Halo: Combat Evolved

"Oooh, another inevitable praising critique. Shoot me."

Halo can be summed up in four words;

BAM BAM BAM BOOM!

This isn't a flaw, but rather something the admire as it's one of the only things that actually drives Halo. Sure, there's a story in there with some mildly interesting happenings, but when you're out in the battlefield with an MA5B Assault Rifle the only thing you'll be thinking is:

BAM BAM BAM BOOM!

This is appropriate, as one would be thinking the same thing during the single player of such timeless classics as Goldeneye 007. None of that annoying stealth in between ferocious firefights, none of those dull stand-here-and-shoot-him sessions, all trigger-finger influenced navigation of the massive land that is Halo.

‘Massive' could also accurately describe Halo if you wanted to push past the summary. Everything simply feels like a large, other world, even though your play-time is divided into separate levels (which actually repeat themselves on occasion). The richly detailed deep green blades of the trees that stand so prominently upon the bullet-riddled blood-fest of a ground once made up of dark soil easily puts you right in there, right with your fellow Marines. Crusading through a dark, purple underground area while shooting up your enemies (the Covenant, an alien race) makes for a thrill, which is exactly why Halo is acclaimed as it is.

Our Covenant foes aren't just a bunch of bumbling idiots, either. In the name of their sacred (and crazy) religion, humanity is of instant need of destruction. These guys are mind-bent on blowing you into pieces, eliminating just another pile of blood and flesh that's of offense to the Covenant's Gods. Taking cover, rushing you, doing everything you'd likely think to do to them; these guys are of equal intelligence to the main character, Master Chief (essentially a super-powered human with more advanced abilities), sans some points for the smaller Grunts, which are the baby soldiers of the Covenant, able to somehow always run right out into open fire while blasting mindlessly at anything at moves with surprisingly slow reaction time. It's of no worry, though, for there's almost always Jackals or Elites by their side (two Covenant enemies that'll put up a decent fight).

You're superhuman though, don't forget. While at times you'll be at the side of your fellow Marines, completing assigned tasks together as a team (though one that you can't control), for the most part Master Chief is the one-man-army mega-weapon of the humans. You can plow through Jackals and Elites at a moderate pace, so long as you continue to use your brain-power, of course (by which what is simply meant: not running into enemy fire). Battles with mass enemy on sole soldier are the most intense and most common of Halo's many bouts which tie together the traversing of the lands (and often incorporate themselves onto the midsections of travel; underground tunnels connecting sea-level areas are always full of enemies, for example). Halo is essentially one battle after another with little room for safe travel or story (which isn't force-fed; you can skip cut-scenes).

These firefights aren't just any random gun duel, either. These are memorable, intense moments that you'll want to replay again and again (Halo makes this possible through a handy level-selection set-up rather than a semi-common string of levels that force you to leave beaten levels behind ‘till second play-through). After the small war of sorts reigned on-ship (in the first level), you crash land onto Halo where you'll quickly experience just what makes Halo so special. Traversing the lands for a bit, you come up to an open area of several odd structures and fellow marines, prepared to attack the Covenant which almost immediately fly in and move out. With clusters of Grunts, Jackals and Elites shooting every which way at every Marine on the field, including yourself, you'll be instantly sucked into the battle, taking clean head-shots worth one kill with the pistol while dodging odd needle-like bullets as projected from an enemy weapon (which you may later pick up if your pistol runs out of ammo during the battle). Tossing grenades in two directions to the sides of each enemy to confuse them, then watching them fly from the explosion as you hide behind wildlife from the Elite you just shot at before is a common sight in Halo, and a very exhilarating one.

Shooter fans, unite; Halo does nearly everything right.

Crazy battles aren't the only sort of gunplay Halo offers, of course. Snipers can get their game on when their time comes; Halo makes sure to provide to every type of shooter fan, be they an explosives junkie or a handgun aficionado weaned on combat from a small distance. Picking off the enemy while you sneak around offers a fun, almost guilty-pleasure-like feeling, simply because of the way Halo plays things out (Covenant near the recently deceased looking around wildly for the sniper, unable to find you hidden behind the brush where you reload so to pick to poor Elite off next). It's wildly entertaining to play through Halo's various scenarios due to their open-ended feeling and decent variety.

As a master of battle, you can do an assortment of actions besides simply firing off your weapon. Standard jumping and crouching is a given, but using the pistol-whip (with any gun) is as important a skill as firing off the thing. Even when you've run out of ammo, if you can sneak up behind an enemy without making it aware of your presence, you can pistol-whip its back and take a one-hit kill. It's a great way to provide melee combat, as well, when the enemy is simply too close for comfort and a gun-shot would do too little.

So Halo knows what it's doing; that much was always evident (how else would it have become so wildly popular?). The original (this) Halo is the one heralded for its excellent single player mode, however (while the later Halo 2 takes the cake for most people in the multiplayer fray, possibly if only because of its online enhancement). Halo does not end when the single player levels do, however. Halo easily offers a solid multiplayer mode which makes for the beef of the game and the majority of the excitement and value one could get from the game. If Halo did the single player right, then it damn near perfected the multiplayer.

