Review: Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox)

Oh, so Master Chief did talk after all? I thought he was a silent hero… Well, I never did care much for the Halo series. In fact, I only got half way on Halo and beat Halo 2 on a burned disc off of a chipped Xbox ”back in the day” and played the later installations of pure duty. Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, I played Halo. On my new original Xbox (I recieved a clear cased one as a gift from a friend recently). My old Xbox has been broken for many months now, hence the lack of Xbox content on this blog. Well, not anymore my friends. Let’s take a brief look at one of the most important FPS games in later years.

"Spaceships're boring."

The Flood's boring. The Covenant's boring. Spaceships're boring. Lasers and plasma's boring. I'm an iron, bullets and blood kind of guy. I like my weapons to feel heavy and the bullets to sound off like they exploded. The ”pew pew” side of shooting is… not for me. It’s just so weak, so bland and so boring. That’s why I didn’t care for this game’s story or setting. What I did care about, a great deal, was the game’s execution. I really appreciate what Halo did. Putting consoles on the FPS map once and for all, and paved the way to a gloriously successful genre (outside the PC realm where it oviously already flourished). It’s almost unbelievable how Halo manages to chug along on a comfortable 30 frames per second during most of the game, only dropping a few frames during the very extreme moments. I understand the impact and I’m completely convinced this was the game to open the developers' eyes towards consoles as a viable FPS game platform. But again, the story, theme and setting is utterly lost on me. I yawned through the whole thing. But I still enjoyed playing it. The gameplay is just that satisfactory. I would use Halo more like an example in game development.

Anyway, the game ended with me blowing up some stuff I guess. I jumped straight in to Halo 2 to continue my journey because no matter how much I didn’t enjoy the space side of this shooter, I loved the controls and the technicals behind it. Not amused, but amused. Ehm. Yeah.