I posted this review on the Order's forum, but Briosafreak asked me to post it here as well, so here are my impressions of Halo for the entire NMA crew.
First off, releasing Halo exclusively on XBox and then two years later on PC was a mistake. Instead of getting a game which could have, two years ago, set new standards for first person shooters, we got a half-assed console port that is inferior to almost every shooter on the market and has little or nothing to justify the outrageous 50$ price tag. Stealing a game from PC and releasing it on a stupid console is one thing, but making a PC version years later and presenting it as a ground-breaking, state-of-the-art action game is completely different, and it really pisses me off. Still, in this review I'll try to set aside my burning hatred for everything console-related (the really evil kind of hatred, that can only be extinguished by execution of every console owner on the planet) and be as objective as possible.
The first thing that I noticed was the ridiculously simplified installation utility that was clearly designed with 6-year-olds and mentally handicapped people in mind. Big, flashy letters, colorful, graphical interface, silly options like "express" installation, inability to prevent Direct X 9.0b from being installed (even if you have it already!)... it's all too tragic to be amusing, though not at all surprising, considering this is a Microsoft release. Even the in-game interface is equally retard-friendly, with huge letters and stupid descriptions of each and every option, even when their function is obvious even to least bright specimens of humankind. Inability to assign two keys to same action (well, you can assign two keys, but they can't both be on the keyboard!) doesn't help things, it just makes it obvious that Halo is a console port.
Second thing noticeable about Halo are its very much outdated graphics. Polygonal objects are very simple, textures lack detail, as do the environments. Fancy effects like pixel shaders, trueform and environmental bump-mapping are non-existent. Edges are very pixelated and in serious need of anti-aliasing. Unfortunately, even though the game is technically outdated and old, it still runs quite slowly and skips a lot, even on a pretty powerful rigs. I tried playing it on a Centrino 1.5 GHz with Radeon 9200 64 MB and 512 MB DDR, and its performance was unsatisfactory. On my P4 2.4 GHz with GeForce 4 ti4600 it runs smoothly in 1280x1024 and with maximum details, but only without FSAA - very disappointing, considering that Unreal Tournament 2003, which has much better graphics, runs quite smoothly even when FSAA 4x is on.
The plot isn't particularly interesting - you are some kind of cyborg, the last of your kind. Planet Reach, where they manufactured cyborgs was destroyed by an army of alien races known as Covenant, who posess technology far more powerful than anything humanity has ever seen. You are aboard a military ship called Pillar of Autumn, which contains last survivors of destruction of Reach. Autumn made a random flight into deep space to divert the alien force from Earth and hopefully locate their home planet. After decelerating from hyperspeed, the ship find itself in a mysterious solar system, near a planet that is surrounded by a huge ring known as "Halo". The ring has its own gravity and a breatheable atmosphere. Pursued by the Covenant, the crew abandons Autumn and makes a desperate landing on Halo. Aliens follow them, hoping to discover the secrets of Halo and use them in their war against humanity.
Story is presented pretty lamely, through in-game sequences and terrible voice acting. Voice acting and dialogues are so horrible that they manage to kill even the slightest bit of interest in Halo's secrets and fate of your fellow soldiers. That's the first reason why single player campaign is really not worth playing.
Second reason becomes obvious the moment you try to save your progress. Namely, you can't! The game is saved at the beginning of level, and there are also checkpoints scattered throughout the level where you can save the game, but only for the current session! God help you if you hit "restart level", you will immediately be transported to the beginning of the level and all your progress in the last session will be lost... Absolutely terrible, this flaw ruins the single player experience completely and shows that absolutely no effort was made to turn Halo into a decent conversion.
Gameplay is typical for a console shooter. You run around real fast, shoot things and pick up ammo and medkits. Good thing is that enemies are pretty tough, as they posess energy shields, and they attack in large numbers, bad thing is that you have an energy shield too. This energy shield recharges automatically after not getting hit for a few seconds, so it really kills the challenge and spoils the fun. In multiplayer I always disable it for all players. Another good thing is that you can only carry three weapons - a pistol, a rifle of sorts (shotgun, plasma rifle, assault rifle, flame thrower etc.) and grenades. Ammo is limited, so often you have to throw away your current weapon and pick up a Covenant plasma rifle or a dead marine's shotgun. It really increases the excitement, especially because enemies are not only tough, but they are also fast, agile and show certain intelligence - they attack in squads, strafe and retreat if they are defeated. Too bad they are so annoyingly unimaginative and stereotype that killing them provides no pleasure at all. Oh well, at least their weapons and vehicles are cool.
