Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo's story, in a nutshell, is basically this: humanity is at war with a collection of races known as the Covenant, who are basically religious fanatics and the gods of which have declared humanity unclean and therefore must be exterminated. Naturally, the humans are losing the war so they concoct a plan to engineer super cyborg soldiers to combat Covenant, which they do successfully, but it's a case of too little too late. The last Spartacus II, the Master Chief, a.k.a you, are onboard the human starship Pillar of Autumn, when it engages several Covenant warships while investigating a ring word (I wonder if Niven got any royalties for that.), known as Halo. The ship is damaged and crash lands on the ring, but not before the Master Chief escapes with the Autumn's sexy babe AI core, Cortana. It is soon revealed that the Covenant have discovered that Halo is of course a weapon, but don't quite understand just how powerful it is and what it was originally intended for. Both sides race against time to gain control of the device to use it against the other side.

There is so much in this game that's really darn cool- the overall look and feel of the weapons, characters and vehicles in spot on, as are the exterior vistas and buildings seen through out the experience. Music is top notch, though sometimes it sounds like it came from a cheap Casio keyboard, it is for the most part as good as the main theme. The sound effects lack, especially in how the weapons sound, and especially how the aliens sound- they grunt and roar like cheap cartoon monsters, not the kind of thing you expect to hear from slick looking beasties in colored chrome battle armor wielding plasma guns. Game play is pretty good, though I don't like the fact that you can't double jump, that is jump on to an object then use that momentum to immediately jump again to a higher position. Then there is the vehicles- whether flying or driving, it has to be experienced to be believed, because it's that good. In either the 4WD Warthog or the Ghost hover bike, ground vehicles are a snap to drive and a lot of fun, meaning you concentrate more on the game than figuring out how to steer. The Covenant Banshee, a small attack fighter, is also a cinch to fly, steer and attack with. Plus the enemy AI is superb- Covenant dodge, shoot from cover and attack intelligently.

Now for the bad news. There is no gentle way to say this: Level design sucks. Maybe the bland stainless steel-like interior textures were meant to give everything a high tech look, but there are few elements of contrast and most every wall looks like every other wall. Worse, moving through levels is like a bad case of deja vu- because basically each new room is pretty much like the one you left, the main difference being there aren't any bodies or weapons lying around in the new ones. It appears as though the level designers merely cloned rooms, stuck tunnels between them to link a level together. Further, there aren't a lot of objects in them, either, and everything looks very sterile. There aren't a lot of computer screens, tools, junk or anything else lying around to look it. This doesn't just go for Halo's interiors- the insides of Covenant and human vessels are just as bland, with the same repetitive layout as their counterparts. If places, chambers, rooms, etc. had been decorated with as much care as the ones in Unreal II, I feel it might have made things a little more fun to explore and look at.

What's also weird is that for all the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of space on the ring world, I never saw one example of fauna larger than insects- no animals, no fish, no birds, nothing. It's like the biosphere gave up after trees and bugs. Exterior vistas are quite large, especially in Banshee missions, and as I said, 2-3 years ago, the graphics would have been ground breaking, but even outside the textures seem kind of plain, though still attractive. Other annoyances is the switching of weapons from one mission to the next. There are a couple of instances where the next mission picks up right after the last one ends, but you no longer have the weapons you finished with- and that makes no sense. This is doubly bad since you can only carry two of them at any given time. I find the shotgun and the Covenant plasma rifle to be the best of the lot, though the latter must be discarded once out of ammo in order to find another, because for some reason you can't reload them. And for all the work Gearbox said they did on this game, would it have been too much to ask for to give us real save game options rather than stinky console check points?

My expectations were high and they were only partially met. There is a lot that's good in Halo- story, music, characters, vehicles and voice acting, but the things that are wrong with it are really wrong. It's a good game and it has a lot of elements that I love, but the uninspired level design, bland textures, dated graphics and silly aliens detract a great deal from what had the potential to be one of the greatest games ever made.


Team killers and absent features ruin the online experience   October 10, 2003
Michael Fehlauer (Seattle, Endor)
88 out of 174 found this review helpful

Halo is a fun game, no doubt. The graphics are pretty, the gameplay is challenging, and the storyline is fantastic. Everyone knows the single-player game is phenomenal; the single-player game in this PC version is identical to the Xbox version.

What this PC version adds to the Halo experience is true online multiplayer. And it's terrible.

