Halo: Combat Evolved Review

 I think we're just getting started.

Would you still respect me as a human being if I told you that I'd never played Halo before? You wouldn't? Well that's just dandy because that was a lie! I have played Halo, I just never played any of the ones with the big green guy on the front. On my 360 I owned and completed 'Halo: Reach', and even dabbled in the mutliplayer a bit and around a friend's house I played a little of ODST, but not enough to be able to recount a single plot point or level. That was my whole Halo world, which is actually somewhat fitting as it means my very first full Halo game was the literal prequel. Still with the recent drop of 'Halo: Infinite' and it's cautiously optimistic reviews, I thought it was high time I caught myself up on one of the biggest video game franchises of all time so that I can maybe see where my place in the immense Stadium of Fandom is. Will I be in the stands amidst the bevy of power armour wearing, mouth-frothing fans, or plopped aside in the middle of the deserted parking lot scratching my head wondering what all the fuss was about. Luckily, thanks to the shockingly good deal that is the 'Halo: Master Chief Collection' (not sponsored, obviously) I had just that opportunity, to jump into the entire series lovingly recreated, or in some cases simply upscaled to 60fps, on the PC! What a time to be alive.

Firstly I want to express how surprised I was to realise that Reach, the only Halo game I had knowledge of before this one, was literally a direct prequel. I mean I knew it was going to be a prequel months before that game came out, that was part of the reason why I was drawn to it. (No decades worth of lore to come to grips with) But I didn't know that the events of Reach were just a few minutes before Halo CE- this is like Rouge One levels of cutting the narrative close, I like it. And beside from that I should probably let any purist out there know that I was well aware of the emulator running underneath the pretty remastered graphics, and thus did switch over to look at the original rendering at least once or twice a level. I'm not going to lie- this remaster was like a magic spell swept over the old game to renew it, the difference is insane. A lot of the changes are obviously made to shift the aesthetic of things. like Covenant ships and enemies. closer to how they'd appear later in the series, but they went above and beyond to spruce this game's every facet up. The level '343 Guilty Spark' alone was mindboggling every time I hit TAB and stepped into a totally other decade of game. (Oh, and no that doesn't mean I played on keyboard like a heathen. I have a controller, I know how Halo is played.)

Gameplay

I'll start with perhaps the most important nugget of infomation in this; the raw gameplay and my reaction to coming across the action in a nearly 21 year old game. I've actually traced a lot of series' back to their routes and I think the raw gameplay is a very interesting element of it, as it stands as a case study for the general genre around the game and how well it and the industry has evolved against how strong that original premise was. Games like Hitman framed grand concepts limited greatly by their time and resources, to the point where it's pretty much a chore to play through that first title in this, to be, classic franchise. Splinter Cell was solid in it's gameplay, even in the first go around, although you can see the ways the formula needed to evolve and shift as software grew grander. And Baldur's Gate seems technologically basic by today's standards, but even 20 years later we have scores of CRPG fans, in this new revival-age for the subgenre, tripping over themselves in order to relieve the experience that original gameplay facilitated. So how does Halo Combat Evolved stack up against it's future selves?

Halo has always had this very floaty approach to combat wherein characters almost felt like they were moving on the moon for how jumping and falling worked, as well an innate lack of grounded-weapon interaction which would later become an industry stable, such as the enduring inability to aim down any form of iron sights. Now it's etched into the soul of the series so intrinsically that any slight attempt to modernise is met with pure emotional breakdowns from the series' fans; you'd have thought their parents were going through a second divorce for how insane people acted when the series added the ability to sprint. (Yeah, even basic QOL features are apparently tantrum-worthy) And the effect of this is that the raw gameplay of what it feels like to play Halo is surprisingly stagnant even amidst the usually slow-changing genre of FPS'. I experienced this myself when I first downloaded the Master Chief collection, then realised that you have to download each game independently, (Thanks for not telegraphing that anywhere, 343) and killed the download time by playing the one game which installs with the base pack, which just so happened to be Reach. By the time CE downloaded and I switched to that, aside from some very clear graphical downgrades (and the absence of my beloved DMR) it almost felt like the exact same experience.

