[sub](Editor's Note: The "Hey Dragon, You Can Have Her" series of reviews are designed to be looks into the flaws of games that were over-hyped, under-developed, blindly followed or questionably praised over the course of their life. For a more "positive" look at games, please search for "A Princess Worth Saving.")[/sub]
Halo: Combat... Evolved?
If there were ever a Grand Canyon sized dividing line in the gaming community as a whole, you could bet that it'd be filled with "covenant" soldiers fighting seven foot tall power-armor clad space-marines. For better or worse, Halo: Combat Evolved (as in the first game of the series) ranks up there with Final Fantasy VII, Street Fighter II and Super Mario Bros. in the, "Most Influential Games of All Time" category. Now keep in mind, that particular category isn't filled with the "best" games of all time, but, like Britney Spears, sometimes games fall on our doorsteps that, despite seemingly obvious shortcomings, alter the course of the gaming world forever. Halo is one of those games. I won't bore you with facts and history of the franchise... if you want that, there's one of those rather comprehensive wiki articles [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved] that you can browse through if you've honestly never heard of the game... in which case why are you here?
Halo surprised everyone in one way or another. Taking the near-decade old genre of the "First-Person Shooter" and bringing it to the masses on Microsoft's first Xbox was a turning point in modern video gaming for sure, but a lot of us were left wondering, "what's all the fuss about?" Okay, so you have a shooter with nice semi-set-piece battles, a semblance of a storyline, a better-than-decent soundtrack and the ability to throw bright blue grenades that stick to little bad guys that look and sound like mutated Munchkins who somehow speak English regardless of what language their alien peers are blabbering. For all intents and purposes however, what the seasoned first-person shooter crowd was handed was a decidedly average shooter that delivered less than games (even console-based) released years prior.
To the newcomer and non-PC gamer crowd however, Halo was a revolution. There seems to be a "rule" (in the scientific sense) of sorts when it comes to Halo; it goes like this:
If you've never played a First-Person Shooter before,
If you did not own a current-generation game-worthy PC,
If the original Microsoft Xbox was your first gaming console,
Then you absolutely loved Halo.
This is totally understandable. For the aforementioned people, this would be like driving a Honda Civic for the first time when you grew up riding bikes and horses. For the people used to driving sup'ed-up Corvettes and Ford GT's however, this was just another car on the lot. So, let's compare and contrast. In any First-Person Shooter, you have a few mechanics that compose gameplay. Here's where Halo stacks up against the rest of the bunchin those aspects.
(Keep in mind, this will be a comparison of the first Halo game against other games previously released a the time)
Movement:
This is the first and foremost core mechanic of any First-Person shooter. If there is one thing you are doing from the moment you step foot into the first level until the last moment of the last boss-fight, it's moving. Halo comparatively to its brethren, feels as though you are really wearing 400 pound space-marine power-armor, so if realism was what they were going after, they nailed it. Maybe it's the expansive environments, maybe it's the fact that there are so many other entities around you that are moving passed you all the time, but for whatever reason, Halo feels like the fat kid trying desperately to run that 20 minute mile. You would think in that super-powered armor of yours, they'd have implemented some sort of technology to counteract the fact that you had to move while wearing it. Why do you think that all the Japanese power-armors have jets built in? In all seriousness, this is probably one of the fundamental reasons that people DON'T like Halo when compared to the quick movement speed of games like Quake and Unreal Tournament. It quite literally feels like playing Super Mario Bros. without the "run" button. Jumping however, also felt like you were a mid-eighties plumber as you suspiciously launched and floated through the air with each button press.
Worse Than: Quake (series), Unreal (series)
Better Than: Half-Life, Goldeneye 007
Shooting:
If there's one OTHER thing you're doing besides moving from bell to bell in this genre, it's shooting; it is a First-Person Shooter after all. Being on a console, (i.e. playing by twiddling your thumbs), Halo does suffer from a unavoidable case of auto-aim-itus, but regardless, the shooting mechanic somehow became incredibly unbalanced. From the damage points on the enemies, to the strength and accuracy of the various weapons, the mechanics of shooting in Halo felt like a giant leap backward when compared to the more skill-oriented shooters of the time, even when stacked against other console shooters. One of the fundamental aspects of shooters is weapon balancing, which either goes the path of "new weapon is better than the last weapon" or "new weapon is different but equally powered than the last weapon," and somehow, Halo does neither as the game comes down to "how good you are and how much ammo you can find for the pistol." The plasma-based weapons are rubbish and should only be used when other weapons aren't available, and some weapons ("Needler" anyone?) are downright useless. This was also the first game to make grenades an annoying focus to the point of spending half your game watching your grenade count meter in the corner.
Worse Than: 90% of Other First-Person Shooters
Better Than: ... Daikatana?