Oh, the new weapons (flamethrower, fuel rod cannon) and vehicles (Banshee, various Warthogs) are neat. The maps are okay. It's the lame players that drives Halo multiplay into the ground. At the time of this writing multiplayer Halo is filled with dweebs who enjoy nothing more than killing their own teammates while swearing in all caps.

This is not fun.

Worse, cooperative play through the single-player storyline--easily Halo's best feature--is simply absent. Inexplicably, there is no way to play through the game alongside a pal. Other PC games (Serious Sam, Tom Clancy games) have featured cooperative gameplay. Halo PC supports over a dozen simultaneous players. Halo Xbox had cooperative play. So... why is this feature absent? It makes no sense, and it makes the game much less appealing.

Stay away from this game until a patch implements such standard multiplayer controls as Banning, Voting, and auto-kicking for excessive TKs.


Lots of Fun   October 21, 2003
Jim (Milford, OH United States)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful

This is a review of the single player version, so if you are mainly interested in multi-player, you should skip to the next review.... I am actually playing Halo through for the second time, on a higher difficulty level. I played through the first time on Normal difficulty, and was able to complete the game in maybe 30 or 40 hours.

I thought the graphics were great, especially the outdoor scenes. I found myself wandering off from a few fire fights just to take in the view. The first set of enemies you fight, the Covenant, were unique and funny (at least the short ones were). They are pretty smart, and like to sneak up on you, lob grenades at your feet when you're not watching, etc. But the short ones also like to run away screaming in terror from time to time. The difficulty level of the game ramps up evenly as you move forward. Although I had to replay most levels several times to move on, I never had to go to the internet to find the "right" solution, although I was close to doing that a couple of times.

I liked that there weren't a lot of secret areas to find and puzzles to solve. There were a few tricky spots where you had to figure something out, but the solutions were usually obvious even to me, and I'm really bad at puzzles. And the tricky spots fit into the game--I never felt like I was being asked to solve an arbitrary puzzle just because the game designer liked puzzles.

Being able to drive/fly vehicles was a nice addition. I especially enjoyed driving the Warhog and the tank. The controls for those vehicles were intuitive and were pretty much the same as what you use to move around on foot.

I also liked the way player health was handled. Because you have a force shield, you only take damage once the shield is depleted, and the shield regenerates after about 5 seconds if you haven't been hit during that time. I often left behind healing packs because I just didn't need them. I also finished several levels with just one health unit left, thanks to the energy shield.

On the down side, I thought some of the levels were a bit too repetitive, and they didn't flow together quite as seamlessly as Half Life's levels. In a few cases, not being able to save the game at an arbitrary point became *very* painful. Only being able to carry 2 weapons at a time was a definite pain. And the second set of enemies you fight, the Swarm, didn't seem appropriate to the story. They were more like zombies. These issues didn't keep me from enjoying the game, but they did cause me to give it 4 rather than 5 stars.

In general, I feel I got my money's worth from the game.


HALO? Oh Yeah!   June 3, 2003
Spartan7 (Edmond, OK United States)
19 out of 26 found this review helpful

First off, no, I'm not playing an advance copy of the PC conversion of this magnificent game. I've had to settle for the Xbox version with the dual analog sticks, but from what I've seen so far, this game is going to rock like the Andes when it comes to its rightful home.

For those of you who don't know what this game is about -- seriously, where have you been? -- I'll nutshell it for you.

You play as the Master Chief, a new SPARTAN-II cyborg soldier being used by Earth in its war against a myriad of alien races collectively known as the Covenant. Earth is on the losing side, having just lost its major military outpost on Reach, where all the other SPARTANs were wiped out except for the Master Chief. Your ship, the Pillar of Autumn, is attacked by the Covenant fleet as it retreats toward Earth. As the ship crash-lands on a mysterious ring-shaped planet, you have to rally the remaining Marines into fighting the Covenant, and to try to solve the bizarre technology of the artifact ... only to learn that there's something worse than the Covenant here ...

This game is a blast to play. Unlike every other First-Person Shooter, you can only carry a maximum of two weapons and eight grenades, which makes firefights even more tense, and forces you to choose more carefully which weapons you'll take with you.

And then there's the vehicles. So far, I've only used two Marine vehicles, the Scorpion battle tank and the Warthog assault jeep, and one Covenant vehicle, the Ghost hoverbike. But what I've seen so far is incredible. With the Marine vehicles, you can choose either to drive them, with other Marines backing you up, or you can get in the gunner's seat and enjoy some unlimited firepower.