Which is to say that 'Halo: Combat Evolved' plays great. Even from the beginning of Halo's franchise there appears to be this level of pace and action which seems a magnitude of degrees more lively than even some of it's greatest competition. Medal of Honor had it's exciting moments but was overall a much slower experience, Call of Duty was a totally different game in it's inception, and only DOOM boasted a greater action-excitement balance for the time. Now of course bear in mind that the Anniversary Edition of Halo CE comes with a bevy of graphical improvements as well as under-the-hood tweaks (such as making the crosshairs in the middle of the screen instead of slightly below the middle) and I'd imagine a bit of AI packaging to round things out. (Though that last bit is an assumption, maybe the first game did play exactly like this version does.) But disregarding all of that, the experience I had playing 'Halo: Combat Evolved', with the perfect flow of switching weapons, melee attacking, near-rhythmic attack telegraphing and absolute hoards of aliens to blast through indiscriminately; was so much fun. Shooting feels as good as it can without iron sights even though I sorely missed the non-existent DMR. The sensible gun bloom, basic recoil and snap gun switching helped propagate the feeling of being this one-man-army with full control over a powerful arsenal, which is great because with the sheer amount of enemies this game throws at you- the gunplay needs to feel great. (I can definitely see the First Person aptitude that would grow into Destiny's mastery many years later)

Narrative

When it comes to telling the story of Halo, it was here that I was the most nervous for the game, because with all the countless books and extended universe lore bits that have flooded the market since this initial entry, the Halo beast is almost too unfriendly for anyone who wants to jump into it. I was curious if starting from the beginning would give me an in-road to the wider universe, even if I was admittedly coming in with perhaps a bit more knowledge than your typical novice. I knew roughly what the Covenant was- an empire of conquered species fighting under a banner, presumably a religious one, in a manner not unlike XCom's Advent. I'd also heard little snippets here about something called 'The Flood', but I had no idea it was going to turn out be a (spoilers) zombie plague right out of Wolfenstein: Old Blood. That was an about turn to my first person cyborg shooting simulator. (Also, I didn't know Master Chief is a Cyborg. I just thought he was just genetically modified to be grotesquely tall and strong or something.) But putting aside that which I know because of my time with the offshoots from the franchise, how does the narrative fair?

They explained so little. Halo operates by this storytelling technique where you frame the key aspects of your world in the moment as they relate to the situation with very little metacommentary or subtle exposition to clue-in the audience. Maybe there's a subtle unsolicited extrapolation here or there, an extra word slipped in the chat to throw the audience a bone, but aside from that Bungie pretty much just launched off on their adventure and expected you to hold on. From one perspective that shows a lot of respect and trust in your audience to keep track of things by themselves, but also makes it very likely that newcomers won't feel the intended impact from moments like the Covenant's bearing down on the Pillar of Autumn, or Cortana exclaiming how Halo must have been constructed by the Forerunners. Seriously, outside of a secret cutscene I might have missed here or there, the word 'Forerunners' is said perhaps once in the entire game (I think, at least; I might have even imagined it, the reference was so quick) and absolutely no effort is dedicated to explaining what that even means. Sure, I know- it's same deal as the Protheans from Mass Effect- but I only know that because I had a Halo fanatic friend in School. How the hell is a layman supposed to keep up with that?

As for the raw story itself? It's your fairly standard Sci-fi action romp with various snatched references from older legends, a little bit of zombies and a significant pick-up in the story for the second half. I think it's the actual visual designs of Halo which stand out best, perhaps even more so than the narrative, in order to give this world it's staying power. The timeless sleek-but-tactically-powerful build of Master Chief's armour alongside the array of instantly identifiable weapons and vehicles. The Covenant would all undergo significant redesigns in the years to come, but the Human forces seemed to strike gold right off the map, and when it comes to Sci-fi- having an identifiable visual brand is 70% of the work done right there. As for the wider universe story about an apparent galaxy-wide war between the Covenant and Humanity which may-or-may-not be a fresh conflict... it's totally serviceable. Nothing to write home about. I just spent the whole time wondering how it was that Humanity could be aware of what the Covenant are, and presumably have that be true back, only somehow keeping the 'secret' of Earth's location safe from these aliens. How do you hide your species' entire homeplanet? Why would you even do that? How bad did first contact go if right off the bat the humans went "You know what, let's scrub the home address off all our tools and equipment- I don't trust these guys."

In the start the story just follows a Human military ship, The Pillar of Autumn (which looks like it may have borrowed some design elements from the Nostromo) being shot out of the sky by a Covenant attack ship and crash-landing into an impending Larry Niven lawsuit. I mean Halo. Halo is a ring floating through space that has an entire artificial world on the inside of it- essentially a cross section of the "Ringworld" concept from Niven's eponymous series. Bungie did tweak the presentation a little, but the influence is clear, and the mystery of discovering what Halo is about was intriguing. (Even if my aforementioned Halo freak friend had spoiled that little mystery for me several years prior.) Just visually, looking up and seeing the curve of the Halo ring surrounded by endless space on either side is true Sci-fi geekdom, and though I'm sure there's going to be at least one game in the series where we never even so much as glimpse a ring, (I don't remember seeing one in Reach) there's no question why that concept alone deserved the title slot for this entire series. The Halo ring is a cool concept, and one that still hasn't gotten old or squeezed dry in the years since.

