.png/revision/latest?cb=20140621133517)
Here's something I never thought I'd ever say in my life: I played Halo: Combat Evolved.
Normally, this is where I'd input some expository information on the Halo franchise—but of course, Halo is a franchise that needs no introduction. In 2001, a little developer known as Bungie made a science fiction-themed FPS game for the Xbox that just happened to become one of the most panegyrized video games of all time. It served as a major forerunner for almost all future FPS games on the market during that period, and the series has since become a juggernaut, with the first installment being considered by many to be an important benchmark for gaming.
High praise in particular has been given to its competitive multiplayer, which, for a long while, was considered a new gold standard for multiplayer combat, surpassing in quality the likes of GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64. The single-player campaign has also been praised for its compelling story and nonstop, action-packed gameplay. It’s because of these qualities that this game is often touted as one of the best in its genre, and still stands the test of time in 2015.
At least, that’s the general consensus.
I, personally, over the last fourteen years, have never been a fan.
I have something of a rocky history with his franchise. When it first came out, I absolutely hated it. I thought the very concept was stupid—shooting other people to death in the first person? Why would anybody want to play that? I felt like the game was trying too hard to be realistic, with its graphics and its physics engine, and ultimately, it just wasn’t at all fun to play. To my dismay, however, Halo: CE was one of the only games my friends were willing to play during that time, so I had no real choice but to play it with them. As a result, it tainted my perception of the FPS genre forever. Or at least, for the next fourteen years.
After finishing Half-Life 2, however, I learned that it’s actually very possible for FPS games to have the same level of depth and entertainment value that a lot of my favorite games have. Since I had never actually played Halo outside of its multiplayer, I thought perhaps if I played its campaign from start to finish, I might be pleasantly surprised, as I was with Half-Life 2.
So how’d it go?
1. Weak premiseThe first thing that catches my eye is the game’s unimpressive premise. The basic premise for the entire Halo series is this: In the distant future, humans have finally began colonizing other planets. And then aliens attack.
That’s… pretty much it.
Of course, there’s some details: The aliens in question, known as the Covenant, are a conglomerate of highly advanced and powerful alien species, who also happen to be highly religious. They discover us on the planet Harvest and declare holy war, obliterating the colony in the process. After a few desperate attempts at combating the Covenant attacks, there was a plan to unleash a new brand of super soldier upon them called Spartans. The plan didn’t go over so well, however, as the Spartans were soon discovered on the planet Reach and killed before they could even launch an attack, except for one: The Master Chief (MC).
None of this exposition is ever explained in-game, and it makes sense why: It’s… kinda boring. Instead, the game opts to put you in a position of urgency almost right away. The
Pillar of Autmn, the vessel MC ends up on after Reach got taken over, is stated to have made a “blind jump” across the universe, in a hail-Mary attempt at baiting the Covenant away from the planet Earth. The Covenant takes the bait, and though we’ve successfully lured them away from our precious home planet, they’re now about to attack the vessel. And this is where the game puts you. This lets me know that the game is going to be more action-oriented than story-oriented—which is fine, if the game is actually incredibly entertaining to play, but… I’ll get into that later.
Because of this lame premise, I’m left asking a lot of questions, like why in the fuck do we care about Earth so much? We have all these colonies—a lot of them were destroyed, sure, but why does Earth get special attention? And what did we do to piss the Covenant off, anyway? Because depending on what we did, I may not even feel justified fighting this war! I’ve asked these questions to a number of Halo fans already, and got sufficient answers, but it doesn’t really change the fact that none of them are really explained in the game itself, which kinda sucks, considering that they’re kind of important to the general understanding of the game’s narrative.
2. Weak CharactersAt first, I didn’t think there was enough characters to really comment on, but I figured I would just touch upon everyone I could.
The main characters are MC (you), Cortana (a female holographic AI who serves as MC’s superego), and Captain Keyes, the leader of the entire operation. Supporting characters include the UNSC Marine Corps, who fight alongside you.