The Covenant is one of the most varied bunches of baddies I've ever seen in a game. They range from "Uh-oh" to "Oh MAN!" to "What are these, Jawas with guns?" Believe me, if you've played it, you'll know what I mean.

So what gives me the right to review this game in the first place? Because I'm sitting here raving over a console game, which is something I NEVER do. I'm a hardcore PC junkie through and through. I also know that Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City are so much better on PC, so based on that, I know this game is going to be dominating my life for at least a few months when it arrives.

Man, September can't come fast enough for me.


Halo is a fantastic game...for 3 years ago   November 5, 2003
Nigalig (Atlanta, GA USA)
19 out of 27 found this review helpful

Let me start off by saying that I think Halo is a pretty good game. Its good qualities far outstrip its bad ones, but, unfortunately, there are too many bad qualities that keep it from truly shining.

Halo starts off with one of the best intros I have ever witnessed in a game (outstripped only by Half-Life, but we'll get to that later). Throughout the game, the story never gets boring, nor does it seem like the same old "whoo hoo, I'm blasting space aliens into oblivion", like so many science fiction games nowdays. The weapons assortment is well balanced, though somewhat skinny. A great part about the weapons system is that you can only carry two guns at a time: this adds a role-playing element to it, because you have to plan ahead for what will most definitely be needed, and what is most effective to take out the enemies that lie ahead of you. The voice acting is also topnotch-all the characters were believable and made me care about them. I was shocked and mortified when I found Captain Keyes was - well, just go find out for yourself.

Now, unfortunately, for the bad news. First, Halo is extremely laggy. Now, I don't have a topnotch computer: for all you ultra turbo computer nerds, like me, I did not know motherboards got as crappy as the one that I have. But I do have a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz, and an nVidia GeForce FX 5200, and EVEN STILL, I have everything to the lowest settings, and it gets laggy with the outdoor environments. It's pretty retarted when you're in the heat of the battle, and suddenly, everything becomes a slide show. Onto the environments themselves. They flat-out suck. When you're inside the metallic rooms, it feels like there are only two or three and you are going through them over and over and over. BBOOOOOOORRIINNGGG! The outdoor environments are infinitely better, but still lack some ambient life (read: moving things that you don't have to kill). The graphics are pretty much outdated by today's standard, although they are nice. It seems like Gearbox (the developer) could have updated the graphics fairly painlessly, but, instead, we're left with mediocre graphics that could have bashed the competition to a bloody pulp three years ago. But, alas, we are stuck with the graphics we had on the XBox. And, finally, the enemies. They are great, except for the "grunts", which are pathetic little children-like things, which scream and run away in terror if you kill more than half of their compadres; which sleep on the job, so you can literally sneak around and bash each of them upside the head (the battle is won, no shots have been fired); and are just all around pathetically weak. The grunt, i think, should have been more of a challenge.

And now to the truly depressing part. There is no cooperative play. There is absolutely no excuse for this. In the XBox version of Halo (it came out roughly three years ago), the superb cooperative play was the real reason you bought the game. I have personally played it, and let me tell you, it is a blast. But Gearbox (the developer) had everything right there for them, and I can't see why they erased it. It just doesn't make sense. This is the main reason why I am giving this game three stars. Usually I believe in judging things y how they stand up to the competition, not based on whether or not it measured up to it's predecessor, but this is just unexcusable, seeing how they had all the potential to make it a great game instead of a good game, and all they had to do was port the co-op. It infuriates me.

I know all of this sounds bad, but it is actually an excellent game. If you are a fan of shooting things, but don't want to fire upon your fellow man, than this, Half-Life, Unreal I and II, and the upcoming Doom III and Half-Life II are your games. But if you could only buy one more game for your entire life, can stand to sacrifice some graphics quality, and are looking for the best of the genre, the one that started it all, by all means, go and buy Half-Life. It came out in '98 or '99, so you will have do fork over some graphics, but it is without a doubt the best game I have ever played, and is certainly worth the money. I kid you not, it has the best EVERYTHING. If you can afford it, try to get it bundled with Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Team Fortress Classic, and Counter-Strike. These are all excellent games (Counter-Strike remains to be the most-played game on the internet of all time). But if you already have Half-Life and thirst blue alien blood, do yourself a favor, buy Halo, and hope that a co-op patch comes out soon.