Halo: Combat Evolved

DESTROYING A RING (2010-09-05) : 2/5
Ok, so I'm a little late to the Halo party. I mean, after all, the game I am about to review is 9 years old and was one of the original Xbox launch titles. But I'll tell you what happened. Way back in the day when I was just a brussel sprout of a lad I had an Atari 2600 (or was it the Sears version?). Then I got an NES, then a Sega Genesis when I started college, I think around 1992? But after the Genesis, I sorta drifted away from gaming for over a decade. It wasn't until Christmas 2004 that I bought a PS2. So during the period 1994-2004, I didn't really pay much attention to games. So since the Xbox came out in 2001 along with Halo, I missed the whole phenomenon. That's not to say I wasn't aware of it. My dad bought an Xbox and Halo back in 2001, and I remember playing through its opening sequence, but nothing else. When Halo 3 came out, it made me want to go back to the start of the series, so I began playing this game then. I got about 75% of the game completed and just sorta drifted away from it. Now that Halo Reach is coming out, I wanted to finish it once and for all and played the last 3 hours or so of the game.

First things first is that there's not a lot of story IN the first Halo game. What little backstory you can glean is in the instruction manual, but doesn't really give you a feel for the universe's mythology. I'm currently reading the prequel novel Halo: The Fall of Reach and would highly recommend reading it before starting this game. Or I guess you could just play Halo Reach in about 2 weeks.

In the far future, humanity has mastered interstellar travel and has moved to colonize other worlds and systems. Earth has become unified under the United Nations Space Command (UNSC), which serves as the peacekeeper of all of our far-flung settlements. But things aren't all hunky dory as there are some who want to rebel against its authority, and yep, you still have criminal pirates that raid ships. Some in the UNSC fear that eventually even bigger threats will emerge as humans move ever further from the centralized authority of Earth.

A secret program, called the Spartan-II project, is initiated to breed and train the ultimate super-soldier. If successful, the genetically and bionically enhanced Spartan-IIs will be much stronger, faster, and intelligent than a normal human and serve as the go-to black ops arm of the UNSC. Unfortunately, just as the Spartan-II soldiers complete some of their first missions, a new and unexpected threat arrives on the scene. We have our first alien contact with beings calling themselves "The Covenant". The Covenant has no interest in friendly relations. In fact, their priests have declared all humans an abomination to their god and instigate a holy war to wipe us out. The humans have plenty of ships and weapons to fight the Covenant, but they are mostly ineffective against the energy shields and laser and pulse weapons that the aliens possess. In effect, we are completely outgunned.

A desperate plan is launched to smuggle the Spartan-IIs, led by their commander, Master Chief, onto a Covenant ship and take the war to the Covenant homeworld. Before the mission can be carried out the Spartan-II homebase is invaded by the Covenant and they are all killed, except Master Chief, who is saved by the ship Pillar of Autumn. When the ship comes out of a blind jump into deep space, they encounter a huge ring-shaped artificial world called Halo...and a Covenant space fleet. It is said that the Covenant think that Halo is a powerful weapon and are attempting to figure out how to use it. The UNSC needs to find out if if this is true, but the Pillar suffers severe damage from the Covenant fleet. As the Pillar heads for a crash landing with Halo, Master Chief and the ship's AI, Cortana, enter an escape pod that will take them to the ring's surface.

I have to say I found myself a bit unimpressed by the Halo experience and found myself a bit bored in this first game. Is it just because it's almost a decade old or because it's just not as good as advertised? Probably a bit of both. First of all, I would have liked to have had more story in the game itself instead of having to read a prequel novel to get the full impact of the game. Because of its age, what cutscenes there are really show their age, polygonal and automaton movement glory to the max. From all of the other media that has come out since the game's release, I realize that universe of Halo is very rich and deep, but coming into this game, I get none of that. It just feels like playing any other pointless shooter.

A negative by-product of this game being an Xbox launch release is that the original Xbox became synonymous with First Person Shooters first, while the PS2 offered a more diverse game catalog. And really, I don't see how this game was so "evolved" over earlier FPSs like Doom or Quake. A lot of this had to do with the boring weaponry and enemies. You basically have about 4 types of each. The Spartan's main weapon MA5B assault Rifle was probably my least favorite gun in the game. In fact, spoiled as I am with COD, it felt like a noisy dart gun. I found myself gravitating to the sniper and shotgun most of the time or picking up Covenant plasma weapons over the human assault rifle. If you can't get anything right, at least make your protagonist's main weapon interesting. The levels themselves were quite lacking in imagination as well.

The vehicle controls, especially of the Warthog, the equivalent of a Humvee, were awful, and were especially cumbersome in the latter stages of the game.

One of my pet peeves about videogames is when they have a "fake save system". By that I mean they have an option that says "save and quit", but in actuality if you use it, it only takes you to your last saved checkpoint. What makes this fake is that your last saved checkpoint is where the game will automatically start you anyway. So the game makes you believe you are saving when in actuality you will lose all progress since the last checkpoint. I also felt that Halo suffered a bit because it didn't offer many checkpoints when it came to longer battles where you had a ton of enemies to take down. In fact, a lot of times, I just tried to rush past some of the battles instead of getting involved in them and dying and having to repeat myself. I actually found myself repeating out loud as I played "OMG, this is so frickin boring...so boring....so boring". This happened a lot when I had to repeat whole battles over and over. I finally got through them, or found a way to bypass them, but it was not an enjoyable experience.

Really, I guess in the end I could sum up my thoughts on Halo Combat Evolved as tedious. I did not have fun playing this game. It seemed more like work than a game. I never had a "wow" moment. The lack of story and the lack of variety in the environments, weapons, and enemies all served to make this game a major downer for me. I guess it's worth playing for its historical I didn't think it was a very good game. If you do choose to pick it up, definitely check out The Fall of Reach novel first to give it some context.

great game fast delivery (2010-08-26) : 5/5
better than 2 or 3 order 2 days latter i'm playing it on my 360
Breaking the mold (2010-08-24) : 5/5
Ok, I admit that I refused to play this for a long time due to all the hype about it, especially on live. I regret that now. Halo is one of the best FPS games ever.

I was a little confused & perturbed trying to operate a warthog the first time as the controls can take alotta getting uesd to. But ultimately being able to drive or man one of 2 gunner stations is cool. Adds a bit of reality you don't usually see, most games you drive & man the gun so to speak, whereas if you wanna drive then you have to rely on the marine behind you to shoot whatever he sees fit & it's not always what you might like for him to kill or if you elect to shoot then you have to trust the marine driving not crash you. Though that can be a bit.... tedious as he often rolls the vehicle.

The other thing that kinda annoyed me was the lack of intelligence of your allies, which is remedied in Halo 2 & then 3 & ODST
The game that started it all (2010-08-17) : 5/5
Halo. One of the most popular shooter series of all time. And this is where it started, Halo: Combat Evolved for the XBox. It might not have the cutting edge graphics and combat as if successors and games of today, but this is the OG. Don't hate. Appreciate!
Halo Review (2010-08-06) : 5/5
Classic game. Very fun game, but even better to play with friends in multiplayer/co-op.