Gotta say first that ive played original before but beaten MCC version (constantly switched to original version to compare) . Game definitely had problems: Uninteresting weapons, limited enemy variety, repetitive level design, (some are copy-pasted). Rather than having meaningful hard sections, It only gets difficult when games throw dozens of same enemy types. I couldn't take any enemy seriously.
It has its highlights tho, and it comes efrom levels like "silent cartographer", games lets you roam in a hub-area freely, and let you use vehicles. Vehicle gameplay was so good for its era. Multiplayer also was very good for 2001 console fps. This game's biggest strength was presentation tho, you can smell high quality on every cut-scene, silent storytelling in maps was excellent. Soundtrack was pretty good too
But comparing the FPS games at that era, its just very well polished mediocre game
Campaign: 6/10
Multiplayer: 7.5/10
It has its highlights tho, and it comes efrom levels like "silent cartographer", games lets you roam in a hub-area freely, and let you use vehicles. Vehicle gameplay was so good for its era. Multiplayer also was very good for 2001 console fps. This game's biggest strength was presentation tho, you can smell high quality on every cut-scene, silent storytelling in maps was excellent. Soundtrack was pretty good too
But comparing the FPS games at that era, its just very well polished mediocre game
Campaign: 6/10
Multiplayer: 7.5/10
I recognize that this game was revolutionary for its time, but this remaster makes it feel like a much newer game and thus I’ve rated it by acknowledging the original’s innovations while still holding it to the standard of other games from the Xbox 360 era. To keep it short, the world building is amazing, the art is fantastic, the story is good but often confusing and under-explained, the level design starts off very impressive but eventually evolves into being unbearable, and the gunplay is pretty fun. Good game
Favorite Halo
I played this because I wanted to know what Halo was all about. This... was hard to play... Not because of difficulty, but because it is a very very repetitive game. Combat is good, but it has no variety. Levels have SO much copy-pasted parts. It got boring.
Story is nice, but is very slow paced. It doesn´t get interesting until at least halfway.
Story is nice, but is very slow paced. It doesn´t get interesting until at least halfway.
Não envelheceu bem.
The remastered graphics are ugly
This game would’ve made me cum my shorts if I had played it right when it came out. As it stands it’s a fun but pretty poorly aged FPS.
Playing through the series for the first time before Halo Infinite!
Halo: Combat Evolved has a lot of atmosphere and it's nice to see where it all started but yeah even with the fancy bells & whistles of next gen, this game is just insanely dated now. I felt aimless for most of it when it came to where I needed to go next and I quickly noticed how often those same hallways were being used (The Library...ugh)
All that said, the game's simple but exciting core gunplay & the fantastic score was enough to keep me going. It helps that it wasn't too long either. Overall, a fine beginning that's hopefully leading to something greater.
Halo: Combat Evolved has a lot of atmosphere and it's nice to see where it all started but yeah even with the fancy bells & whistles of next gen, this game is just insanely dated now. I felt aimless for most of it when it came to where I needed to go next and I quickly noticed how often those same hallways were being used (The Library...ugh)
All that said, the game's simple but exciting core gunplay & the fantastic score was enough to keep me going. It helps that it wasn't too long either. Overall, a fine beginning that's hopefully leading to something greater.
I can see why teens in the 2000's loved this
I've grown to like this release of Halo: Combat Evolved over time. At least the Master Cheif Collection version of the game allows you to set the graphics and sound effects to the version you'd prefer because the "remake" portion of this game can rot in hell for all I care.
It's quite easy to get lost in the remaster in a way, to the point that when I would switch the quality back to the original it was practically jarring, almost like playing two separate games.
