Halo: The Master Chief Collection: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary sure is helluva a verbose title isn’t it? All those colons! So! Our first order of business here is to make that word salad a bit more palatable. For the remainder of the review I’m just going to refer to the game by its original working title of Halo: Combat Evolved, or even more succinctly Halo CE. Just know that the version of the game being reviewed here is the one included in The Master Chief Collection which is itself the remastered version from 2011 titled Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Phew!
So yeah! We’re really tackling a legend here, eh? Can you believe that I had never played Halo CE prior to this playthrough!? How can I even claim to be a self-respecting gamer with such a massive blind spot in my repertoire!? Well … in the great sixth-gen console wars of the 2000’s, I fell firmly to the Sony side of the conflict, and there I remained for the most part, over the course of the console generations that followed. So I was absolutely thrilled when The Master Chief Collection released on Steam as it finally allowed me to crack into this legendary series (and with my trusty KB+M to boot!).
There’s one other caveat I should address right up front, and for some it may well invalidate whatever else I have to say about the game. I won’t be touching on the multiplayer aspects of Halo at all. If you’re one of the approximately zero people who reads the blog on a regular basis, this shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise. It basically boils down to the fact that those elements I enjoy most in gaming tend to revolve around single player experiences. Story, worldbuilding, atmosphere, plot, characterization and the like are all important components of what I enjoy about this medium. I place considerably less importance on being pwned by 12-year-old Halo prodigies whose vocabulary seems to consist almost wholly of racial epithets. As much as I hate to say it, gaming serves (among other things) as a form of escapism for me, and that almost certainly encompasses an escape from having to deal with other people if only for a bit. “Gee null, that’s a very roundabout way of saying you don’t have any friends with which to play these games in multiplayer.” And well … yes, fair point really. Maybe someday in the future I’ll find a like-minded gamer buddy and run a retrospective of all the multiplayer components for the games I’ve only reviewed in single player. Don’t hold your breath.
In terms of Halo though, omitting the multiplayer aspect from discussion really is a rather significant oversight, due to the importance and impact the game had within the gamespace of multiplayer FPS. Split-screen, LAN parties, and (on PC and Mac versions of the game) fully online multiplayer were all significant to getting to the full experience of Halo … unless you’re a curmudgeonly old hermit like nullPointer who couldn’t really give a toss about all that. But now that we’ve at least acknowledged those multiplayer elements, let’s dive right into the campaign shall we?
Prior to playing Halo CE, I was laboring under a misapprehension that the story was a simple, generic, barebones, space marine narrative. And at least initially it plays that angle fairly earnestly. Coming fresh off the heels of a devastating attack by the powerful alien forces of the Covenant, the United Nations Space Command vessel Pillar of Autumn is forced to crash land on a mysterious ringworld, with legions of Covenant units in close pursuit. During the crash-landing sequence, the legendary Spartan Master Chief is awakened from suspended animation and entrusted with protecting the ship’s advanced artificial intelligence entity known as Cortana. Taking on the role of Master Chief, once you put your battle-hardened combat boots on the soil the ring world, you’re immediately fighting off hordes of the Covenant, often times alongside your fellow UNSC soldiers. In terms of atmosphere and approach, Halo really strikes a nice balance of military action. It’s not a fully squad-based shooter where you’re bogged down by forced squad tactics, but likewise when present, your squad mates feel capable and effective, serving as more than mere cannon fodder, or worse, as an entry point into escort mission hell. At any rate, the story quickly makes gains in both momentum and depth, much of which revolves around the origins and purpose of the ringworld itself, or as the Covenant refer to it, ‘Halo’. What started as fairly a straight forward riff on concepts analogous to those in Starship Troopers (the original Heinlein novel rather than the subversive (and awesome) Verhoeven film), quickly becomes an amalgamation of further noteworthy influences, including Aliens and The Thing, as well as developing a sense of its own unique mythology. Fairly impressive for a game in which the protagonist remains mute through most of the proceedings!
Memorable set pieces serve to emphasize story points, and of course to ratchet up the tension, but perhaps the greatest of these moments is the introduction of the Flood, a parasitic enemy which invades a sentient host effectively turning them into zombie-like ‘Combat Forms’. Functionally, I suppose these enemies are a bit like the Head Crabs seen two years earlier in Half-Life, but the stage which introduces them truly is a masterful work of sci-fi horror gaming. The smaller Flood parasites are vaguely reminiscent of the face huggers seen in Alien(s) (and the aforementioned Head Crabs), but the infected Combat Form hosts are pure phantasmagorical science fiction body horror, recalling imagery from The Thing among others. The Flood are equally dangerous to both Humans and the Covenant, which sets up some great three-way battles betwixt the various combatants. It all ratchets up to a fantastic climax and hanging denouement which I won’t spoil here. Ultimately Halo CE tells a great action-packed story which I enjoyed from beginning to end.
