One of the best console FPS finally arrives on PC. Things have changed but its still a must own high octane action game.
Even fewer have surpased it.
Halo is a sc-fi action game where players assume the role of a cyborg super soldier known only by his rank, Master Chief. He is one of many super soldiers called SPARTANS, created by humanity to be the ultimate fighting machine. And it seems that for a while the SPARTANS were unbeatable until humans ran afoul of a fellowship of alien races known as the Covenant who view mankind as an insult to thier gods and must all be killed. In the war against the Covenant the SPARTANS are the only thing that keep humanity alive, but gradually they are all wiped out, one by one, until only their toughest, Master Chief, is left alive.
Halo begins with the MC's battle ship, the Pillar of Autum fleeing a battle with a huge Covenant force. The Autum lures the Covenant fleet away and makes a blind jump to lightspeed in an attempt to lure the enemy away from earth. They succeed, but end up lost deep in space with an army of Covenant not far behind. And they find an artifiacially created ring world.
The game begins with MC being awoken to find the Autum under heavy attack and about to crash land on the ring world. From there, the fun begins.
Halo's comabt is unlike any game before it. Indoor levels are tight quarters with tension filled gunfights, whle the majority of the game is outside, with huge levels that see the MC taking down entire armies of Covenant troops either on his own or with help from Marine allies.
Halo's action is so enjoyable because the game is filled with great features. The MC has a rechargable shield. When you get hit, the shield goes down. If it reaches zero you take damage and die quickly, but if you duck down for a few seconds the shield swiftly recharges to full and you can get back into the fight. This means that even if your health is at just one hit away from death, your shields are still there to keep you playing. Then there are the weapons. The humans have some standard FPS guns, the assault rifle, the pistol, the shotgun, sniper rifle and rocket launcher are all easy to identify and use. The Covenant on the other hand wield drastically different plasma weapons. There are standard pistols and rifles, then there's the Needler which fires explosieve tracking darts. Or the fuel rod gun, a fast firing grenade launcher. The weapons work well because the game only lets you carry two at a time. This invokes careful strategic thinking about what you pick up to play with. Then there's the nature of some weapons, Covenant fuel rod guns can't be used in he singleplayer game, while the plasma pistol and rifle can't reload, once you exhuast the ammo you need to switch it for a new weapon.
Then there are Halo's grenades. There's the frag grenade and the plasma greande. The frag explodes a second after it lands, but it can be bouced or rolled into various areas. The plasma grenade has a longer timer, but it sticks to enemies and vehicles, but not the environment although it wont roll or bouce like the frag grenade. Like on the Xbox the greandes are thrown with a quick hit of seperate button. Here's the right mouse, while the left fires your current weapon. Control Genius!
Halo's next big thing is its enemies. The Covenant are a fearsome bunch. First there's the Grunts, small and really quite weak they scare easy and you'll often see them hanging around the tougher Elites for protection. Kill the Elite with a group of Grunts nearby and they'll panic and run. Of course killing an Eilte is often a challenge. These guys are powerful, smart, fearless and have their own recharging energy shields. This means that you can blast away at an Elite and they'll still come back for more and more punishment. You have to drain their shields and then unload a bit more ammo to kill them. Of course, take their shields and they'll run away to seek cover. I'll say this now and I mean it, Halo has some of the best AI ever seen in a game. There are plenty of other enemies, like the mammoth Hunters and the sneaky Jackals as well as the Flood but I'd be ruining the game's story if I told you about them all.
Vehicles are great part of H:CE. There's tanks, the warthog jeep, the Covenant Banshee flyer and Ghost as well as a Covenant mortar tank. The game lets you experiance all of them except the Covenant tank and they are all great fun to drive. With the warthog and tank you can drive them and your marine allies will ride shotgun, its pity you can't do this the other way round, but its still fun. The human vehicles for some reason don;t take damage, while in them you can, the veicles themselves are invisible so hitting them grenades and rockets sends them flying. The Covenant vehciles take damage though and explode in huge fireballs, although in multiplayer all vehicles are indestructable.
Halo's multiplayer got a cult following on Xbox. The downside was that there was no surpport for onlineplay, this didn't stop people from enjoying the seemingly endless thrills to be had from though. Now on PC players can frag over the internet and damn if it isn't awesome. Games are easy to start and modify and there's a large amount of different play options. Expect to see hundreds of servers online with CTF being the prime favourite. Its just a pity that there's no co-op. It was a great part of the Xbox Halo and makes the whole experiance a little less then what it could have been. Grnated in the long run I'd prefer online play to online co-op so it evens out. The only thing missing from the multiplayer is in the inclusion of bots, with Halo's killer AI they would have made a great great improvement on an already brilliant multiplayer experiance. Hopefully some user mods will fix this.
Graphics and audio in Halo are pretty much the same as Xbox. The sound is top notch with some good dialogue, plenty of meay effects for when in combat and the music itself is great with some sharp, fast and addictive pieces. The music clearly had a lot of work put into and soundtrack would give most Hollywood movies turn for pause. Its just a pity that the music is onyl heard at certain points in the game, a feature when the music comes and, similar to what we've seen in Splinter Cell would have been great.
Overall Halo remains one of the best action games around. The MC is a sure to go down in history as a legend amoung gaming protagonists, he's enigmatic with a mysterious background we'll never know much about. But we know he's something speical, when you approach other charecters in te game they say things, 'Wow, its him" or "The Chief, we're saved!". He's got a rep as a tough as nails ass-kicker and it works great for the game's atmosphere. Halo has dozens of great touches, the difficulty I should mention comes in four flavours, Easy, Normal, Heroric and Legendary. The latter is going to test even the toughest gamer as the game throws you against numerous enemies all of them tough and smart. Trust me, beating just one level, any level, of this game on legendary is an achievment. Finishing the final mission or some of the really long levels will take hours but you'll feel like you've earned something when you finally complete them.
Basically if you enjoyed Half Life and want a shooter that ups the ante to a whole new level of brilliance, get this.