If anything this game is surely a testament to the graphical upgrades that can happen over a 10 year span
If anything this game is surely a testament to the graphical upgrades that can happen over a 10 year span
I understand that first games in an extremely successful franchise tend to be rough but lord almighty I was not expecting to be this drained when playing this game for the first time. Halo 1 is repetitious to the Nth degree. You wander around fighting enemies in the same looking empty hallways leading to the same looking arenas for the 50 billionth time over and over again, and that’s not even an exaggeration. The amount of recycling CE does is borderline ridiculous, sometimes it recycles other parts of another level in a LATER level with little to no changes added. And what makes the whole thing worse is that these levels can drag on for an eternity. Just when you want it to end, you find yourself in yet ANOTHER copy of the similar room you were in like 5 minutes ago for the 15th time and you silently beg for the sweet sweet release of death (No Halo 1, haphazardly dumping the flood in a level we were just in a couple of missions ago is not an excuse to force me to play the exact same level we juST PLAYED A COUPLE OF MISSIONS AGO, IT'S STILL THE SAME FREAKING LEVEL).
Gunplay itself is slow and somewhat clunky compared to the other Halo games but it’s to be expected, the enemy design and AI is pretty decent and sets the stage for what will be standard in the future. Music and atmosphere carry this game HARD. I don’t think I’m ever gonna go back to this one ever again.
Gunplay itself is slow and somewhat clunky compared to the other Halo games but it’s to be expected, the enemy design and AI is pretty decent and sets the stage for what will be standard in the future. Music and atmosphere carry this game HARD. I don’t think I’m ever gonna go back to this one ever again.
4.5 Stars for Combat Evolved. The anniversary edition alone would drop it to a 3 or 3.5
The multiplayer is great, but goodness the campaign is bad. It's so repetitive, same enemies in same corridors that all look exactly the same. At least playing it on Legendary brought some fun with the challenge, but yeah not a fan.
Never played multiplayer. Like most Halo campaigns, it's not terrible but not particularly good either. Some really terrible missions with hordes of enemies and it gets incredibly repetitive.
Played this in coop via the Master Chief Collection on PC for the first time in ~15 years again. Needless to say, I used the original graphics the entire time 'cause the remade visuals are a good contender for the most soulless graphics in a videogame I've seen in a long time.
Hard to imagine this was the beginning of one of the most important and influental franchises to date. While we had a lot of fun, the lack of weapon and enemy variety and the copy-pasted level design was quite a slog to get through. Still, the gameplay is superb, albeit a bit dated. I am glad to be playing this on the PC with M+KB since this made combat against the Flood (especially those small annoying ones) a lot more tolerable!
Hard to imagine this was the beginning of one of the most important and influental franchises to date. While we had a lot of fun, the lack of weapon and enemy variety and the copy-pasted level design was quite a slog to get through. Still, the gameplay is superb, albeit a bit dated. I am glad to be playing this on the PC with M+KB since this made combat against the Flood (especially those small annoying ones) a lot more tolerable!
Good.
Pretty fun, I like the story and the gameplay is fun, if somewhat repetitive. Pretty solid shooter, and a good start to a series. Excited to see what the next entries have in store.
The pacing can be kinda whack, especially in the latter half with all it's repetition, and Halo 1 has obviously aged in not the best way, but even all these years later the game still manages to feel fresh and provide you with fun and unique experiences. It's still challenging and immersive, and the music is amazing. A classic for sure.
Anniversary is a disgrace though
Anniversary is a disgrace though
I probably could have just used my regular copy of Halo if I felt like replaying the campaign
classic is better
Half the time, the combat helps carry this game to be the excellent FPS it's known to be. However, the other half where you get lost or bombarded by like a fuckton of enemies sucks balls. The map design can also get really claustrophobic and repetitive in some levels. However, the gameplay helps make up for it with solid combat and variety of guns to suit different scenarios. You're always picking up something new that helps the combat feel fresh when it gets tooo lengthy.
If more levels were as good as the last one, this might have been less repetitive
What a deeply frustrating game. The second one must've been really fucking legendary for the series to still keep going today.
This review contains spoilers
The most influential FPS of the 21st century. However, its aged worse than Mickey Rourke's facelift.
I would personally recommend the SPV3 mod, as it does a far better job remastering the game with lore friendly elements and is a far better experience.
