Certainly one of, if not THE best FPS which has yet to be matched, even by its sequel.
It seems like only yesterday that this game was being released for the XBOX and people went crazy over it. It's hard to believe that this game was old enough to be a launch title for the XBOX now that the XBOX 360 is common on store shelves. But age aside, this game sure doesn't act like it's 6 years old. This milestone in gaming is a classic in every sense of the word. It is already the one game almost all gamers would associate with the XBOX. The stunning graphics were lightyears ahead of its time. The story here is always engaging and keeps one on the edge of their seat. Here you play as Master Chief, a badass futuristic-looking man always hidden behind his suit of armor. Master Chief is awakened at a desperate time for mankind when an alien race, the Covenant, boards your ship. Soon your ship crash lands on a huge ring crawling with Covenant called Halo. But the Covenant might not be the only things lurking in the dark depths of the ring. I don't want to give anything away for anyone who hasn't played it already, but it almost feels like two games in one. The places in the game where the developers set it up so that the gamer sees a certain thing at a certain time are truly cinematic. There is a good selection of weapons and vehicles, both human and alien, and I also liked that you can only hold two weapons at one time, a feature common in games today, but for the time it really added some strategy. The sound design is pretty good in surround sound, though sometimes the back speakers are a lot louder than the front speakers and you might find yourself turning around so you can hear somebody. It is also kind of weird that they mapped Master Chief's left and right footsteps to the front-left and front-right speakers. It always sounds like somebody's walking right next to you. But, these small faults are nothing to worry about and the truly memorable and epic score is more than enough to make up for anything wrong in the sound department. On the replayability front, I usually beat a game on normal and put it away, and on this game I don't see myself doing anything different than the usual procedure, but for someone who really wants to, there is fun to be had trying to beat the super-hard legendary mode. And the multiplayer is endless fun, and so is the cooperative mode. So there's that going for it in replayability. But for all of the good things in the game, there are some bad things. Many times when a loose weapon is hit very hard by a grenade explosion or just sometimes when you switch weapons really close to a wall, the weapon will partially glitch into the wall and you will hear a very loud, horrible noise that sounds like machinegun fire for a few seconds until the weapon eventually falls out. This has happened to me about 15 times throughout the game, so it's not that rare. But it doesn't really affect gameplay. Second, the framerate usually holds up while in gunfights, but when there are a lot of enemies, explosions and particle effects onscreen, the framerate can drop into the red, but it never happens for more than about two seconds. Third, the floating circular robot who Chief finds on halo is very hard to understand because of his metallic voice, which can be frustrating. And last, the game gets to be very repetitive while not in outside maps. It always seems like you've been in a certain place before, though sometimes you have. This repetitiveness really shows towards the end of the game. But, despite all of its minor problems, HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED is an excellent game all the way around with an engrossing story that will make you not want to stop playing until it's done. This milestone in gaming is one of the greatest video games ever made and really started to convince some of the people who thought first person shooters could only succeed on the PC.