Speaking of vehicles, they are one of the coolest, most fun things Halo has to offer. Whether it is a Warthog buggy with a mounted machine gun/rocket launcher, a hovering Ghost motorcycle or a flying Banshee fighter, the vehicles provide a whole new dimension of entertaiment and allow for new cooperative tactics in multiplayer. The controls are a bit awkward (you use mouse to turn and W key to accelerate), but it's not too difficult to get used to them.
As I already stated, Halo's single player mode is absolute horror, but multiplayer mode is a completely different story. There are many gameplay modes, including various derivatives of CTF, deathmatch, survival, assault, king of the hill (where you have to defend your base for an amount of time) and other modes previously seen in a number of other PC games. If you aren't content with the selection, you can even create your own modes and easily adjust the rules for them however you see fit. You can play over internet or a local area network, and maximum number of players is 16. However, soon I noticed that Halo's multiplayer is really not as great as it seems and no match for fantastic Battlefield 1942. First of all, maps in Halo are way too small and don't allow the player to take much advantage of vehicles and terrain. Indoor maps are even worse, as they are cramped, ugly and tedious. Secondly, it's impossible to play through the campaign cooperatively, which makes me wonder why the hell they even bothered to design a campaign. Finally, it's impossible to play against bots in multiplayer, so you can forget about practicing for online multiplayer matches. Overall, Halo's multiplayer is pretty average (though it's much better than single player) and bland when compared to Battlefield 1942 and other PC titles.
To sum up, Halo is a pretty average game for today's PC standards, and inferior to its PC counterparts in every aspect. It offers very little in terms of atmosphere, storyline, gameplay and graphics, and even though it has its moments (like decent multiplayer, fun gameplay, challenging opponents, well designed weapons, vehicles etc.), it still can't match its more modern and sophisticated rivals and justify its high price. This is most unfortunate, because two years ago Halo could have been a fantastic game.
First off, releasing Halo exclusively on XBox and then two years later on PC was a mistake. Instead of getting a game which could have, two years ago, set new standards for first person shooters, we got a half-assed console port that is inferior to almost every shooter on the market and has little or nothing to justify the outrageous 50$ price tag. Stealing a game from PC and releasing it on a stupid console is one thing, but making a PC version years later and presenting it as a ground-breaking, state-of-the-art action game is completely different, and it really pisses me off. Still, in this review I'll try to set aside my burning hatred for everything console-related (the really evil kind of hatred, that can only be extinguished by execution of every console owner on the planet) and be as objective as possible.
The first thing that I noticed was the ridiculously simplified installation utility that was clearly designed with 6-year-olds and mentally handicapped people in mind. Big, flashy letters, colorful, graphical interface, silly options like "express" installation, inability to prevent Direct X 9.0b from being installed (even if you have it already!)... it's all too tragic to be amusing, though not at all surprising, considering this is a Microsoft release. Even the in-game interface is equally retard-friendly, with huge letters and stupid descriptions of each and every option, even when their function is obvious even to least bright specimens of humankind. Inability to assign two keys to same action (well, you can assign two keys, but they can't both be on the keyboard!) doesn't help things, it just makes it obvious that Halo is a console port.
Second thing noticeable about Halo are its very much outdated graphics. Polygonal objects are very simple, textures lack detail, as do the environments. Fancy effects like pixel shaders, trueform and environmental bump-mapping are non-existent. Edges are very pixelated and in serious need of anti-aliasing. Unfortunately, even though the game is technically outdated and old, it still runs quite slowly and skips a lot, even on a pretty powerful rigs. I tried playing it on a Centrino 1.5 GHz with Radeon 9200 64 MB and 512 MB DDR, and its performance was unsatisfactory. On my P4 2.4 GHz with GeForce 4 ti4600 it runs smoothly in 1280x1024 and with maximum details, but only without FSAA - very disappointing, considering that Unreal Tournament 2003, which has much better graphics, runs quite smoothly even when FSAA 4x is on.
