Surprise! It’s time for a new love/hate series! As you can probably tell, we’re going to be diving into the Halo franchise, going over all the mainline entries and their campaigns. Multiplayer is a pretty major aspect of Halo, obviously, but I’m about 23 years too late to properly dive into these games’ multiplayer modes, so we’ll just stick with the campaigns for this analysis.

As for my history with Halo, I got invited to a LAN party at my church a couple times where we hooked up four Xboxes and played Halo and Halo 2‘s multiplayer. It was an absolute blast and, for many years thereafter, Halo was the gold-standard multiplayer game in my mind, unsurpassed until 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I purchased an Xbox 360 with Halo Anniversary several years later and tried to play through the game’s campaign, but fell off about halfway through before selling the system. Recently though, Steam had a huge sale on for the Master Chief Collection, so I picked it up and finally decided to knuckle down and play through this series. How do these games hold up today? Read on to find out…

Love

• The AI – No, I’m not referring to Cortana here (although she is an excellent character). No, I’m referring to what was probably the most defining aspect of Halo for me: the incredible amount of personality that Bungie have baked into all of their NPCs. Grunts scream and run from battle when you kill their superiors. When you kill an enemy, they will fire their gun a few more times in a death spasm. Your allies will rage and unload magazines into dead enemies in revenge. These are just some of the more obvious examples, but there is just so much personality baked into the NPCs that it makes them feel like more than just bullet sponges. It’s even more impressive considering that few shooter games today even bother with these kinds of touches to make their world feel real.
• Enemy Designs – Combat is so much fun in Halo because you can feel how well-designed the enemies are in these games. Each enemy type requires different approaches to defeat them: for example, Elites have powerful weapons and shield generators, requiring plasma weaponry to kill effectively before they obliterate your own shields, while Jackals have an arm-mounted shield which needs to be overloaded with plasma or bypassed with precision weaponry, grenades, or good ol’ fashioned melee. In addition, each enemy type has a very distinct silhouette, making it easy to tell who is who in the heat of combat. As a result of this strong design foundation, Bungie are able to mix and match enemies and environments to make for endless potential for fun encounters.
• Large-scale Warfare – While Halo is primarily a corridor shooter, like many of its contemporaries, it does open up during a few levels (most notably in the second level) and allow you to engage in large-scale open warfare. These areas are always the game’s biggest highlights, allowing you to pilot vehicles, including the Scorpion tank and Banshee, or you can just hoof it on foot and use the terrain to your advantage. There are also multiple moments where you can choose to just sit back and watch the Covenant fight your allies or the Flood, which helps sell the idea of this huge war that you are just a part of. It’s wild to see this kind of ambitious design in an Xbox launch game!
• The Lore – The actual plot of Halo is pretty basic: you crash land on Halo, rescue your comrades, and then try to figure out what the Covenant are doing here. What really makes it stand out to me though is how authentic and real it feels. You can clearly tell that the people who wrote it are military history nerds and they ensure that the UNSC characters speak and act like real soldiers. Add in the intriguing zealotry of the Covenant and the mysteries of the Halo installation and this is a world that feels positively lived-in, even in this first entry.
• The Flood – No one who played Halo for the first time expected it to turn into a full-on horror game about halfway through, but man is it effective. It’s a cool twist which comes just in time to shake-up the gameplay and introduce several new enemy types to deal with, which function differently than any other enemy you’ve encountered up to this point. Plus, y’know, the Flood are an existential threat which really ramps up the narrative as soon as they’re introduced.
• The Shotgun – Oh. My. GOD! In the pantheon of video game shotguns, Halo‘s is easily one of the most satisfying. This thing is a fucking beast, shredding Flood and Covenant alike in a single blast. Most weapons in this game feel kind of weak, requiring a lot of shots to actually kill anything, but it is so refreshing when the shotgun arrives and bucks this trend. You don’t get access to it until about halfway through the game, but as soon as it was introduced, the entire back half of the game for me was ride-or-die with the shotgun.
• Weapon Variety – One of the most impressive aspects of playing Halo today is seeing just how unique the various weapons are. This was kind of par for the course back in 2001, but since video weapons became codified as “assault rifle/pistol/shotgun/sniper rifle/DMR/SMG/machine gun”, it’s refreshing to see weapons as distinct and iconic as the needler and plasma pistol. Even the assault rifle and plasma rifle don’t overlap – the assault rifle is purely a low damage, high rate of fire weapon, whereas the plasma rifle specializes at knocking down energy shields and will overheat if fired for too long. There’s simply no overlap for any of the weapons here and, given what I said about enemy design previously, they all have some strategic use depending on the situation you find yourself in.

Hate

• Level Design – This is my biggest complaint about Halo by far, and it’s the reason I fell off the game the first time I tried to play. It took me months to slog my way through this game and that largely came down to how dull the levels can get at times. This is mainly due to the time-period in which Halo was developed, as you can see the DNA of early corridor shooters like Doom or Star Wars: Dark Forces with these maze-like environments. It’s especially bad because the levels in Halo are, ultimately, quite linear, but I was still managing to get lost because of all the reused assets and non-sensical level layouts which make it hard to tell where you’re going and where you’ve been. Making matters worse, Halo loves to just throw wave after wave of enemies at you. I remember reading the second Halo book, The Flood, and realizing it was basically a full-on walkthrough of the game when it would describe how Master Chief kills all the enemies in a room, then goes to the next room and does it again for another wave. For how dull that was to read, it was a pretty accurate description of how these levels often play out and, while the enemy designs keep things fun, it does start to get a bit much towards the end.
• Vehicle Controls – As much as I love that Halo lets you shake-up the gameplay by driving vehicles, the actual controls are fucking dogshit, specifically for the Warthog. They are so slippery and unwieldy, causing you to crash into everything if you end up in a situation where you need to drive with any sort of precision. This is especially a problem because the final level requires you to race a Warthog through an obstacle course while a timer counts down. Suffice to say, I failed the first time I tried this and that was almost entirely due to the poor vehicle controls screwing me over.
• Explosive Spam – Holy shit, the sheer damage and blast radius of explosives in this game is nuts. A single explosion is often enough to kill you instantly and can come out of nowhere, with even basic Grunts frequently hucking plasma grenades at you. You are going to die to explosions all the time, especially in the latter levels when enemies are unloading barrages of grenades, fuel rod cannons, and full-on rocket launchers at you.
• The Assault Rifle Suuuuuuucks – So I did say that every weapon in Halo is useful in certain situations, but the assault rifle’s the closest we come to a weapon just being worthless. Unlike most video game assault rifles, Halo‘s is only good at extreme close range due to some insane bullet deviation. Even Grunts take most of a magazine at close range to kill, which is insane. The only situation where the assault rifle shines is in killing pod infectors… but that’s not that impressive, because literally stepping on them will kill pod infectors, and they do such miniscule damage that it’s barely worth wasting a bullet on them.

Halo: Combat Evolved is rough. I can see how it revolutionized the shooter genre and it still has some brilliant aspects that hold up today, but actually playing the game can be exhausting at times. Still, for all its rough edges, I’m glad that I finally got to experience this game for myself and live out my teenage dreams for real.