Midway through the story, Bungie decided that their 'struggle against the Covenant in order to get off this strange world' narrative wasn't quite living up to the massive Sci-fi potential that the Halo ring setting teased, and rather abruptly shifted to a grander tale of progenitor races, ancient plagues and plots to literally wipe out all life in the galaxy. It's all a tad cliché basic bones- but with these writers absolute aversion to comprehensive exposition of any kind, a straightforward core narrative is much appreciated. As with some game stories written around this time, the second half of the story almost feel entirely separate from the first half, and not because of naturally evolving circumstance but almost due to what amounts to a sudden heel turn. I'm actually something of a fan of this style of narrative structure, as it keep things hard to pin down and the audience always guessing, but some strange hypocrite in me just feels the puzzle pieces misalign ever so slightly. Having circumstance drastically shift is done right, having the stakes scale dramatically is done right, I just think there could have a been a bit more telegraphing done in the first half (Which seems to be my prevailing note for the whole story) to tease at something grander in the second half, so that I'd been more invested in the idea of something bigger brewing up.

Characters

Master Chief is a near impossibly iconic video game mascot character, right up there next to Mario, Sonic and Gordon Freeman. Such that it's a little strange not to hear everyone tremble from his very presence in this initial entry, although he is signalled out as apparently the only Spartan on this entire war ship. (Oh right, the rest of the Spartans from this expedition are rotting on Reach, huh...) You can tell that this is a character who isn't currently nailed down by the team, in that he has tiny slivers of sarcasm to him, several amphorae full of tough stoicism and a gorgeous voice that just gets better as the series does, but it's all a little surface level. As an old school video game protagonist, I wasn't really expecting this narrative to break off into an indepth character dive exploring the Chief's emotions, I don't think this is a series that'll ever have the space for something like that; but I never felt even the team had a bible for who this man is and how he acts. Also, I couldn't tell if Chief was being Hero worshipped inside of the Halo universe right off the bat or if that grew later with the series. (I hope it grows, it think that would work better.) Still, I liked him.

Cortana was the character I was most interested in, as from the little snippets I've heard over the years it would seem that she has the most sweeping arc that anyone from this franchise could expect. Also, there's the strange connection she's due to make with the Chief and the fans of the series as one character the team couldn't help but bring back time and time again. And in that light, I'm actually a little surprised at how much I didn't gel with her. From the slightly awkward way she implies she could literally manually pilot you if she wanted to when you first insert her AI chip into your suit, to the many instances where she doesn't tell you something she knows for literally no reason whatsoever. Cortana was just plain annoying. I know that her playfulness is supposed to come off as endearing, and maybe in later games with better writing it will, but in this first game I was pleased for the peace when she disappeared from the story for a bit. I think, and I always hate saying this, but the performance might have been what killed it for me, because her actress had this smug-sounding know-it-all slant to almost every line that I think was supposed to be hinted at in the script, but not imbued into every sentence! In one moment we watch a character I actually cared a bit more about, Foehammer, get blasted out the sky (Yeah, all she does is ferry you in and out of missions and I liked Foehammer more than Cortana. Wrap your head around that!) and Cortana's response feels along the lines of "Whelp, guess we need a new way off this ship." Our friend just died, Cortana- have a little class! (Also, Anniversary Edition did practically nothing to update her model for some reason- they left our little naked blue girl looking all awkward.)

And finally then there's 343 Guilty Spark, arguably the main villain of this little story... whom I really liked. Guilty Spark is something that the team knew exactly what they wanted to do with- make this neurotic logic-dictated AI with a quirky empathy-free curiousness about the world around him. And his actor pulled it off flawlessly. His little quips and funny observations proved amusing, and his utterly sincere and unapologetic insistence that wiping out all life in the galaxy is a totally reasonable course of action rings with pitch-perfect matter-of-fact authenticity. I believe that he believes that, and I found his every diatribe and morbid remark endlessly entertaining. If only we had his personality in our head instead of miss-snarks-a-lot, maybe then I'd actually play with the headphones on a bit more. None of the supporting cast really stood out too much, but none of them were total lifeless planks of wood either. For example, Captain Keyes was stereotypical for one in his position, but someone you want to like nonetheless. 

