Retrospective – Halo: Combat Evolved

I don’t have the rabid love of Halo that the majority of Xbox devotees presumably possess (“u dnt lk hlo cs u twt”), but I have immense respect for the series. While the second and third games never captured my imagination, due, in large part to weak single-player campaigns and an overt focus on online multiplayer (a feature that, due to 99% of morons flushing a toilet next to their headset and calling me ‘gay’, I mostly avoid), the first remains my favourite FPS of all time.

With only system-link multiplayer and co-op, it’s a game that plays a very good hand in Campaign mode. The missions are tightly structured and varied – not in environmental terms, as Assault on the Control Room and Truth and Reconciliation are both repeated backwards later on, but in creating toybox scenarios that rarely have too much overlap. Everything is used just enough, in Halo: Combat Evolved. How so? Well, you don’t fly a Banshee for any more than about 20 minutes in the whole game, yet those 20 minutes are arguably the most memorable of the entire experience; the same applies to the Scorpion tank sections. Halo 2 and 3 are both weighed down slightly by too much corridor-based action and less inventive set pieces. Battling the two Scarabs in the latter game’s ‘The Covenant’ level captured some of that spirit, but I could have done with a few more comparable battles.

Much of the fun in Combat Evolved is garnered from repeating the same scenario ad nauseam, seeing what variables you can scoop out of crashing a Banshee into a Hunter, or trying to clear out a room of enemies just using melee attacks. Hell, I’d wager that Halo wouldn’t be half the game it is without Bungie’s savvy checkpoint placement, which accommodated this style of play perfectly.

Playing system link multiplayer harbours nothing but good memories, for me: the guys on the other telly pissing me off by intentionally delaying the game, having an all-out war on Blood Gulch and using the invisibility power-ups to great effect.

Really, it was a cracking game that has dated graphically, above anything else – the advancement of textures, lighting and particularly animation seen in Halo 3 seems illuminating, after one play of the 2001 original. The fundamentals still remains strong, however. Whoever is working on the next Master Chief-centric Halo game, whether that’ll be Bungie, Gearbox or another savvy, independent developer, I hope they take at least a few cues from the original Halo, still a bloody fun and novelty-free FPS.