The plot isn't particularly interesting - you are some kind of cyborg, the last of your kind. Planet Reach, where they manufactured cyborgs was destroyed by an army of alien races known as Covenant, who posess technology far more powerful than anything humanity has ever seen. You are aboard a military ship called Pillar of Autumn, which contains last survivors of destruction of Reach. Autumn made a random flight into deep space to divert the alien force from Earth and hopefully locate their home planet. After decelerating from hyperspeed, the ship find itself in a mysterious solar system, near a planet that is surrounded by a huge ring known as "Halo". The ring has its own gravity and a breatheable atmosphere. Pursued by the Covenant, the crew abandons Autumn and makes a desperate landing on Halo. Aliens follow them, hoping to discover the secrets of Halo and use them in their war against humanity.
Story is presented pretty lamely, through in-game sequences and terrible voice acting. Voice acting and dialogues are so horrible that they manage to kill even the slightest bit of interest in Halo's secrets and fate of your fellow soldiers. That's the first reason why single player campaign is really not worth playing.
Second reason becomes obvious the moment you try to save your progress. Namely, you can't! The game is saved at the beginning of level, and there are also checkpoints scattered throughout the level where you can save the game, but only for the current session! God help you if you hit "restart level", you will immediately be transported to the beginning of the level and all your progress in the last session will be lost... Absolutely terrible, this flaw ruins the single player experience completely and shows that absolutely no effort was made to turn Halo into a decent conversion.
Gameplay is typical for a console shooter. You run around real fast, shoot things and pick up ammo and medkits. Good thing is that enemies are pretty tough, as they posess energy shields, and they attack in large numbers, bad thing is that you have an energy shield too. This energy shield recharges automatically after not getting hit for a few seconds, so it really kills the challenge and spoils the fun. In multiplayer I always disable it for all players. Another good thing is that you can only carry three weapons - a pistol, a rifle of sorts (shotgun, plasma rifle, assault rifle, flame thrower etc.) and grenades. Ammo is limited, so often you have to throw away your current weapon and pick up a Covenant plasma rifle or a dead marine's shotgun. It really increases the excitement, especially because enemies are not only tough, but they are also fast, agile and show certain intelligence - they attack in squads, strafe and retreat if they are defeated. Too bad they are so annoyingly unimaginative and stereotype that killing them provides no pleasure at all. Oh well, at least their weapons and vehicles are cool.
Speaking of vehicles, they are one of the coolest, most fun things Halo has to offer. Whether it is a Warthog buggy with a mounted machine gun/rocket launcher, a hovering Ghost motorcycle or a flying Banshee fighter, the vehicles provide a whole new dimension of entertaiment and allow for new cooperative tactics in multiplayer. The controls are a bit awkward (you use mouse to turn and W key to accelerate), but it's not too difficult to get used to them.
As I already stated, Halo's single player mode is absolute horror, but multiplayer mode is a completely different story. There are many gameplay modes, including various derivatives of CTF, deathmatch, survival, assault, king of the hill (where you have to defend your base for an amount of time) and other modes previously seen in a number of other PC games. If you aren't content with the selection, you can even create your own modes and easily adjust the rules for them however you see fit. You can play over internet or a local area network, and maximum number of players is 16. However, soon I noticed that Halo's multiplayer is really not as great as it seems and no match for fantastic Battlefield 1942. First of all, maps in Halo are way too small and don't allow the player to take much advantage of vehicles and terrain. Indoor maps are even worse, as they are cramped, ugly and tedious. Secondly, it's impossible to play through the campaign cooperatively, which makes me wonder why the hell they even bothered to design a campaign. Finally, it's impossible to play against bots in multiplayer, so you can forget about practicing for online multiplayer matches. Overall, Halo's multiplayer is pretty average (though it's much better than single player) and bland when compared to Battlefield 1942 and other PC titles.
To sum up, Halo is a pretty average game for today's PC standards, and inferior to its PC counterparts in every aspect. It offers very little in terms of atmosphere, storyline, gameplay and graphics, and even though it has its moments (like decent multiplayer, fun gameplay, challenging opponents, well designed weapons, vehicles etc.), it still can't match its more modern and sophisticated rivals and justify its high price. This is most unfortunate, because two years ago Halo could have been a fantastic game.