This game, on the other hand, is by far the worst mainline halo game that I’ve played. It's repetitive as all hell and a chore to play through. Copy pasted rooms, fighting the same enemies with the same weapons over and over again, dying in milliseconds before even seeing what killed you. Completing the game on solo legendary and dying less than 100 times is basically impossible unless you google how to complete certain sections. All the vehicles handle like shit. It has not aged well at all. Nobody ever talks about how shitily the second half of the game was developed: lazy AF level design, terrible A.I., enemies spawn everywhere, you use either the magnum or plasma pistol for the majority of the game, and the game rewards you with a broken checkpoint system. Multiplayer is a complete joke and borderline unplayable most times. It's 10x worse than Halo 4's multiplayer because at least everybody isn’t camping in Halo 4 and the spawn points were FAR more forgiving. Literally every small map turns into a giant fustercluck of people crowding the middle area.
Co-op campaigns can be fun at times but I doubt anyone, even those who are new to Halo, would prefer playing this over the others. It's a classic and it obviously was incredible for its time but today you couldn't convince me, held at gunpoint, to play it over any other halo. It's just not happening. I think it deserves a proper remake, with more polished gameplay, not just an HD skin, and some better writing because the story and characters are pretty lackluster, thats where SPV3 (A FAN MADE mod) comes in and has to fix all the errors of Halo CE by including weapons and armor from Halo Reach which makes sense because it's the same time period and Halo CE should have all the same weapons and vehicles from Halo Reach, it doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Gameplay/Level Design/Sandbox:
2.5 stars. You find yourself only using two weapons throughout the first half (plasma pistol and magnum). The second half you use the shotgun and magnum. Sure, there's some vehicles like the occasional tank or warthog to mix up the gameplay but mostly you'll be hiding behind cover and shooting elites with the elite combo (plasma pistol and magnum) or killing flood up close with a shotgun, while your marines run head first into rocket fire, they are useless anyways.
Explosions have a ridiculous blast radius so you can also spam grenades in the area you know the enemies will spawn in and that makes going through legendary a hell of a lot easier. That’s when you know your game is bad, “hmm maybe if I die enough times I can find the enemy spawn point and throw grenades there or maybe if I keep dying due to the infinitely spawning flood, I should take a leap of faith and move to the next area and maybe that’ll stop the infinitely spawning enemies”.
Picking up Ammo unless you’re empty will make the game waste ammo. Even if you're just one round shy of a full load, you still will pick up a box of ammo and waste 99% of the whole box. If your game can’t even get ammo right, then that speaks volumes about the game design at large. All the other halo games, ammo works.
This game has a lot of problems when it comes to player feedback, physics and the controls in vehicles, they all handle like they're on ice. Enemies spawn out of nowhere and master chief has no lateral quickness unlike the elites who have perfect accuracy and dodge everything, you die very fast on legendary, not quite as fast as in halo 2 but still very unfair and most times it's because of how archaic the game’s engine is. Every encounter you act like a total wimp and pick off enemies from afar with a rocket or use the elite combo but most times the combo takes too long and you end up dead because the chief can't dual wield (but somehow can dual wield for the next two games).
Story/Characters/Game World:
4 stars. Good intro to the series, not convoluted at all but I wish more lore was explored and more characters were memorable. The writers did a great job in describing this three sided conflict, there weren't any bad lines, and I’m glad the story was easy to follow and looking back the game had some great twists and clever ways of providing exposition.
Basically only two vocal characters in the game, Cortana and Guilty Spark. (terminals don't count). Captain Keyes is dumb and gets captured twice, Sgt Johnson is barely in the game. We don't understand the covenant or their motives, no gravemind superintelligence, no brutes, no prophet high council, we're just fighting flood, grunts, and elites the whole game but Cortana and Guilty Spark do more than enough of a fine job in moving the plot along and even Chief has more lines in this game surprisingly, than in 2 and 3.
Music and Sound:
5 stars, enough said. Martin O'Donnell is a god. Voice acting is also great for a game made in 2000. It holds up great.
Visuals:
2 stars. Remastered graphics have great textures but things are way too bright and it kills the intended atmosphere. Old style graphics look terrible but the lighting is apt, overall I find it a two out of five because there's really no reason I should be switching styles constantly because the lighting sucks.
Final Score: around 2 or 3 stars out of 5
I would personally recommend the SPV3 mod, as it does a far better job remastering the game with lore friendly elements and is a far better experience.