Underlying the narrative is a rock-solid foundation of presentation and gameplay. Controls are fully remappable, so I was able to map some preferred actions to dedicated mouse buttons, reorganize the key layout just a smidge, and then I was mowing through Covenant forces in no time. The best control schemes are those that you don’t even have to think about, and to that end Halo played like a dream. That being said, I sorely missed ability to run and/or sprint. I’m not sure whether the lack thereof is simply due to the age of the game, or whether it was an intentional design concession. Either way it felt like a glaring omission during intense firefights where the increased mobility would have been a boon. Furthermore I feel like first person games of this era were still sorting out the details of how to best implement platforming sections. Any time I had to execute precision jumping with Master Chief, it never felt quite intuitive or even fully predictable (jumping around on those pistons during The Maw stage was occasionally an exercise in frustration). Thankfully sections like these are fairly scarce, almost as if the level designers themselves realized the platforming sections were a little weak.
The weapons loadout contain quite a variety of both energy-based and projectile weapons. I often found myself relying on found energy weapons recovered from Covenant forces through much of the game, though towards the end the regularly occurring shotgun pick-ups came in clutch when dealing with the flood. Another one of my favorite aspects of the game is that the magnum that you start with is legitimately one of the best weapons in the entire game. It’s nice to see a FPS where your starter weapon is not to be taken for granted as a piddling pea-shooter.
Naturally, we can’t talk about Halo’s gameplay without mentioning the all the wonderful vehicle-based segments peppered throughout. The illustrious Warthog all-terrain vehicle is almost as much the face of Halo as Master Chief himself. And with good reason! The Warthog along with all the other vehicle-based sections are a joy to play. A huge part of this is that Halo wisely opted to have gameplay change to a third person perspective when you take control of a vehicle. Because let’s be brutally honest here, first person driving sections are a giant suckfest with KB+M. Sorry Far Cry, but your first-person driving is terrible, and you should feel bad about that <condescending tsk in Far Cry’s direction>. (Brief tangent mode activated: the primary defense I’ve seen for this mechanic boils down to, “Well, do you drive your IRL car in third-person perspective?” … which is a fair point, I suppose … one that I’ll absolutely concede when they’re able to explain to me how they drive their IRL car with a keyboard and mouse). So the vehicles in Halo are actually a blast to drive and pilot (as opposed to something like Far Cry where I’d much rather just walk everywhere to avoid the chore of driving). The final escape sequence behind the wheel of your trusty Warthog is pure … <chef’s kiss> … gaming excellence.
The last remaining element to talk about is the presentation of the game. And here I have to give special recognition to the Master Chief Collection/Anniversary edition of Halo CE. By default, the game is rendered using the same graphical engine that powers Halo: Reach released in 2010. That being said, to these old gamer’s eyes, the Master Chief Collection looks a lot better than a 2010 title. So I’m inclined to say further graphical improvements were made for the Master Chief release? Let me know if I’m mistaken about that (I certainly could be). That being said, 343 Industries didn’t forget about the retro-gaming purists among us and it always does my heart good to see it. At any time, you can toggle between the upgraded graphics and the original Xbox graphics. For my part, I absorbed all the eye candy available via the modernized graphics, but it was very cool to be able to see how everything looked on the original Xbox at any time (I toggled back and forth quite a bit just to check it all out). The music, while often atmospheric and understated, serves as a nice counterpoint to the action occurring onscreen, swelling appropriately to crescendo as things get more intense.
Looking at the word count on this bad boy, Halo CE may have just become the longest review on the blog! So with that in mind, it’s time to steer this Warthog towards home. With very few qualms, I enjoyed my time with Halo CE quite a lot. I’ll be excited to see what happens next in the series, and what sorts of adventures Master Chief lands himself in moving forward. This is one of those games where it feels completely redundant to say “recommended for FPS enthusiasts”, because if you are an FPS enthusiast, you probably already know this game inside and out. So instead, I’ll recommend Halo CE to anyone whomsoever with an interest in first person shooters. In fact I would say that Halo might even be a good place to start for someone just dipping their toes into the genre. It’s got enough modern elements to stay relevant, but exudes the type of historical perspective that gives perspective into the lineage of the genre. So if any of the above sounds intriguing to you, it’s high time you said hello to Halo.
Final verdict: 9 noob combos out of 10.
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