The Halo franchise is one that I’ve always felt I should play. There are a couple of others, but this is the one I’m talking about today. It’s kinda like those list of classic movies that if you want to be a film critic -you should probably watch those. If you want to be a games critic – you should probably play these. Halo is defiantly a franchise that’s on that list, especially if you’re covering Xbox.
My journey to playing through all the Halo game’s in the lead up to Halo Infinite later this year has begun.
EX-PILE OF SHAME #4: HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED
What I Played: The campaign in co-op
Difficulty: Normal
Playtime: 6-8 hours
Synopsis: Halo® is a sci-fi shooter that takes place on a mysterious alien ring-world. Packed with combat, Halo will have you battling on foot, in vehicles, inside and outdoors with Alien and Human weaponry. Your objective: to uncover Halo’s horrible secrets and destroy mankind’s sworn enemy, the Covenant.
LET-DOWN
I gotta admit, I wasn’t a huge fan. Sorry to let you all down! This game just shows its age quite badly.
If I wasn’t playing this with Ciaran (which is what we’ve been doing at twitch.tv/explosionnetwork) I would have ended up putting headphones on and a podcast, or something. Damn, do these levels get boring and repetitive.
One level, in particular, took about twenty minutes to beat and it was the definition of a hallway-shooter. Every room looked like the last, every enemy encounter was the same. There was nothing to break up this monotonous structure.
All that said, I did have mild levels of fun playing in co-op. That certainly helped a lot.
YOU’RE NOT THAT COOL, CHIEF
I’m also not grabbed by the story in this first game. Master Chief is some dude that’s frozen and awoken to do battle at the last second against human races biggest enemy. Okay. Why was he frozen? Why does he look like a Bionicle man? And these very stereotypical army dude-bro characters aren’t exciting and why is The Flood just tedious to fight and not scary?
I now know what the “Halo” refers to in Halo though so I feel like I’ve grown as a gamer.
By the end of this first game, my attachment to the characters and story is more or less non-existent. I have very high hopes for the next several game’s though, it can literally only get better after this.
Catch me playing them on twitch.tv/explosionnetwork over the coming month(s) and I’ll be following up with more of my thoughts on the future Halo games in this series.
