Halo: Combat Evolved is Timeless

We’ve entered a new year my fellow readers! Time to put together a list of new year's resolutions to only then fail two weeks in. Get used to writing 2024 instead of 2023 whenever you write the date, and this year is gonna be especially chaotic seeing how it’s an election year. Vote between two individuals you probably don’t care about and watch the disappointment kick in. Life could be better, but at least we have video games. Pieces of art we can immerse ourselves into and run away from the troubles of the world. There’s already a handful of titles I’m quite excited for, but what I didn’t know is that we’re about to reach the five year anniversary of this very site. Time really does fly by. Who knew a silly little blog I formed during high school would be something I attend to regularly. Since we’re inching towards that special occasion I thought it would be best to cover a game that means a lot to me. It’s one of my earlier gaming memories and without it I probably wouldn’t have gotten into gaming. Halo: Combat Evolved, a first person shooter made by Bungie and published by the big behemoth we all know as Microsoft. The people who made a computer. Anyways, Halo is a special game to a lot of people and I can understand why.

It came out during the start of a new century and was the game that made Microsoft a big name in the video game industry. First person shooters were pretty good for the time. Doom, Half-Life, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Goldeneye 007, and so on. Each entry in the genre felt like another leap forward, but the thing about these games is that they never brought first person shooters to home consoles. I mean there were attempts. Goldeneye 007 brought shooters to the N64 and there were a few ports of Half-Life and Quake 2 to consoles. However, it was Halo that kicked off shooters on consoles. Microsoft needed a selling point for their new console, the Xbox, and they partnered up with Bungie to get the job done. Before Halo blew up, Bungie wasn’t really well praised or popular. They made the Marathon series, a sci-fi shooter with maze-like level design and saw a war between humans and aliens. Much of which helped inspire the Halo series. However, those games did not particularly sell well or were well received. When Bungie started working on Halo their ideas began to run wild. They had the tech, freedom, and funding to create whatever they wished. Originally Halo was going to be an RTS game similar to Starcraft, but they settled for making a first person shooter. They wanted to evolve the shooter genre, and that’s what they did.

They modernized the first person shooter genre and along the way told a compelling story. Past first person shooters had stories too with Half-Life being the most recognizable, but Halo wanted players’ attention. They wanted them to be excited every step of the way and created a fun and deep universe just with the first entry. Bungie was worried that Halo would struggle against other console giants as realistically nobody would buy a new console just for one game, but remember this series blew up bigger than they expected. Halo: Combat Evolved was a massive success and sold hundreds if not thousands of copies within a few weeks. Critics praised it across the board, and it did well enough to warrant a sequel. A follow-up with so much hype surrounding it that it became one of the fastest selling games of all time. Then you had a third entry that had the same level of hype again, and so on. Halo: Combat Evolved is extraordinary. Not just from a historical standpoint for gaming, but as a whole. It’s not entirely perfect and some aspects have not aged well, but god damn it does so much right that it’s easy to ignore many of the problems it has. So today we’re gonna be talking about Halo: Combat Evolved and why it is such a classic. 

Story

We find ourselves sailing across the stars. The Pillar of Autumn orbits around what appears to be a giant ring full of life. Different ecosystems lie down there, and the crew are wondering whether they should or should not explore the ring. It’s the 26th century and mankind has been exploring a variety of planets. Establishing colonies and making peace with themselves. However, a group consisting of various alien species known as the Covenant claimed war on the human race. They began attacking our cities and thus the UNSC, basically the military, fought back. For years we have been trying to figure out the Covenant’s goals and how to stop them, and we may have just figured out how to. The Covenant had coordinates towards a giant ring, but a special task force managed to steal the coordinates allowing the Pillar of Autumn to get there first. Just before they could sail down to the ring they are attacked by a pursuing Covenant fleet. Hell breaks loose, but before things can get worse they decide to awaken an elite soldier aboard, the Master Chief. One of the first Spartans to ever come into existence. The Spartans are the greatest soldier humanity has ever made. Children that were genetically strong since birth, heavily experimented on by the UNSC, and trained to be war machines. Not all Spartans survived the process, but those that did became the best of the best. Humanities saving grace from what feels like an unwinnable battle. 

