I've wanted to play Halo for a while but it was originally Xbox exclusive. Until the Master Chief Collection came to Steam, and the price dropped down to about as much as the last paperback book I bought.
Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 form the core trilogy. Halo Reach is a sort of prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 3: ODST takes place on Earth during the events of Halo 2 and the start of Halo 3, and Halo 4 returns to the Master Chief, but in a new situation on another planet.
All of these are in the Master Chief Collection, with the first two games being remastered or "Anniversary" editions.
That all straight now?
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Anyhow, Halo 2 is when the lore starts getting complicated. You play about half the game as the Arbiter, who is an Elite chosen by the Prophets to redeem himself after losing a Sacred Ring to the Demon, and finds himself in conflict with the Brutes especially after an Oracle explains a few things the Prophets had wrong about the Great Journey....
Yeah. This is what Yahtzee was talking about in one of his Zero Punctuation reviews. There are conversations in this game where every other word is capitalized.
So short version -- as of Halo 2 -- what is known is that the long-extinct high-tech Forerunners (as if you couldn't tell just by their name alone) were losing to the Flood, a parasitic alien life form (think fast zombie plague with all the trimmings), and they created the Halo Rings; ring-shaped habitat megastructures with about the habitable surface area of your average planet (for whatever reason) but entirely intended as doomsday devices; when the Rings fire they wipe out all life, period -- thus starving the Flood of potential hosts.
Some years later, the Covenant -- a theocratic alliance of several alien races -- has decided the Forerunners are gods and has confused the firing of the Rings with some sort of mass spiritual transcendence which they would very much like to happen. Oh, and they hate Humanity for desecrating all their cosmic temples. But while brawling around the Ring of the first game someone lets a sample of the Flood out of secure containment.
In the second game the three-way fight turns into a globular cluster. The three leaders of the Covenant have a religious falling-out, one of the more militaristic member races pulls a coup, and the Flood gets enough infected brains in one place in order to grow its own colony intelligence. Shifting alliances and frequent betrayals characterize the remainder of that trilogy.
A cool thing about that brain thing; the Flood tactics visibly change through the game, going from Zerg Rush to being dangerously canny. There are some other social dynamics at play; the Brutes operate in packs, fighting cooperatively, but when isolated from his pack a lone Brute will go rogue and start charging things. The Unggoy cannon-fodder lack esprit de corps and if their commanders are killed they will flee the battle.
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The second game has more visual impact, and communicates a little better the scale of the Halo megastructures. There is more sense of space overall and orientation over a landscape, even if you traverse that landscape by going through far too many similar valleys/rooms/corridors/tunnels. At least there aren't quite as many this time, and they aren't quite as claustrophobic.
Still, I have to compare again to Mass Effect and Half-Life. Both of those games changed things up, with the environment, the mix of enemies, special goals or properties causing dynamic changes to the mix of strategies you could employ. In Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 the combat is largely defined by your personal preferences and whatever weapons you managed to find lying around. Even in the larger arena-like spaces there aren't good ways to bunker and snipe or to bunch up enemies for a grenade or take over a pintle-mounted heavy weapon and go to town. You pretty much just do the same thing, only it takes longer to reach the next save point.
It is nice looking, and the play is fast and dynamically changing and you need to be smart and adaptable. So that's all to the good. Not bad for the price of an omelette.
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