Weapons:
Piggy-backing on the last concept, again, the weapons in Halo are totally unbalanced making most of them fall to the point of "useless." More important however, was the developer's decision to go for a more "realistic" (read: simple) feel by limiting the player to two weapons at once. While not only dumbing down the gameplay, this severely breaks the "super-powered space-marine" aesthetic. Any person wearing that much armor should not be limited to holding only a pistol and a "plasma pistol" at a given time. This is not World War II, this is the future. This is the one shooter that very well could have justified holding ten weapons at once from a story aspect, and instead the developers chose to focus heavily on the "marine" and less on the "space" aspect. However, the one reason that holding ten weapons in Halo would have been impossible is that the game literally only had eight weapons. Eight weapons; in the future? How with all the advances of technology and weapon design enough to create a giant space-ring capable of "killing all sentient life in the galaxy" did we end up with eight functional weapons and the ability to only hold two of them at a time? Not only that, why would an advanced race of aliens with the destruction power to threaten humanity's existence create weapons that become useless after running out of batteries? Also, why do those batteries only last for approximately ten seconds of concentrated fire, and overheat after five? Are "covenant" soldiers really so expendable that they can send them into battle with a weapon that can only last them a few moments before being rendered completely ineffective? This is probably the single aspect of Halo that is broken in both design and implementation. This is also the central reason that veteran First-Person Shooter players were left wondering what the big deal was.
Worse Than: Other Futuristic Shooters, World War II Shooters (Hey Bungie, YOU'RE IN SPACE... IN THE FUTURE!)
Better Than: [ERROR: Cannot divide by zero]
Level Design:
If any aspect of Halo were a mixed bag, it would be the level design. Ranging from brilliant to downright asinine and boring, as a player, you can nearly tell what the developer's spent there time on versus what was phoned-in to pad the overall gameplay time. The near fourth-wall breaking experience of subconsciously critiquing a game's level design as your playing it is incredibly jarring. If at any point you're playing a game and think to yourself, "wow, they really didn't spend much time on this level did they?" when you're supposed to be listening to the overly expository dialogue of a charming little blue floating orb robot janitor thing while fending off wave after wave of zombie like aliens and picking up the perfectly placed discarded weaponry allowing you to do so along the way... you have a broken experience. These moments of not-awesome are highlighted by the moments of awesome that swim around them. If there was one thing that Halo tried really, really hard at capturing, it was the "set-piece" aspect of story-based First-Person Shooters. The main problem with this is that games like Half-Life and Unreal had already immersed players with their (albeit smaller) set-piece single-player gameplay, so short of the expansive "war-oriented" battles in the more open environments, Halo didn't bring that much "newness" to the table. Still, faults aside, this (and the music) is probably the best aspect of what Halo should be credited for.
Worse Than: Half-Life, Goldeneye 007, System Shock 2, Deus Ex
Better Than: Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D
Multiplayer:
Any first person shooter experience, aside from more story driven games like System Shock and Deus Ex, better have its multiplayer up to snuff else it's going to start collecting shelf dust really fast. Oddly enough, this is the most confusing aspect of what Halo was praised for, and what "put the game on the map" in the gaming world in general. The game's split-screen 2 vs. 2 max, two-player cooperative campaign, and local "system link" (read: multiple consoles, games and TV's) gameplay were really the only aspects of Halo's multiplayer. The Vs. multiplayer mechanic only had five modes to choose from, and when compared to games like Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena, had literally a infants handful of multiplayer maps. No bots, no user-generated content, no online play, no game-changing modifiers (i.e. single shot kill, low gravity, etc.), no customizable game modes (no music!)... about the only thing that Halo multiplayer had going for it was the inclusion of the games few vehicles. It's confusing to figure out why Halo was so praised by the gaming world for its multiplayer aspect (even before Halo 2) when compared to other games, and even previous console games (read: Goldeneye 007), it had a paltry amount of gameplay and innovation.
Worse Than: Goldeneye 007 (in so many ways), Most other PC First-Person Shooters
Better Than: First-Person Shooters that did not include Multiplayer
Mechanically, when you break down the Halo experience, it falls short in nearly every way (except the single-player music). What Halo did do, was bring the First-Person Shooter genre to the masses (that never owned a Nintendo 64), for better or worse. Since then, developers have deduced that "less is more," when it comes to gameplay and instead have focused on set-piece aesthetics, multiplayer and getting the most amount of money for the least amount of thought and innovation. With games that redesigned the idea of what a First-Person Shooter can be like Deus Ex and System Shock (sorry BioShock fans, it's been done), and games that exemplified what the genre had actually evolved to, Halo: Combat Evolved cherry-picks the elements of a world established and puts it into a McDonalds-like package that can be marketed to the would-be gamer crowd of people who are prone to buying into hype and propaganda. One thing is for certain... the world has never been the same since, and never will be again. Whether it's an "evolution" is definitely open to debate.