The Chief is awakened and is assigned to take care of an artificial intelligence manufactured by Halsey. An elite scientist who works for the UNSC and helped create the Spartans. Cortana is the name of the AI, and together they help fight back against the Covenant on the ship and escape to the giant ring. Below. They crash land, manage to survive, and regroup with the surviving crew. Their goal now is to explore the ring, figure out why the Covenant came, and stop them from accomplishing their goals. They may even uncover the history of the ring. Who made it, what it was made for, and why it was left untouched for millions of years They’ll discover soon enough.

Gameplay

Take everything you know about old school shooter design and chuck it out the window. Halo was one of the first games to kickstart modern shooter design, and even though it contains design choices I favor less Halo is one of few to do it right. Instead of being a movement based shooter where there’s very little cover to work with, it's the opposite. There’s a ton of cover to work with, but your movement is very limited. In fact, standing out in the open is a death wish as enemies can kill you within seconds. However, you always want to be on the move as enemies will close in on your position and even throw grenades which will kill you instantaneously if you stand by them. You want to be moving from cover spot to cover spot. Find advantage points and know the best ways to punish your enemies. There’s a good handful of enemy types and the assortment of them get you to change your approach to combat. Grunts are your basic cannon fodder, and can be quite tricky when placed in large groups or with stronger foes. Elites move around as quickly as you and have regenerating shields. Jackals wield physical shields to block attacks, but can be killed if you shoot them from behind. The Hunters deal heavy damage up close and afar, but do have an exposed weak spot which you have to bait them into exposing. You even have variants of existing enemies like Grunts who suicide bomb towards you, Grunts who wield cannons, and stronger Elites who require more bullets or are sometimes invisible. A few even wield glowing energy swords which kill you instantly. A weapon that became usable in future games.

Combat is all about what you bring into a fight, how you use it, and what is the best way with tackling foes. Who do you prioritize and how to use the terrain to your advantage. That is what makes every gun fight in this game so exhilarating. You have a nice array of tools and they each have their own quirks. The pistol is good at dealing damage from short and long range, but is not as strong as most weapons unless you are dealing headshots. The assault rifle fires bullets rapidly and is good when facing multiple weaker enemies. Sniper rifle can kill most enemies instantly from a long range, and the rocket launcher does the exact same thing except the projectiles move much slower. You get a shotgun later on which is good for dealing loads of damage up close, and can even wield Covenant weapons. The plasma pistol can fire plasma projectiles rapidly or can be charged up for a shield lowering blast. Plasma rifle does the same thing but for more damage, and the Needler allows you to stick needles into foes and if enough are stuck on they explode. You also have two grenade types, a normal frag grenade and a sticky grenade. You can only carry two guns at a time with some having sparse ammo supplies. It’s all about knowing which one you want and what’ll be best for the combat scenarios that are about to come. 

Another thing that makes Halo unique, well until every major shooter did it, is the regenerating shield. You have a main health bar which can be refilled by picking up medkits, but alongside it you have an energy shield. These go down when shot at, but can be brought back up if you take cover and avoid damage for a specific amount of time. This creates interesting strategies. Do you want to play methodically, or think you can gun down things blazingly while soaking every shot. The choice is yours. You have the occasional vehicle sections like driving a warthog with a turret in the back, a tank to blast bigger vehicles easily, ghosts to glide around and shoot easily, and banshees to fly around. There’s marines who can help you during fights, and if you look around hard enough you can find power ups like invisibility or two extra shields. There’s so many tools in this game and ways to tackle combat. Sometimes you are railroaded into doing specific things and some arenas aren’t good for certain weapons. However, it’s these design staples combined with other good design choices that makes Halo so fun to play and replay. Hopefully you can kill all the Covenant bastards who stand in your way and find the secrets of the ring. It all depends on you.