Everyone is so bland and bereft of personality, with the exception of maybe Cortana, who has brief glimpses of emotion here and there. MC and Cortana exchange banter here and there, in a weak attempt at convincing us of some sort of friendly relationship. Everyone else is just a hardened stoic robot. The marines are all dispensable and nameless, so when one of them dies, I don’t feel anything, unlike in Half-Life 2, where I actually gave a fuck about the people who were trying to help me.
Apparently, Master Chief is supposed to be some kind of altruist, or something, but they never really touch upon it until the last five seconds of the game, where he seems mildly distressed over the sacrifices he incurred to destroy Halo.
In general, though, I wasn’t impressed. The game lacks any truly likable personalities, or personalities at all.
3. Weak storyThis is where I expect a lot of people to get pissed at me, but I’m sorry—the story in this game is pretty lame. Nothing makes sense—and the game is so manipulatively linear, it makes you forget how dumb the story really is.
The titular “Halo,” the massive ringworld in which most of the game takes place, turns out to be an exceedingly powerful superweapon—the purpose for which is revealed to be the destruction of all sentient life. Now, that may sound terrible, until you realize that the weapon was slated to be used for a rather reasonable cause, at least in my opinion: In the middle of the game, we’re introduced to a group of grotesque parasitic life forms known as the Flood. They inhabit the bodies of other life forms and essentially turn them into incensed, hostile zombies. Due to their numbers, they’re virtually unstoppable, and leaves anyone infected to suffer a horrible death.
The only way to stop the Flood, it is slated, is to deprive them of any hosts to devour or infect—and this is what the Halo ring is designed to do. If everyone’s fucking dead, the Flood dies off, too. I don’t know about anyone else, but that sounds like a pretty damn good idea to me. As soon as you introduce something as destructive and volatile as the Flood into the universe, that’s when you say, “Yeah, I don’t think I really want to be here anymore.” It’s just not worth it.
But of course, the game ignores that—and we’re just supposed to accept that destroying all sentient life is a bad thing, because reasons. Well, no, game—I don’t accept that. Like I said—if the rest of existence is just going to amount to fighting off an unstoppable Flood for the rest of time, what good reason is there to remain existing? I can’t think of one. The universe sounds like a miserable place to be, at that rate.
Even if you disagree with me philosophically here (and I completely understand if you do), you can’t deny that the story is vastly unoriginal. It’s essentially a rip-off of Star Wars, with Halo being the Death Star on steroids. It’s much easier to be against the usage of something like a Death Star—destroying singular planets for no good cause is pure evil, no doubt about it. But Halo, in some bizarre attempt at one-upping the Death Star, tries to up the ante by creating a weapon whose slated purpose is the destruction of
all sentient life in the galaxy.
There’s a fine line between paying homage and straight-up unoriginality, and Halo really toes that line for me. The Star Wars influence drips out of every one of the game’s orifices. Even all the dialogue in this game is super corny, like a Star Wars movie.
Anyway, just like Luke did in A New Hope, Master Chief successfully destroys the
Death Star Halo ring, and says something like, “
I think we’ve only just begun,” implying the existence of other Halo rings to be destroyed, perhaps in the next few sequels. Sigh.
All right, now that I’ve probably pissed off everyone reading this review, let’s try to talk about something I kinda liked for a moment.
4. Gameplay – Good aspectsNow, I didn’t care for it much at first, but it sort of grew on me over time. Emphasis on “sort of”.
For the most part, your weapons are incredibly generic and uninteresting, and the majority of them aren’t very fun to use. You have your standard pistols and assault rifles, your shotguns, your sniper rifles, and your rocket launchers. You also have two types of grenades, which I’ll go into later. Now, since you’re fighting alien species, your enemies are going to be using their own weaponry, which you yourself can use. All of them are plasma-based, and as a result, they tend to be more fun to use, despite still being extremely generic.