Halo: Combat... Evolved?
If there were ever a Grand Canyon sized dividing line in the gaming community as a whole, you could bet that it'd be filled with "covenant" soldiers fighting seven foot tall power-armor clad space-marines. For better or worse, Halo: Combat Evolved (as in the first game of the series) ranks up there with Final Fantasy VII, Street Fighter II and Super Mario Bros. in the, "Most Influential Games of All Time" category. Now keep in mind, that particular category isn't filled with the "best" games of all time, but, like Britney Spears, sometimes games fall on our doorsteps that, despite seemingly obvious shortcomings, alter the course of the gaming world forever. Halo is one of those games. I won't bore you with facts and history of the franchise... if you want that, there's one of those rather comprehensive wiki articles [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo:_Combat_Evolved] that you can browse through if you've honestly never heard of the game... in which case why are you here?
Halo surprised everyone in one way or another. Taking the near-decade old genre of the "First-Person Shooter" and bringing it to the masses on Microsoft's first Xbox was a turning point in modern video gaming for sure, but a lot of us were left wondering, "what's all the fuss about?" Okay, so you have a shooter with nice semi-set-piece battles, a semblance of a storyline, a better-than-decent soundtrack and the ability to throw bright blue grenades that stick to little bad guys that look and sound like mutated Munchkins who somehow speak English regardless of what language their alien peers are blabbering. For all intents and purposes however, what the seasoned first-person shooter crowd was handed was a decidedly average shooter that delivered less than games (even console-based) released years prior.
To the newcomer and non-PC gamer crowd however, Halo was a revolution. There seems to be a "rule" (in the scientific sense) of sorts when it comes to Halo; it goes like this:
If you've never played a First-Person Shooter before,
If you did not own a current-generation game-worthy PC,
If the original Microsoft Xbox was your first gaming console,
Then you absolutely loved Halo.
This is totally understandable. For the aforementioned people, this would be like driving a Honda Civic for the first time when you grew up riding bikes and horses. For the people used to driving sup'ed-up Corvettes and Ford GT's however, this was just another car on the lot. So, let's compare and contrast. In any First-Person Shooter, you have a few mechanics that compose gameplay. Here's where Halo stacks up against the rest of the bunchin those aspects.
(Keep in mind, this will be a comparison of the first Halo game against other games previously released a the time)
Movement:
This is the first and foremost core mechanic of any First-Person shooter. If there is one thing you are doing from the moment you step foot into the first level until the last moment of the last boss-fight, it's moving. Halo comparatively to its brethren, feels as though you are really wearing 400 pound space-marine power-armor, so if realism was what they were going after, they nailed it. Maybe it's the expansive environments, maybe it's the fact that there are so many other entities around you that are moving passed you all the time, but for whatever reason, Halo feels like the fat kid trying desperately to run that 20 minute mile. You would think in that super-powered armor of yours, they'd have implemented some sort of technology to counteract the fact that you had to move while wearing it. Why do you think that all the Japanese power-armors have jets built in? In all seriousness, this is probably one of the fundamental reasons that people DON'T like Halo when compared to the quick movement speed of games like Quake and Unreal Tournament. It quite literally feels like playing Super Mario Bros. without the "run" button. Jumping however, also felt like you were a mid-eighties plumber as you suspiciously launched and floated through the air with each button press.
Worse Than: Quake (series), Unreal (series)
Better Than: Half-Life, Goldeneye 007
Shooting:
If there's one OTHER thing you're doing besides moving from bell to bell in this genre, it's shooting; it is a First-Person Shooter after all. Being on a console, (i.e. playing by twiddling your thumbs), Halo does suffer from a unavoidable case of auto-aim-itus, but regardless, the shooting mechanic somehow became incredibly unbalanced. From the damage points on the enemies, to the strength and accuracy of the various weapons, the mechanics of shooting in Halo felt like a giant leap backward when compared to the more skill-oriented shooters of the time, even when stacked against other console shooters. One of the fundamental aspects of shooters is weapon balancing, which either goes the path of "new weapon is better than the last weapon" or "new weapon is different but equally powered than the last weapon," and somehow, Halo does neither as the game comes down to "how good you are and how much ammo you can find for the pistol." The plasma-based weapons are rubbish and should only be used when other weapons aren't available, and some weapons ("Needler" anyone?) are downright useless. This was also the first game to make grenades an annoying focus to the point of spending half your game watching your grenade count meter in the corner.
Worse Than: 90% of Other First-Person Shooters
Better Than: ... Daikatana?