Level Design

As one of the few genres in the world left that still uses normal mission structures ('Infinite' notwithstanding) the actual design of each level and how balance is handled is important. To which I will say that visually this game goes to a lot of cool and interesting places, locations that are improved tremendously by the Anniversary Edition update. You have green plains that become strewn with battle, purple Covenant warship halls, dense dark jungle levels, a sweeping desert backdrop scene, underground geometric machine tunnels and a couple of frozen tundra escapades. Bungie did not beat about the bush- you go to each of the four major climates in this game and some other places besides- the team really wanted to take their players on an adventure. (And you know how much I love doing that!) Anniversary Edition did, from the few comparisons I made, spruce up the more vibrant elements to stand out more, (giving the Covenant warship a lot of the colour it was missing) but in doing so seemed to rob almost every level of it's darkness. I don't mean thematically either- there's hardly a single darkened hallway (except the pitch black ones) in the entire remaster and they don't play around with slight sources nearly as much as the original did. But then I guess that's because the original game wanted to show of the power of it's hardware, and there's no real incentive for that nowadays unless this was going to be a full Bluepoint remake situation- and it most certainly is not.

The levels themselves are sprawling, but designed well enough that most of the time you know roughly where you should be heading without a map marker. Some missions feel more vast then the team actually knew what to do with, such as 'The Silent Cartographer', which literally gives you an entire island to just explore and plumb the depths of with hardly any restrictions beyond those enforced for progression purposes. It's an old but beloved approach to level design that speaks to the amount of effort each location took to bring it to life, and shows you why heavily linear FPS games don't get as much replay value as what games like Halo conjure up. Linear but broad, would be the best way I would describe this design philosophy, and watching that grow up into a full open world, with Infinite, is a real butterfly out of the cocoon moment. There's all the good things I have to say about the level design. And there are still two paragraphs to go.

Now you see, not every level can boast a wide open space you're just given to explore- for varieties sake (as well as for the pacing of the story) sometimes you need to have more constrained and straightforward assaults down corridors. That makes sense. Halo CE even sometimes has you backtrack across a mission, although always with new enemies set-ups and twists which keep things interesting. But somewhere along the way I think the team fell under the impression that the amount of effort they put into those more sprawling levels needed to be matched exactly by the effort put into the corridor levels, in a very arbitrary mindset. But how do you work on a corridor as long as an entire island? By stretching it out, of course. On and on and on and on. The same corridors joined by the same connector rooms and separated with the same elevator sequences- oh, and dripping with enemies. It's only perhaps a third of the game's missions that suffer from this- but they suffer badly. 'The Library' and the on-foot section of 'Assault on the Control Room' (I think) in particular had me thinking I was going insane for the amount of times I was seeing the same halls. Several times I sat up and literally asked myself "Is this ever going to end? Did I die whilst playing Halo and accidently slipped into a game-playing purgatory? I don't even know if I'm progressing anymore!". "The Maw" and "Keyes", as finale missions do, I suppose, hit me with such enemy spam my trigger finger was threatening to start cramping, it was a lot.

Also, I sarcastically respect the decision to have the final boss of the game be the, and I'm going to commit the sin out loud with no reservations, godawful Warthog controls. Driving that oversized dune buggy through a fun-house crash course was an almost impressively meta last challenge from the team. The whole 'move by pushing the left sick forward, adjust direction with the looking stick' setup is so ass-backwards it's almost comical, and the Halo communities phobia of all things new means that I'm going to have to get very used to this as I play through the series. Lucky me. Thank god, at least, for Anniversary Edition Checkpoint system which was generous without being trivialising, except for in this Warthog hellhole finale, in which the only Checkpoint was the beginning of the six minute slog. Yes, I fell down the hole at the end. Yes that almost made me want to turn off the game.

Summary

'Halo: Combat Evolved' is an impressively well aged shooter that sports it's Anniversary Edition makeover with effortless ease. Many games series don't quite necessitate or justify going back to their bitter routes in order to experience the whole story (even if I typically do exactly that anyway because I'm a masochist) but Halo CE in 'The Master Chief Collection' manages to feel almost as good to play as it's more modern counterparts do, and provided you can live with two or three endless corridor levels and a nigh-on troll of a finale, there is a lot of fun to be had from this little title. The grand Halo narrative might only be decent and some of the characters feature that patchiness emblematic of 2001 games, but for a near twenty one year old shooter I enjoyed the raw gameplay much more than I optimistically hoped to. As someone who loves their stories, however, and who suffered a near existential crisis duelling through the never-ending halls of 'The Library', I'm going to give 'Halo: Combat Evolved' Anniversary Edition a -B Grade. There's a lot to love about this title, although I know from experience that there's little here you can get that the later games don't pull off, and with better all-round narratives and level design. If you want to play this anyway just to experience the birth of Halo, I'd recommend playing with a friend so that the late game repetition doesn't drive you utterly mad. That review dragged a lot more emotion out of me than I expected, but my journey with the Halo franchise isn't done yet, oh no. In fact, "I think we're just getting started." Cute, how Master Chief says that at the end. It's Bungie showing how confident they were that they'd get a sequel. Like calling your game 'Dragon Age: Origins'. Origin to what? The series and nothing else. >Commence golf clap<.