Picture this: it's 2001, the PS2 is about a year old, and Microsoft is finally releasing its first console. Launch titles are minimal, but there is one that seems to follow up on trends with some big games of recent years. The late 90s PC gaming landscape was in a post-Doom world. The Doom engine had been modified more times than it is worth counting, and it wasn't until id Software released their spiritual follow up, Quake, that Doom and its engine's reign had ended. Quake brought the FPS into true 3D, but the FPS didn't garner a serious, adult eye until the release of 1998's Half-Life, a bona fide classic upon release whose markings can still be seen on gaming today. While PC was enjoying this increase in quality for the FPS genre (not to mention a shot in the arm as far as multiplayer is concerned with the release of Half-Life fan mod Counter-Strike in 2000 along side Quake III and Unreal Tournament the year before), consoles were still somewhat lagging. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark had proven that FPS games could work on consoles extremely well, but they still felt lacking in the world building provided by Half-Life, or the intense fun of Quake and severe skill of Counter-Strike. There was a gap in the console world that needed to be filled.
Halo: Combat Evolved is an obviously important game, starting an IP that has permeated out past the gaming sphere and into the culture far more broadly. Its sequels would break records, out sell films, and even garner prime advertising time during the biggest advertising event of the year. It was one of the biggest gaming franchises to ever exist, heralding in the AAA marketplace that exploded during the seventh generation of consoles. But during the sixth generation of consoles, it was something else. It was a sort of revelation.
Halo did a couple of things out of the ordinary, even in the PC landscape. It limited your guns to only two, rather than the veritable armory of most FPSs, requiring you to often find discarded guns on the battlefield, looted from the corpses you made. It also had a focus on cinematic language, a distinct contrast with PC heavyweight Half-Life, which told its story entirely from a game-centric point of view. Halo wanted camera angles, a cinematic soundtrack (and still one of the best in video games), and an epic story similar to those you'd see in dramatic action films. It also introduced the idea of time based recovering health, something the series wouldn't completely commit to until its sequels. Here, it comes in the form of shields that will drop as you get shot, but recover if you go a certain amount of time without being hit. A health bar beneath this shield's covering kept with the classic game design for FPS games, but the first innovative steps had been made. Halo was a game about moment-to-moment play, about knowing when to duck into and out of cover, never allowing you to feel too fragile. You were a super soldier, after all, and no matter your health or ammo count, you should always be able to pull a win out if you just played well enough.
In Halo, you play as Master Chief, a Spartan super soldier made by the UNSC, a sort of United Nations navy that explored space. You are on a ship that has just barely made a lightspeed jump out of danger (a story of which you have to read the manual to know, until the release of Halo: Reach in 2010), and find yourself floating in uncharted space, with an odd structure in the shape of a ring nearby, apply called Halo. It has the topography of a planet on the inner side of the ring, and you realize your foes, the alien group called the Covenant, are already on the surface. The plot from here is not far from the plot of Aliens, an obvious inspiration. The Covenant want to do something with the halo, and you find the halo was holding a great scourge deep in its facilities beneath the surface. There is a parasitic race called The Flood trapped within, and through the Covenant's actions (and a little of your own), they have been released, threatening the universe. Halo's plot is pretty simple, all in all. You have two foes you must face on an odd alien ring in the middle of space, and you have to shoot your way through. The plot is played with a downright campy amount of conviction, a campiness that is only exaggerated in the sequels. The military is always correct, noble, and in the pursuit of the greater good in all three of the main trilogy, and there is little ambiguity anywhere. There is a finesse to how the baddies will play out in the sequels, but that's as complicated as things get. The gung-ho military attitude is laughable today, but if you look at it through a pulp lens, it can be pretty enjoyable.
