is decent, the controls are great, the combat is varied enough that it's only boring sometimes and it looks like an original Xbox game. After playing through the story once, I think this is destined to remain on my shelf for all eternity or until I make friends, whichever comes first.
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