Weapons:
Piggy-backing on the last concept, again, the weapons in Halo are totally unbalanced making most of them fall to the point of "useless." More important however, was the developer's decision to go for a more "realistic" (read: simple) feel by limiting the player to two weapons at once. While not only dumbing down the gameplay, this severely breaks the "super-powered space-marine" aesthetic. Any person wearing that much armor should not be limited to holding only a pistol and a "plasma pistol" at a given time. This is not World War II, this is the future. This is the one shooter that very well could have justified holding ten weapons at once from a story aspect, and instead the developers chose to focus heavily on the "marine" and less on the "space" aspect. However, the one reason that holding ten weapons in Halo would have been impossible is that the game literally only had eight weapons. Eight weapons; in the future? How with all the advances of technology and weapon design enough to create a giant space-ring capable of "killing all sentient life in the galaxy" did we end up with eight functional weapons and the ability to only hold two of them at a time? Not only that, why would an advanced race of aliens with the destruction power to threaten humanity's existence create weapons that become useless after running out of batteries? Also, why do those batteries only last for approximately ten seconds of concentrated fire, and overheat after five? Are "covenant" soldiers really so expendable that they can send them into battle with a weapon that can only last them a few moments before being rendered completely ineffective? This is probably the single aspect of Halo that is broken in both design and implementation. This is also the central reason that veteran First-Person Shooter players were left wondering what the big deal was.
Worse Than: Other Futuristic Shooters, World War II Shooters (Hey Bungie, YOU'RE IN SPACE... IN THE FUTURE!)
Better Than: [ERROR: Cannot divide by zero]
Level Design:
If any aspect of Halo were a mixed bag, it would be the level design. Ranging from brilliant to downright asinine and boring, as a player, you can nearly tell what the developer's spent there time on versus what was phoned-in to pad the overall gameplay time. The near fourth-wall breaking experience of subconsciously critiquing a game's level design as your playing it is incredibly jarring. If at any point you're playing a game and think to yourself, "wow, they really didn't spend much time on this level did they?" when you're supposed to be listening to the overly expository dialogue of a charming little blue floating orb robot janitor thing while fending off wave after wave of zombie like aliens and picking up the perfectly placed discarded weaponry allowing you to do so along the way... you have a broken experience. These moments of not-awesome are highlighted by the moments of awesome that swim around them. If there was one thing that Halo tried really, really hard at capturing, it was the "set-piece" aspect of story-based First-Person Shooters. The main problem with this is that games like Half-Life and Unreal had already immersed players with their (albeit smaller) set-piece single-player gameplay, so short of the expansive "war-oriented" battles in the more open environments, Halo didn't bring that much "newness" to the table. Still, faults aside, this (and the music) is probably the best aspect of what Halo should be credited for.
Worse Than: Half-Life, Goldeneye 007, System Shock 2, Deus Ex
Better Than: Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D
Multiplayer:
Any first person shooter experience, aside from more story driven games like System Shock and Deus Ex, better have its multiplayer up to snuff else it's going to start collecting shelf dust really fast. Oddly enough, this is the most confusing aspect of what Halo was praised for, and what "put the game on the map" in the gaming world in general. The game's split-screen 2 vs. 2 max, two-player cooperative campaign, and local "system link" (read: multiple consoles, games and TV's) gameplay were really the only aspects of Halo's multiplayer. The Vs. multiplayer mechanic only had five modes to choose from, and when compared to games like Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena, had literally a infants handful of multiplayer maps. No bots, no user-generated content, no online play, no game-changing modifiers (i.e. single shot kill, low gravity, etc.), no customizable game modes (no music!)... about the only thing that Halo multiplayer had going for it was the inclusion of the games few vehicles. It's confusing to figure out why Halo was so praised by the gaming world for its multiplayer aspect (even before Halo 2) when compared to other games, and even previous console games (read: Goldeneye 007), it had a paltry amount of gameplay and innovation.
Worse Than: Goldeneye 007 (in so many ways), Most other PC First-Person Shooters
Better Than: First-Person Shooters that did not include Multiplayer
Mechanically, when you break down the Halo experience, it falls short in nearly every way (except the single-player music). What Halo did do, was bring the First-Person Shooter genre to the masses (that never owned a Nintendo 64), for better or worse. Since then, developers have deduced that "less is more," when it comes to gameplay and instead have focused on set-piece aesthetics, multiplayer and getting the most amount of money for the least amount of thought and innovation. With games that redesigned the idea of what a First-Person Shooter can be like Deus Ex and System Shock (sorry BioShock fans, it's been done), and games that exemplified what the genre had actually evolved to, Halo: Combat Evolved cherry-picks the elements of a world established and puts it into a McDonalds-like package that can be marketed to the would-be gamer crowd of people who are prone to buying into hype and propaganda. One thing is for certain... the world has never been the same since, and never will be again. Whether it's an "evolution" is definitely open to debate.