Thoughts

Almost 23 years later, Halo: Combat Evolved is still a magnificent game to play. I’ve played this game maybe four to five times during middle school, and somehow it  still feels refreshing. The combat loop is satisfying and well designed. You’re pushed to move from cover to cover with how big enemy groups are and how they are doing the most they can to overwhelm you. There’s a two gun restriction, but you want to swap between tools lying around often seeing how your ammo supplies quickly drain out and some tools are useless during certain moments. Different enemy types and the arrangements of them get you to strategize and consider who to prioritize. The arrangement of battlefields and the structure of them are nice. You have tight closed spaces and big open fields often serving as vehicle sections. They each give you enough space and I never found myself overwhelmed because there was too much or too little to work with. One of the greatest aspects of Halo: Combat Evolved, and I'm sure anybody can agree with me about this opinion, has to be the environments and how they immerse you into the setting. How you just soak in everything. 

Halo: Combat Evolved has some of the most breathtaking scenery in a first person shooter. It’s a game that manages to take you to multiple places within its eight to ten hour runtime. You start off on a spaceship, then go to open fields, cliffside, Covenant ship, snowy tundra, high tech ruin, swamp lamp, infected zones, and much more. It’s impressive to see how detailed the universe is and wonder how the original Xbox was able to manage it. I know a lot of Halo fans are mixed on it, but I played the 2011 remaster of Combat Evolved. It manages to add a ton of detail and depth to the world, and even though the lighting is screwed up for some areas and enemies tend to look like they are glitching into walls due to some details taking up space it looks great today. I won’t say it’s the best version of Combat Evolved. That I’ll let readers decide. The audio design is great and one thing I feel like future games lack is the sound of the weapons in Combat Evolved. The assault rifle feels godly to use as it heavily fires bullet after bullet. The shotgun thumbs, every explosion contains ferocity, and even your melee attack feels heavy to use. The music is epic and knows when to settle you into a scene. When to make large scale gunfights feel more epic, create moments of tension, and make the player part of an even bigger world. One with depth.

I always enjoyed the story and lore of the Halo series. It’s not one of my favorites and it does get a bit too complicated at times, but it’s engaging and drags you along for an entertaining ride. The history of the rings, the goals of the Covenant and UNSC, the big twist later on, and finding out the truth. This is what has made the plot of these games so incredible and Combat Evolved serves as a good foundation for what would become. Now this is where we move onto the negatives of this game. Halo: Combat Evolved has a great combat loop, level design, and missions. It is an entertaining game from beginning to end, but around the Assault of The Control Room mission, otherwise the halfway point, is where the quality of the game shifts left and right. Like it’s still really good, but it gets repetitive. I don’t even have to give a spoiler warning, but the introduction of the Flood is when combat scenarios feel poorly designed. They throw you into either tight corridors or rooms lacking cover, and wave upon wave of these guys. They are easily killable, but it’s the number of Flood that makes fighting them annoying. Sometimes you can’t even tell where they are coming from or what weapons they are wielding. Some of them wield rocket launchers and don’t even give you a second to react when they fire. Combat Evolved also has this thing where if a bunch of grenades are put close together and one goes off they all do. On one hand it’s cool, but on the other it leads to cheap deaths because the explosion is too big. 

The level design gets repetitive too. The mission called 343 Guilty Spark has you navigate a series of tunnels and a lot of the room structures look the same. You may even get lost and try to backtrack where you just came from. The Library is probably the most infamous mission seeing how you fight wave upon wave of foes across four similar looking floors. One mission has you backtrack through a snow level you marched across an hour ago. Another mission is literally the Covenant ship again, and you go there to check on Captain Keyes again. I can understand why Bungie did this. Most likely they had limited resources, had to work around technical limitations, and had to meet a deadline. I’m not gonna say it aged badly because I did enjoy these missions, but it does start to feel like padding. Finally the checkpoint system in this game is very wonky. So wonky that it makes some sections of the game a bit frustrating. Sometimes checkpoints work and when you die you get conveniently sent back a few seconds before a fight. Then there are the times it doesn’t work and you get sent two to three whole combat sections ago. Otherwise you’ll lose ten to fifteen minutes of progress. I know my criticism sounds very harsh, but it's just because I love this game. I grew up on it, played it several times, and just want to point out what was fixed or improved with time. Halo: Combat Evolved is amazing and can recommend it to anybody. Thankfully it’s easily accessible due to The Master Chief Collection which is available on modern Xbox consoles and PC. Runs well and while there are some bugs it's nothing to ruin the game. I give Halo: Combat Evolved a 9/10 for excellence at best. 

9/10, Excellence