Halo is incredibly cinematic in its execution. Camera angles, ambient lighting, and a stellar soundtrack elevate the corny script to something far more dramatic than it has any right to be. Taking notes from the likes of Metal Gear Solid, the absurdity of the plot is given an odd weight by simply giving the execution a serious eye. Halo isn't innovative in this approach, but it is somewhat ahead of things as other games were either going to attempt something similar in the future once the style had sunk in, or would go the route of Half-Life, Halo's counter in many ways. It is not incorrect to consider Halo the console's answer to Half-Life, a criticism I am not the first to lay its way. Halo takes a different approach, one far less concerned with a mature, focused output than action movie antics and conflict, but in essence it is still that Half-Life approach to level design, attempting to give FPS shooting galleries and brawl pits a world context. Where Half-Life used it to make you feel as though you were discovering routes out of Black Mesa yourself through your own cunning, Halo uses it to tie together a world full of abstract architecture into something that feels almost believable.
The aesthetic of Halo's world design will probably split some people. The outside sections, where you are on the surface of Halo, are pretty well universally praised, and for good reason. Instead of making the planet look alien, they went for making it feel alien. The usual aesthetic of green grass, pine trees, and lazily flowing rivers are contrasted by truly alien ruins scattered across the installation, reminding you this is not, actually, earth, but rather a large construct of unknown design and purpose. It has its own weather and biomes on the surface, where green valleys will give way to snowy, mountainous regions, where the one constant is the odd architecture found in all things built on its surface. The ruins, and the halo itself, are built by a long extinct race called the Forerunners, who were also the ones to trap the flood centuries ago (thousands of years ago, if my memory of the lore is intact). Their ruins can often feel monolithic, and their architecture seems to serve little purpose, and repeats itself so much it can make even the most straightforward levels feel confusing. That's the in world perspective, but when taken as a game with levels designed by game designers, its easy to start sharpening your critical eye upon playing through the game. The innards of the halo look like they were made with a level design tool, with simple, basically matte grey textures over most things with oddly placed lights for aesthetic emphasis. The matte looking textures are given a hint of character by using some early bitmapping, but it's hard to ignore the fact that these are sort of lazy looking. For me, this design is extremely nostalgic, and though I can see how simple and blocky the design looks, I also see something foreboding, reflected from my younger eye. It feels as though the context of the maps within this world acted as justification for what was, essentially, some relatively primitive looking 3D level art.
This is more efficiently masked by the tone and texture of each level. Halo, in the original graphics, looks dark and foreboding (as a side note: the remastered graphics are gaudy, neon disasters in my opinion). Shadows are everywhere, opaque and dangerous, with shapes cutting into them through sparse lighting and the odd panel or screen. It isn't pretty, but it is ominous and effective, exactly the mood you would want when exploring an alien ruin. The Covenant architecture gets a little more criticism in my book, with its pink and purple color scheme and bitmapping that stands out as far more obtrusive in the garish lighting here. The aesthetics of Halo are oddly unique, despite their simplicity or overcompensating complexity and rhythm depending on the race responsible, and they stand out with an odd starkness when compared to the sequels, which all keep a relatively similar aesthetic. As said before, this aesthetic can be repetitive in a lot of the levels, where you could be tasked with clearing a series of exact replica rooms, where the designers had to put arrows on the floor to help guide you through them, which may be why they were changed.