The multiplayer offering far and away outdoes the single player. Multi-layered maps that are all well thought-out for four player combat make for more frantic combat than the single player could ever hope to offer. Watching two friends duke it out with Assault Rifles through your sniper scope, waiting for one to reign victorious so that you can snipe him out makes for a fun, personal game of ‘BAM BAM BAM BOOM'.

One of the keys to Halo is getting to know it through single player to help prepare you for multiplayer (where you'll need to learn a bunch of new stuff anyway), because the multiplayer is the main reason why Halo's held so much longevity. You have a variety of weapons to get to know; M6D Pistols, MA5B Assault Rifles, M9O Shotguns, M19 SSM Rocket Launchers, S2 AM Sniper Rifles, and M9 HE-DP Grenades. However, that only covers the human weaponry; there's a match for nearly all of them designed by the Covenants, who also offer some of the weirder and more useful weapons (The Needler, appropriately, shoots needle-like bullets at an enemy which soar in the air and home in on the foe. When all (or nearly all) the needles land on the enemy attached (or on some box the enemy decides to hide behind or whatever), they explode causing enough damage to execute a kill on most foes). Their grenade is also a prime example of the more weird and useful; it shines bright blue and attached itself to objects of all sorts, including infantry from both sides. It goes off like a normal grenade though, so it's more a guaranteed way of executing a kill.

Halo mastery is a difficult task, however, and required getting to know everything the game has to offer so well that you could recite such facts as has already been done in this very review. It's important information, though what's even more important is how you choose to use these tools of destruction and death.

Trigger-finger wild-boy shooting will get you nowhere on the field; this is not the Dynasty Warriors of shooters, though at times it may feel very similar (whenever a massive horde of enemies come at you in seemingly endless swarms, namely). If all you're going to do is stand in one spot with the trigger pulled down on the Assault Rifle, spraying flurries of bullets at enemies in all directions, then a death is guaranteed. Not only is movement required for your survival - hiding behind boxes or crates, jumping to the side as you throw a grenade at the enemy, and then shooting wherever the enemy jumped to to dodge the grenade, securing hits and possibly death. It's necessary you understand combat basics and make good use of them and evolve upon them to suit the battle at hand. It's a game of intelligence and reactions, and it proves that Halo is built for the long-haul. Shooters rarely achieve this level of depth and replayability, and it's all a combination of weaponry and levels working hand-in-hand together. Halo has a sort of legendary status for a reason.

While online play is (obviously) absent, it doesn't make Halo any less fun as the environments weren't built for mass attacks from many different players. Each level is perfectly crafted to work in the favor of a small set of gamers, and because of such the multiplayer levels can actually feel rather limiting, especially in comparison to the mammoth-sized single player choices. That type of grandiose design wouldn't work with Halo, so all complaints on levels offered in the multiplayer in this regard are irrelevant. Finding any complaints with Halo is a task in and of its own. However, there are several flaws in Halo as there are in any game, really.

The first flaw is some of the single player level design, primarily the Library level. In such levels as the Library, you aren't offered lush landscapes to explore and partake in war on, nor are you offered a variety of different corridors in a maze-like set-up that makes for tricky combat and navigation, nor most any variety at all, actually. Such levels as the Library are essentially room after too-similar room of swarming enemies for you to take care of. It's solid fun for the first couple of swarms simply because Halo does shooting so well. However, once you're on the tenth swarm in under ten minutes and you're still on the same structure looking at walls so similar to the last area that you could swear they're the same (in some cases corridors and areas are actually repeated within the same level), you'll really feel that boredom hit you, and even worse; annoyance. While these levels and sections are somewhat of a rarity among the other, fantastic selections offered, they're so daunting on their own that they essentially ask you to put the controller down after a dozen swarms of then meaningless shooting.

The other flaw is in the repeating areas in separate levels. While it can be a nice, refreshing re-visit if the distance in levels is great, it can also be a groaning moment of ‘what, here again?' for most cases of this occurrence in the game. It's annoying in much the same manner as the first flaw; it's so repetitive (you've already cleared those areas, it isn't so fun to do so all over again in a single sitting) that it simply gets on your nerves.

Aside from those two annoyances, though, it's difficult to find fault with Halo. It offers extremely entertaining shooter gameplay that one could say finally one-ups Goldeneye 007 in terms of perfection for the era of its birth. Halo, one could say, is the definitive shooter for the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube generation, as one could say that Goldeneye 007 is the definitive shooter for the N64 and PS1 generation. With large, sprawling levels, a lengthily and difficult campaign, a slew of things to learn to hone your skills in multiplayer and the needed juice to fuel an extremely entertaining multiplayer mode, Halo really does have it all. It isn't perfect, but then again, nothing is. It's so damn close though, and that's what sets it apart from the other mass amounts of shooter titles begging to get picked up that sit beside Halo. If the gamer were Kakihara, and Halo was Ichi, there'd be a similar relationship between the two. Except for the whole sudden realization and dying bit. Believe it!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/24/06