Of the tougher enemies you’ll be facing (mostly the Elites), they will come equipped with an energy shield, visible when fired at with any type of weapon. You have these shields, too. The plasma weapons are designed to wear down your enemy’s shields—usually, regular human weapons won’t do as much damage until their shields are down. Therefore, it’s generally advisable to fire at enemies with plasma weapons first, and then shooting them in the head with a well-placed pistol shot.
Even though I don’t care much for the most of the weapons themselves, I find the relationship between the plasma and lead weapons to be pretty interesting. Not to mention, I love how the most of the plasma weapons don’t need to be reloaded—instead, they overheat when you fire them too often. My favorite weapons are the plasma pistol, for its incredibly fast rate of fire and ability to “overcharge” its shot, giving it homing properties as well as instantly destroying shields, and the shotgun, because, well, it’s awesome. Instantly kills at point-blank range, penetrating shields.
Oh, and there’s also two types of grenades: plasma and fragmentation, both of which are pretty fun to use. Plasma grenades will stick to any surface they land on (including your enemies), and fragmentations bounce. However, a really shitty thing about the grenades is that there’s no real way to tell where they are when your enemies use them against you—you can die spontaneously, and it’ll only be because you had no idea where a grenade was tossed. Being stuck by a grenade will always lead to instant death, too, so you always have to be on your toes in tight situations.
The small amount of enemy variety allows you to experiment with many of these weapons in various ways, but it gets old rather quickly. Probably the most fun I’ve had combat-wise is the utilization of the game’s melee technique. If you perform a melee strike when your enemy’s back is turned, you’ll instantly and silently kill them. Fun.
The last thing I really liked about the gameplay in general is towards the end of the game, after the Flood is introduced. We sort of have this warring triangle going on between the humans, the Covenant, and the Flood. The game doesn’t expect you to kill everything in sight—only what’s necessary for you to proceed. Therefore, there are moments where you’ll end up in the middle of a skirmish between the Covenant and the Flood. You can make a variety of choices in these situations—either wait it out and allow one side to kill each other off completely; sneak through the crossfire in an effort to make it to your waypoint undetected, or attempt to fight. That sort of dynamic is actually pretty cool, but like I said—it only ever happens during the final few levels.
5. Gameplay – Bad aspectsDespite its positives, there are aspects of the gameplay that are very flawed and dated. The biggest and most glaring problem I had with the gameplay is simply the gameplay itself: All you do in this game is shoot aliens. That’s literally it.
Not all games have you perform the same boring, monotonous task for hours on end, but this is one of them. Room after room of slaying the same four enemies over and over again with the most generic weapons ever starts becoming a real drag when you stretch it across ten full levels. There are moments where I just had to stop playing because I was just getting so bored—and I never stop playing games due to boredom.
Occasionally, you’ll have the opportunity of doing something different: Hitting a switch to open a door. Which is hilarious—the door could have been wide open, for all intents and purposes, but in order to trick people into thinking the game has a little bit more depth than it has, they have you opening some doors every once in a while. What a joke.
I mentioned the stupidity with the grenades earlier, as they can result in some unfair deaths, but even more unfair is the game’s implementation of
fall damage. Yes—Master Chief is a Spartan super soldier whose bones are harder than fucking steel, but if he falls more than a couple meters down, he’s gonna take quite a bit of damage. He might even die, if you’re lucky. Thankfully, they made it a lot more forgiving in future installments. I distinctly remember playing Halo 2’s multiplayer, falling, and not taking any damage at all, so that’s good.
Finally, the vehicles. There’s only one that I like, and that’s the ghost. Fast, high rate of fire, and I can strafe with it. All the other vehicles either sucked, were cumbersome, or were boring, like the banshee, the scorpion (which is just a tank), and
especially the warthog. The warthog is the biggest piece of shit in the entire game, for its piss-poor control and handling, and the fact that I need someone else to operate its machine gun. The AI sucks ass, by the way.
