Way back when I first joined the Replica Prop community over at the RPF, some of the greatest looking props were coming from the video game world. Several names were popping up all the time in the stuff I really liked the look of; Portal, Half-Life, Mass Effect. And Halo.
I impulse-bought Portal when it came on sale for a couple of bucks, and that started a whole love affair/huge time suck with modern games, especially "twitch" games -- first-person and third-person real-time games, as opposed to the turn-based strategy stuff I'd been doing before then.
It has taken me this long to work my way around to Halo.
Mostly I came to it for the world-building, the setting and lore. And that's a mixed bag. Yes, you are exploring a (small) Ringworld. And you can look up in those very few scenes that are set outside and see the Ring stretching above you. But other than that there's little sense of the thing.
Well, that's for Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the series, which I played as the Anniversary graphics upgrade. (Which, in a cute but poorly-documented bit, will toggle between the upgraded graphics and the original graphics with a tap of the tab key.)
Scale is a bit inconsistent in the game anyhow. In the last section you fight your way through a crashed ship with the final battle being in the main engine room with thirty or more opponents shooting at you. I've worked in much bigger buildings. But then you drive at top speed for six minutes to escape the ship. Drive, at a scale speed of at least thirty MPH.
And that sort of segues to the lore. The lore is interesting, and complicated, and it has a deep history. And here is where I'm going to contrast with Mass Effect because Mass Effect gets history. Everything in the ME universe arises organically from the foundations. Yes, real history is complicated and inconsistent and entire civilizations go missing for centuries before someone reads the right inscription.
But the Halo universe feels wrong. It feels like every time the game designers needed to break up the endless combat with some slightly different version of the same endless mazes of corridors and small useless rooms, they invented some new bit of lore. "Wait, that couldn't have been made by the Forerunners! Oh, okay. So we'll just say this was made by the Predecessors. What happened to them? Oh, let's say there was a war with the Forerunners."
To give the first game credit, it keeps most of its lore behind the scenes. Why did Cortana send them to the Halo and how did she even know about it? Why did the Covenant attack Humanity? Who built the Halo and why were the Flood held captive there? None of this is explained and this is actually a strong choice -- a lesson George Lucas apparently forgot. You don't need to know everything; you are just one soldier doing the best with the facts at hand.
Which mostly involves shooting at far too many of the same basic enemy types in a maze of identical winding little rooms and corridors. Seriously, I got lost so many times. And getting killed, which moves us to gameplay.
Whereas the primary elements of most modern AAA shooters are the Holy 4 weapons selection and chest-high walls. (you will always have four weapons; not three, not two. Five is right out.) That is, cover shooters and you largely vary your tactics by choosing rifle/sniper rifle, machine gun, shotgun, and nobody chooses the pistol. Except me, and a few other people who have realized that often the pistol deals the highest damage at intermediate ranges and is extremely accurate.
Halo CE introduced the Holy Trilogy of Halo; weapons (which you have two and only two), grenades, melee. Instead of cover, it has recharging shields. And smart AI and lots of indirect fire. So the usual tactic is to hit-and-run, actively engaging to take out priority targets then ducking out of sight just long enough to recharge your shields.
Also, whereas vehicle sections, heavy weapons, and other ways to break up the pattern are usually scripted bit in AAA games, Halo CE largely integrates those. And I have to say, shooting an enemy driver and stealing their Ghost (a motorcycle-like ground skimmer) was my go-to any time the game gave me an opportunity.
Some enemies are bullet sponges, and the Flood particularly go for Zerg Rush tactics, so the biggest enemy is, as with most games, attrition and fatigue. After dodging near-misses and scrounging for ammo (usually by trading off weapons endlessly for every weird alien weapon you find lying around the battlefield) and trying to watch your shields over a ten-minute mad fur-fight, eventually you blink and...it's back to the last checkpoint.
It does keep things lively, though. You rarely have the chance to really strategize and pick the optimal weapon and approach. Instead it is whatever you currently picked up and the best you can make do with it. Halo CE also has an annoying habit of insta-kills; there are artillery and various things that explode and enemies that spawn right on top of you and there's a lot of times you didn't do anything wrong, it was just you got unlucky.
So my rating? Aside from the endless, endless little rooms and corridors, the combat is decent. I probably would have dropped to an easier setting not because I had any trouble beating it, but because it was getting boring and repetitive.
The lore? It is a very Marines-themed universe (well, at least the parts you see of it). So now I understand that part of how people talk about the game and it's universe (because make no mistake, there are dozens of games, plus books and comic books and fan-made films, set in that universe.)
But regardless of how you feel about the lore, the interaction with it is different. You don't make choices, you don't have dialog, you don't really interact with anyone (particularly not civilians). So on that basis, I really prefer walking around the Mass Effect world.
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