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by Microsoft
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 So I never played the
Xbox version of Halo, but it was a game of which I was always aware and
wanted to experience. My prior exposure to it was limited to playing it
for 3 minutes on the Xbox at CompUSA (with the old bear-sized
controllers), and reading about it on Penny Arcade – they aren’t big
fans of it all – and I wasn’t either at first. I found the game to be
choppy, poorly scripted, clunky, repetitive, and not very fun at all.
However, I decided that I needed to give it a chance. I had talked to a
lot of people who loved it on the Xbox and others who were looking
forward to its release on the PC. I sit here writing this now smiling
and very glad that I decided to spend some time getting to know this
game because it ended up being one of the more entertaining and
challenging shooters that I have played in quite some time (I would go
so far as to call it my favorite since Half Life). It offers tactical
challenges, extremely intelligent AI, multiple ways to attack a
situation, and a decent if not earth-shattering storyline.
 Let’s start with the
strengths of Halo. The game’s subtitle is “Combat Evolved,” and it
definitely lives up to this. The game excels when the fighting is loud
and insane. I loved running the Master Chief into a room full of Flood
or Covenant, chucking a grenade into their midst and watching their
nicely rag-dolled corpses fly back at me, then going to clean up the
survivors with my shotgun. That is fun stuff. Halo is like this 95% of
the time. I will get to the other 5% a bit later.
 The game begins with a
less than stellar intro movie that uses the game-engine graphics to
introduce us to the back story. It has something to do with a war
between humanity and an alien race called the Covenant. Eventually the
main character, cryptically named Master Chief, is brought out of
cryogenic fugue and brought up to speed on the situation. Some clever
gameplay calibration occurs next before we can take full control of the
Chief (a soldier has us look around the room in various directions to
set up proper mouse controls here). But then chaos ensues. The Covenant
hoards have boarded the ship and we need to get to the bridge of the
ship. As a starting level, I found this to be lackluster. All of the
criticism of the repetitive levels seemed to be very noticeable here and
I also had a hard time running the game at anything more than 640x480.
The controls felt very touchy and the textures looked rather shabby. I
was wondering what all the hype was about. Eventually I finished the
intro level and found myself on Halo. At this point I was feeling
distraught and didn’t want to finish the game. Rarely has a first level
so disappointed me in a game. Thankfully our intrepid editor Shawn Rider
convinced me to marshal on. I thank him for this now. He told me to wait
and see that the true meat and potatoes of the game were coming up. He
was right.
 Once I got through a
few more skirmishes, I found a bunch of my fellow soldiers from the
ship. We were soon attacked by scores of Covenant. I felt like I had
jumped into the intense storming of Normandy section from Medal of
Honor. My fellow soldiers were firing everywhere, calling for help, and
the enemy kept on coming. It was intense and I could now see that this
game had potential.
 Halo is definitely a
combat game first. You are limited to carrying two weapons at a time, 8
grenades, and a shield that recharges after taking damage. The pace of
combat has a natural flow to it due to the shield. Once you take some
damage and the warning siren goes off, you better find some cover until
the shield recharges or you will take heavy direct damage very quickly.
The necessity of this action creates a rather deliberate pace to the
combat. No longer can you charge into a group of enemies and blow their
heads off without regard to your own status. You have to pick your
targets, attack, avoid taking hits, and then hide somewhere to recharge
because your enemies are going to be gunning for you. And this is one of
the strongest points of Halo – the enemy AI. The Covenant (and later the
Flood) will test even the most experienced FPS player. They hide and
ambush you, take cover in the surroundings to avoid your fire, and use
vehicles in organized attacks on your position. It is truly an
astounding AI and sometimes battles will play out differently each time
you go through one. But this in turn brings me to Halo’s most glaring
problem – its level design.
 Some levels look nice,
but they go on and on and on as if they wanted to increase the amount of
game time (the Library level, and to a lesser extent the reactor level).
This repetition is a combination of unimaginative level layout,
repetitive enemy attacks, and monotonous textures. It really feels like
a cut and paste job with the underlying code. Luckily the challenge of
the combat alleviates this distasteful practice somewhat, but it is
still a major game flaw that will hopefully be rectified in Halo’s
sequel.
 The single player game
is a kick in the pants and well worth playing. Multiplayer is also great
and fun to play. There are a bunch of maps and the carnage is really
nice – lots of vehicles to play with, lots of weapons, and lots of game
play options. However I seem to have a bit of a problem with my ping and
there is no in-game command to display the various pings of players like
there is in Counter Strike. I found that annoying, but it could be
partly because I am running a wireless LAN. My biggest ax to grind with
multiplayer is the menu system. Once I got into the multiplayer screen,
loaded all of my servers, and then found one I wanted to play on, the
load times rocked – as long as I got onto a server. If the server was
filled after I connected (which happens a lot), I would get dumped back
to the main menu of the game! This is terrible! I would have to go
through the entire update check, and then reload my server list, and
find a game all over again. This is a terrible feature and needs to be
addressed immediately.
 Now for more of the
bad: while I don’t have the hottest gaming rig in the world (AMD XP
2700, 512 PC2100, GeForce4 MX420), it suffices for almost every game I
have played in the last year. To get all the glitzy goodness out of Halo
you need a serious beast. I found a nice balance at 800x600 with decals
and a decent texture level. I would love to see this game in its full
glory because I think it would look fantastic.
However, there are some major graphical glitches in this port which I
think are unacceptable. Oftentimes I would kill an enemy who would then
fall down and have half of his body lying off a ledge. Other times I
would encounter an enemy who was stuck inside of a wall or other various
environmental objects. There are also various texture issues that
annoyed me. The texture on the machine gun that displays the ammo count
would flicker at times when I wasn’t moving, and there were other
various texture fights in the game. For such a major game port, I think
Gearbox could have and should have addressed these issues.
So while there are a few significant problems with this port of Halo, I
think that it is an overall excellent game that lives up to most the
hype. The gameplay rock, multiplayer is fun, and the story is compelling
enough to keep you interested. If you have a weak gaming system you
might not be able to enjoy all of the bells and whistles, but it won’t
affect your overall experience. I look forward to the sequel to this
interesting, yet not groundbreaking game.
Reviewer (00/00/2003) |
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Snapshot
Ups:
Combat is great, very good enemy AI, playable vehicles, good multiplayer
maps; graphics look nice for the most part.
Downs:
Steep system requirements, too many graphical
glitches for such a big release, repetitive levels, multiplayer menus
need some work.
Platform:
PC
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