Thoughts on: Halo Combat Evolved

	Halo: Combat Evolved launched with the OG Xbox and immediately became the console's defining game.  Though it didn't really hit its stride until Halo 2, Master Chief quickly found himself as the Xbox's unofficial mascot, and it seemed like the game itself make a huge splash and pioneered a new style of FPS singlehandedly.  For the life of me, I cannot see why.  Having replayed it with a more critical eye, I've realized that Halo 1 is a REALLY rough game, most likely due to the troubled development that made Bungie pivot and compromise on design until the 11th hour.  I wouldn't exactly call it *bad*; the game certainly has things going for it, but the quality seems to oscillate between being really good and making me wonder who in their right mind could have ever considered it fun.  For reference, I played the Master Chief Collection release for this re-examination, having previously played Halo 1 on the Xbox 360 when it got ported there, as well as lots and lots of demo Blood Gulch that kids kept putting on my high school computers for LAN action at lunch time.

	It's difficult to do my usual "What a game does well -> what a game does not" format because you can't really divide Halo 1 like that.  When it's good, everything comes together to form great experiences.  When it doesn't, everything is awful in its own unique way.  It's very difficult to separate the two, but I'll do my best.  When the levels are good, they're great.  The Silent Cartographer remains one of my favorite FPS levels of all time, and 343 Guilty Spark is dripping with atmosphere.  Bungie has the potential to do great level design, and the game has a great balance between open environments (no doubt relics from its original development as an RTS) and tight corridor action, with special setpieces sprinkled in there for memorable moments.  The player has the freedom to deal with challenges as they see fit, and the encounters are very dynamic due to Halo's excellent AI.  The Covenant respond well to what the player does, and one of the key ways the game handles difficulty settings is by upping how quickly the AI executes.  This means Halo mostly manages to avoid the FPS trapping of higher difficulties simply translating to more damage-spongey enemies.  One of the biggest criticisms of Halo when it first came out was the two weapon limit.  This innovation (likely a way to save on controller real-estate by relegating weapon swap to a toggle) was Halo's most controversial legacy, and for good reason, but I didn't think it was inherently bad.  I've always been a believer that the best gameplay comes from measured inconvenience, where you have to choose something and then deal with the consequences of your actions.  The two-weapon limit in Halo works well "in theory" in the sense that you're supposed to be regularly swapping out your arsenal, keeping combat fresh and varied, as well as providing a nice dynamic between Covenant and Human weapons.  Covenant weapons deal more damage to shields, while Human weapons deal more damage to the soft flesh underneath.  It's a nice tradeoff that makes you really debate whether or not you really want to toss away that assault rifle or hold out thinking that you'd soon get more ammo for it.  The other big innovation (well, not really, but it put the system into the public eye) is the regenerating shield system.  I really like this, as it allows the player to move from cover to cover without being worn down due to health chip and needing to play like a coward because the game autosaved when you only had a single tick of normal health remaining.  Unlike later games in the series, Halo 1 still punishes the player for bad plays that overextend them by having a second, non-regenerating health bar underneath their shield.  It's a great balance and does well to encourage daring plays without simply giving a victory to the player.  Frequent vehicle use also help spice gameplay up, and the music (though rarer than I remember) an an utter delight and sets the mood for an epic science-fiction conflict.  Marty O'Donnell is a master of the craft and defined Halo is the minds of millions of fans.

	What I'm trying to say is, when Halo works, it works well.  However, this constitutes probably only around 40% of the total campaign play time.  The rest of the time, you really see the game's limitations, the most obvious of which is the atrocious level design.  People like to poke fun at getting lost in identical corridors, but Halo 1 genuinely has levels that are nothing but identical corridor after identical corridor.  This isn't helped by how floating and imprecise the movement is and the platforming the levels expect you to perform in the heat of battle.  One level has you going through the same room design (I mean literally the exact same room copypasted) a whopping EIGHT times.  What's even better is that another, future level has you going through the same level again, but backwards.  It's atrocious at times and makes a lot of levels feel like endless slogs, especially since the enemy variety is too limited to keep things fresh.  The Covenant have a paltry variety of units, and the Flood lack the sophisticated AI that makes the Covenant so fun to fight.  It's actually mindboggling just how constrained the game is at times, and I have to wonder if it wasn't some sort of trick to save on console RAM by loading in a single room template and then just calling it multiple times throughout a level.  Due to this low unit variety, that also means the two-weapon toggle system fumbles in practice.  Due to the vast amount of Covenant that you end up fighting, you're going to quickly be running out of ammo for Human weapons and will just rock plasma rifles/pistols for most of the game, MAYBE a Needler if you're feeling frisky.  You will covet those human weapons like gold because they occupy the niches that people tend to gravitate towards in FPSs, i.e. shotguns, snipers, etc.  Fortunately, the encounters never feel like they need these specialized functions, but the much more frequent presence of Human weapons and reload stations in future games made me think that Bungie realized this error and corrected course.  All these factors mean that you're playing a mostly homogenous game with infrequent segments of brilliance.

	I will not spend much time talking about the multiplayer, which seems almost heretical for a Halo game.  On the surface, the multiplayer sounds pretty solid.  Excellent map design, varied game modes, vehicles for variety, and elements of map control in the sense that you want to kill your opponents before they grab strong weapons and vehicles from their spawn points.  However, the fatal flaw in this system is that everyone starts with the Pistol, which, as anyone who has played the game will tell you, is far and away the best weapon, ESPECIALLY on PC with a mouse, which I imagine is how 90% of people discovering this game in the future will play it.  On console, aiming is inaccurate enough to warrant using spray and pray weapons over something more precise.  With a mouse, though, it's incredibly easy to track heads, and for shots drops anyone from full health.  This makes matches a pistol-fest, completely eliminating the map control element that the devs obviously put a lot of time into.  Don't get me wrong, the multiplayer is functional, but if you've played one match, you've played them all, at least on PC.

	Overall, Halo 1 is a fairly rough start for what would eventually become a beloved series.  I'm not sure how it became so loved in the first place, and I suspect that the fondness for the first game was more due to its sequels than the actual game itself.  It has glimmers of greatness, but it really needed a lot more work before launching.  At least the remake is very faithful, letting you switch between the original and remastered graphics/music instantly so the player can get the original experience if the new style isn't to their liking, as all remakes should.  The remake also adds special cutscenes in the form of hidden terminals to give more insight about the lore, but for some reason they weren't backported to the original rendering of the game, so you're just completely unable to interact with them unless you swap to the new graphics.  A bit of an awkward decision, but having seen all of them, I do think that they're best saved for a second playthrough, or if you already know the story of Halo already coming into the game.  Still, better than 90% of remakes out on the market currently, I suppose.  As a total package, I have to rate Halo CE a C+.  It's not a dysfunctional game, but its fantastic moments are overshadowed by its less-than-fantastic ones.  Still a decent experience and worth one playthrough, in my opinion, though your mileage may vary.