Any way you look at it, Halo is a phenomenal achievement, and its impact on how we percieve the FPS genre is undeniable.

User Rating: 9.5 | Halo (Xbox Collection) XBOX
By Mirkan | Review Date:
The term "revolutionary" gets thrown around a lot, but people rarely stop to ponder what that means. In the genre of first person shooters, it basically meant that someone dared take the steps necessary for a game to fundamentally change and offer something completely different from the corridor based click-on-your-enemies-to-kill-them gameplay. The changes made with Halo are really really small, but the fact that someone finally made them is something we all should be eternally grateful for. When people say that this is the same old FPS thing, they'd probably made their minds up before they even touched the game. Either that or they're just scratching the surface, because once you dig a little deeper than that, it all becomes absolutely obvious. In my view, when your typical developer tries to do something different with their typical FPS, they look to the environments for change. You've got the destructible locales, you've got the fancy physics, the blood, the interactivity, the space based missions, the hell based missions, the cool scripted events (that happen exactly the same way every time you play through the game), the scary shooters, the loud shooters, the I'm-trying-to-be-clever-and-stealthy-but-fail-miserably shooters, the shooters with the charismatic female lead with big boobies, the shooters with the random male lead entirely devoid of personality (yeah ID and Valve, I'm looking at you), etc etc etc. My point is that this doesn't change anything. This doesn't change ANYTHING. Halo however, is different at its CORE. The way you play Halo isn't just about pointing and clicking, it's dynamic in a way that no shooter has been before it. Something as simple as melee attacks that actually are useful means that there's a whole new dimension to the combat. Even that out with the delayed ranged attack of grenades and you've got a three variable combat system, and we haven't even added the AI yet. Yeah, the AI that you can fool and play around with in the middle of insane firefights. Hiding and sneaking up on enemies aren't separate elements in themselves, but rather just another aspect of the gameplay that comes absolutely natural after a while. Combat Evolved is a silly subtitle, surely, but it's also quite accurate. There's something hard to define about Halo's gameplay, and it's even more difficult to explain it to someone whose opinion of the game is already biased, but the closest I can get to putting my finger on it is; Halo's gameplay feels alive in a certain way. It doesn't feel like it's just about you and the enemy. The world doesn't revolve around you the way it seems to in other games, and that gives the player a sense of enormous presence. The enemies aren't out to kill you specifically, but they're rather deployed in a way that you have to fight them to get to your objective. This may not seem important, but on a whole, it makes the experience so much more convincing than, say, Doom 3 where the enemies basically spawn on top of your head. The criticism directed at the recycling of levels later on is perhaps a question of whether or not the surroundings has an impact on your enjoyment of the game. If the settings are very important to you, then you will almost certainly feel that some locales are repetitive, (especially on the dreaded Library level) but not once does the action suffer. Beyond all of this lies a truly remarkable story as well. Hugely inspired by the work Bungie did with the Marathon games, Halo touches on many of the same themes. How one comes to experience the story of Halo is difficult to explain though, as little is concretely spelled out in the game, but if you pay attention to the dialogue, cutscenes and underlying messages, you'll come away knowing exactly what went on without really knowing how. It can be argued that Halo offers a more direct and digestible story than its sequel, wrongly criticised for being weak in that department, but there's loads of stuff beyond that for those who care to dig a little deeper. While I could go on and on about Halo, I've probably said what needs to be said already. It is the kind of game that, even though you may not enjoy it yourself -- be it because the genre holds no appeal, or if science fiction isn't your cup of tea -- deserves your respect the same way Mario does. It brought change into the genre possibly hardest hit by stagnation, and offered a glimmer of hope for us who'd grown tired of first person shooters a long time ago. By Simon Lundmark

Other Helpful Reviews for Halo (Xbox Collection)

Load Comments (0)