Halo is probably most famous for its gameplay loop, the notoriously titled "30 seconds of fun" by one of the developers. Shooters are generally about routing enemy AI, pumping them full of lead (or plasma) while taking notice of your health. With the regenerative health, weaving in and out of the hot spot of battle is much easier, encouraging a level of aggression usually only reserved for the best of the best in most shooters up to this point, such as Doom and Quake. Halo makes you feel good at the game, even when you aren't necessarily. The skill ceiling is certainly still there on higher difficulties, where your shields can only take a couple hits before popping and leaving you vulnerable, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that Halo was a tad bit easier than its contemporaries, with the exception being maybe Half-Life. The two weapon limit means balancing your loadout for multiple scenarios, often having to change on the fly. It adds a level of strategy that, while mild, is still a core part of what is so enjoyable about Halo. Having to switch from the assault rifle over to a plasma rifle means having to contend with different strengths and weaknesses suddenly, sometimes in the middle of a fight. The assault rifle is better at shooting bodies than shields, while the plasma rifle is better against shields than bodies, meaning an up close melee may be the better option once you've pumped their shields full of plasma. Likewise, I always found the shotgun to be far superior against the flood than the covenant, and so I may flirt with the idea of switching the weapon out once the flood had been dealt with and I was up against more covenant. Making this juggling of loudouts even more fun is the famous AI of Halo, which is still some of the best AI around, and particularly of this generation. Elite enemies will duck and weave around grenades and shots, evading your reticle on your sniper as you try to line up a clean headshot, and sometimes even learning your dodging patterns and leading their shots to where you are going to be. It requires working on your feet, changing up your approach as you go, and is surprisingly still a lot of fun today. I had no plans of replaying Halo for the umpteenth time this week, but fell into it when a played a one-off level for the hell of it and got sucked in. The simple, minute-to-minute skirmishes are still quite a bit of fun, even if elements such as a weak melee and a seemingly unfair amount of enemies with rocket launchers in the latter levels try to dampen the experience.
A discussion about Halo is remiss without mentioning its mutliplayer, however. While Halo 2 may be responsible for bolstering the presence of Xbox Live and all of its features the service innovated on, Halo was not online. It required a LAN connection, with up to 16 allowed in a match. It seems ludicrous today to think that four Xboxs would be connected via ethernet in one place, but it did actually happen, as I can attest. Halo's multiplayer was simply one of the most addictive and easy to pick up multiplayer options available at the time. Partly, this was due to Halo's great control scheme, which the whole game seemed to be built around. Switching weapons was a single button press, rather than a spamming to cycle through your cache of weapons. The twin stick approach is still used today for shooters, something that was more than likely an inevitability, but Halo was there very early on in this design concept's prepubescent days. Playing Halo was intuitive, it was getting good at it that was hard. The multiplayer maps on show here had their clunkers, such as Boarding Action or Chiron TL-34, but even these at least showcased interesting design ideas. Boarding Action has two muli-layered levels facing one another, allowing you to snipe those on the other side, or enter a teleporter to go there yourself and put the beat down on would-be snipers. Chiron TL-34 . . . well, it was confusing and about teleporting between small rooms, so not particularly good anyway you slice it. But Halo also had notable multiplayer classics, such as Sidewinder, a large, two-base map notorious for stalemates in Capture-the-Flag, and Wizards, a small map with two levels that inevitably led to chaotic gunfights and quick evasive maneuvers. There was a map for every type of play, be it team based or free-for-all, objective or "slayer". Halo simply had some of the best multiplayer out there.
Talking about the Halo series can be a bit odd, because taken together (particularly the first five or so, depending on if you count Halo 3: ODST or not) they are a 10/10 in a bundle, but taken apart you can see weaknesses in one made up for in another. Halo has a tone to it missed in other games, whereas Halo: Reach probably has the best campaign. Halo 2 and Halo 3 both have some of the best multiplayer in the entire series, but Halo 2 probably has more classic maps and Halo 3 has the cinema mode and Forge. Talking about the original Halo on its own makes obvious some of its flaws that would otherwise garner exceptions when taken with its brethren. The level design has serious problems, and the multiplayer would be innovated on later, but as far as firsts go in a series, Halo: Combat Evolved is a monumental achievement. Not perfect, but not particularly dated in the gameplay department. The rabid fanbase can make the series less than appealing at times, but there is a reason Halo has garnered that fanbase over time, and it isn't just because of its cultural status. It is neither the most innovative, nor best shooter of its generation, even, but it is a landmark worthy of consideration in the annals of gaming history.
9.0
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