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Halo: Combat Evolved Review
Stephen Leyton
14/11/2003
Although Halo will be slightly old news to console gamers, PC fans should not feel intimated by wanting to buy this!
Now, before we even start, letâs say that there will be no debate as to whether this is better than the XBOX version or that mine is better than yours, or consoles are far better than your lack lustre bog standard PC. Itâs a subjective issue with no real end result, so weâll keep this for another time.
Halo, billed as the definitive first person shooter with epic production values and hordes of Halo converts, has a lot to live up to. There is a vast number of PC gamers who have not played or have taken much notice of this game on the XBOX so to them itâs fresh and, more importantly, they are willing to be impressed.
Halo takes place on a mysterious alien ring-world. Here you will battle through amazing indoor and outdoor environments, in vehicles and on foot, with the largest arsenal of futuristic weapons, vehicles, and combat roles many gamers will have encountered. (Sound good already!)
Set way in the distant future, the fate of mankind hangs in the balance as a fierce alien faction known as the Covenant pursue the fleeing Earth forces to the ancient ring-world Halo. As the legendary cyborg super-soldier Master Chief, you must battle to unravel the mysteries of Halo and save humanity from the ruthless Covenant threat.
OK, yes the convoluted good V bad storyline is pretty much what you would expect but it is gelled together with a nice intro, supplemented with well scripted dialogue. It has a great storyline with devious and adroit changes in direction which presents those unexpected twists and turns which are the backbone and class to the game.
From the moment you load this in the sense of adventure and high anticipation never appears to dissipate, even in those hard or frustrating moments when you are struggling to stay alive. Before we delve into the pure gaming events letâs hone in on some of the technical issues that many PC gamers will want to know about - the âwheresâ and âwhysâ - before even considering the actual game itself.
Reservations to needing a beast of a machine to run this game, seeing it in its full glory, need to be considered. I will hear many of you cussing when the system this was played on is mentioned, a mere PIII 500! After getting a requester, as the game started to load in, announcing my system was not good enough to run the game, I opted to go ahead. Although the graphical options were on the minimum settings - with all the snazzy shadowing, lighting and effects shut off - what was seen, was on a par with many of the best games I have played on a better spec machine. What does this tell you? I can't imagine what this would look like on a high end P4 but needless to say, it would bring forth a catalogue of superlatives.
The speed the game ran at was nigh on perfect, with a glitch free experience and no audio catch up to be found anywhere.
If I had any initial issues, it was with the controls. Trying to set up the best controls, using both the mouse, keyboard and sidewinder pro was not as intuitive as I had hoped and at some points in the game, when the action was moving at pace, I did tend to mess up at the most inappropriate time but this could be put down to not persevering!
On to the game:
Shooting at a multitude of really smart aliens along, with driving a variety of vehicles is really the essence of Halo but all is done and presented in the best and most inventive way! A stash load of weapons makes the experience even more compelling with frag grenades, sniper rifle, assault rife, shotgun and the costmary rocket launcher. The melee fighting, involving weapons in your hands, where you can fend off attackers, for bullets will not last forever, is well executed but needs a good deal of practice.
There is also a host of covenant weapons that you will find laying around and these can be picked up by walking over them and these are essential, so keep your eyes peeled. You will need to find and use them for a number of them can rip through energy shields. These weapons include needler, plasma rife and pistol. The plasma grenades are cool, great for sticking to a target like a vehicle or better still a soldier!
Once you move into the big bad world after wading over a mound of dead marines, it would be fair to say the real action starts and let me tell you it doesnât abate one iota throughout, well not as far as I got anyway!
One of the first things you will mentally take onboard is that the aliens are pretty savvy. One good tip, but nothing revealing, that most would think of doing is to aim to the head, which means one shot and its goodnight! Another point to take into account, depending on the mode you have chosen, could mean more or less work. Taking the easy option, allows, when practical, the marauding marines to do some of the donkey work but beware as in harder modes you have to be more pro active.
The lush outdoor environment was pretty impressive seeing I was running it on the min resolution (a reason why it was running so well on the machine maybe) but it could well be turned onto a higher mode, aesthetically even more spectacular. I must confess that distinguishing between the good and the bad units was hard in some places but that could be down to being trigger happy and not paying attention, wanting to progress as far as possible, to see what untold twists were about to unravel in the storyline.
Tedium never set during in the 6 hours play that was undertaken. It is pretty obvious what kind of game this is and it offers all sorts of variety on one theme! With combat taking place both on foot, in first-person mode, and in vehicles, from a third-person vantage point, you have the best of both worlds.
Without going into detail about the enemy list and the tasks etc, summarising what it all entails is basically about attacking enemy installations, rescuing survivors along with infiltrating alien spaceships, plus oodles more!
The general use and execution of controls for shooting/HUD is pretty much standard.
Overall impressions, as you can see, are about as positive as you can get.
Apart from some early, doh, why didnât I do that faster so I can hide? and
sussing out to use some grenades to get me to the maintenance shaft, it was all about going slowly slowly. The pace of the game, learning what to do, solving problems, being totally tuned into the mindset of the game, comes with time and focus, as well as being a half decent game player! I may not have got that far but it was a darn sight engrossing. Isnât that what it is all about?