Overall, I think the negatives tend to outweigh the positives on the gameplay side of things. The sheer monotony of this game made it something of a chore to play through, and though I found a couple of things to entertain myself with along the way, they weren’t quite enough for me.
6. Level designA lot of the game’s boredom is the result of its generally poor level design, especially towards the end.
I’m not normally one to comment on a game’s graphics if they’re not up to snuff, but I have to be honest: the dated 2001 graphics are ugly as sin. The game’s plain, muddy textures are enough to put me to sleep.
There were levels I thought were okay, design-wise. The Silent Cartographer being my personal favorite—I thought the jungle beach atmosphere was quite pleasant and interesting to explore, and I also liked 343 Guilty Spark, for its Endor-inspired swampy forest landscape.
Everything else sucked—especially the last three or four levels, where they basically run out of ideas and simply have you run through a couple of the previous levels all over again—but backwards. Many areas, such as Assault on the Control Room, Two Betrayals, and The Library, all have you entering these similar-looking rooms numerous times,
on top of fighting a bunch of similar enemies, over and over and over again. It’s very easy to go in circles, because all the rooms look the same, and your only leads are the trail of bodies you’ve been leaving. It’s terrible. It’s lazy. And it’s something they’d never get away with today.
7. The soundtrackI wasn’t gonna talk about this, but everyone goes crazy about Marty O’Donnell’s composing. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that it gets better, because there’s really only one piece of music in this entire game that I’d consider good or memorable. Everything else is either “meh” or forgettable, and a lot of times, the music that plays doesn’t even fit together with what I’m doing. There’s this calm, atmospheric track that sometimes plays whenever I’m in a large-scale firefight, and it doesn’t make any sense.
I’ve heard it stated before, too, that Marty innovated something—as you play the game, and music starts playing, the music is supposed to vary in intensity in correspondence to your actions. I didn’t notice any of that. Like, at all. So, either that person lied, or they were talking about Halo 2, or something. But it was a disappointment, nonetheless.
8. The multiplayerFrom a more objective viewpoint than I had when I was little, I have to give the multiplayer some credit in a number of aspects—first of all, the number of unique maps that it provides for you is pretty nice, and I can only imagine how fun it was playing cat and trying to memorize each and every location on every map. My favorite maps are Boarding Action and Hang ‘em High, but I’ll play on any of them just to keep things fresh.
The game types it provides are all pretty fun, too: Slayer, Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Race, and Oddball. Slayer will always be my favorite, just because it’s so standard.
However, the multiplayer is still plagued by a number of things that the single player campaign was plagued by. The weapons still suck, and some weapons are even suckier (my coolest thing about the sniper rifle—night vision—was taken out, likely because you don’t need it, but still). The vehicles are somewhat overpowered—especially the banshee, and everyone knows about how unbalanced the weapons are. The pistol in this game is just unforgivably ridiculous, overcentralizing the gameplay around it entirely.
Overall, I can see the multiplayer game’s merits much more than I have back in the day. I still don’t really enjoy it, just because it simply isn’t my thing, but given you’re facing off against fellow players rather than the game’s AI, it makes the combat a lot more engaging, and even addicting, than in the single player campaign.
Overall, I can't say I'm any more or less of a Halo fan than I was before I played this game.
I was in dire need of something fresh out of this game, and I never got it. Scraps of originality are overshadowed by monoliths of monotony and misguided attempts at extending gameplay. I wasn’t at all intrigued by the game’s story. It failed to convince me that I should be at all concerned about the purpose of Halo, and I can’t say I’m very interested in exploring the game’s lore further to get some more answers.
I don’t expect to make any friends with this review, or convince anyone that I’m right or anything. This is just an expression of
my opinion—that’s it. You don’t have to agree, but if it’s any consolation, I wouldn’t have given this game any higher than a 1/10 back in 2005.
Final score:
5/10And hey... You can't tell me that I never gave it a try.