This game, on the other hand, is by far the worst mainline halo game that I’ve played. It's repetitive as all hell and a chore to play through. Copy pasted rooms, fighting the same enemies with the same weapons over and over again, dying in milliseconds before even seeing what killed you. Completing the game on solo legendary and dying less than 100 times is basically impossible unless you google how to complete certain sections. All the vehicles handle like shit. It has not aged well at all. Nobody ever talks about how shitily the second half of the game was developed: lazy AF level design, terrible A.I., enemies spawn everywhere, you use either the magnum or plasma pistol for the majority of the game, and the game rewards you with a broken checkpoint system. Multiplayer is a complete joke and borderline unplayable most times. It's 10x worse than Halo 4's multiplayer because at least everybody isn’t camping in Halo 4 and the spawn points were FAR more forgiving. Literally every small map turns into a giant fustercluck of people crowding the middle area.
Co-op campaigns can be fun at times but I doubt anyone, even those who are new to Halo, would prefer playing this over the others. It's a classic and it obviously was incredible for its time but today you couldn't convince me, held at gunpoint, to play it over any other halo. It's just not happening. I think it deserves a proper remake, with more polished gameplay, not just an HD skin, and some better writing because the story and characters are pretty lackluster, thats where SPV3 (A FAN MADE mod) comes in and has to fix all the errors of Halo CE by including weapons and armor from Halo Reach which makes sense because it's the same time period and Halo CE should have all the same weapons and vehicles from Halo Reach, it doesn’t make sense otherwise.
Gameplay/Level Design/Sandbox:
2.5 stars. You find yourself only using two weapons throughout the first half (plasma pistol and magnum). The second half you use the shotgun and magnum. Sure, there's some vehicles like the occasional tank or warthog to mix up the gameplay but mostly you'll be hiding behind cover and shooting elites with the elite combo (plasma pistol and magnum) or killing flood up close with a shotgun, while your marines run head first into rocket fire, they are useless anyways.
Explosions have a ridiculous blast radius so you can also spam grenades in the area you know the enemies will spawn in and that makes going through legendary a hell of a lot easier. That’s when you know your game is bad, “hmm maybe if I die enough times I can find the enemy spawn point and throw grenades there or maybe if I keep dying due to the infinitely spawning flood, I should take a leap of faith and move to the next area and maybe that’ll stop the infinitely spawning enemies”.
Picking up Ammo unless you’re empty will make the game waste ammo. Even if you're just one round shy of a full load, you still will pick up a box of ammo and waste 99% of the whole box. If your game can’t even get ammo right, then that speaks volumes about the game design at large. All the other halo games, ammo works.
This game has a lot of problems when it comes to player feedback, physics and the controls in vehicles, they all handle like they're on ice. Enemies spawn out of nowhere and master chief has no lateral quickness unlike the elites who have perfect accuracy and dodge everything, you die very fast on legendary, not quite as fast as in halo 2 but still very unfair and most times it's because of how archaic the game’s engine is. Every encounter you act like a total wimp and pick off enemies from afar with a rocket or use the elite combo but most times the combo takes too long and you end up dead because the chief can't dual wield (but somehow can dual wield for the next two games).
Story/Characters/Game World:
4 stars. Good intro to the series, not convoluted at all but I wish more lore was explored and more characters were memorable. The writers did a great job in describing this three sided conflict, there weren't any bad lines, and I’m glad the story was easy to follow and looking back the game had some great twists and clever ways of providing exposition.
Basically only two vocal characters in the game, Cortana and Guilty Spark. (terminals don't count). Captain Keyes is dumb and gets captured twice, Sgt Johnson is barely in the game. We don't understand the covenant or their motives, no gravemind superintelligence, no brutes, no prophet high council, we're just fighting flood, grunts, and elites the whole game but Cortana and Guilty Spark do more than enough of a fine job in moving the plot along and even Chief has more lines in this game surprisingly, than in 2 and 3.
Music and Sound:
5 stars, enough said. Martin O'Donnell is a god. Voice acting is also great for a game made in 2000. It holds up great.
Visuals:
2 stars. Remastered graphics have great textures but things are way too bright and it kills the intended atmosphere. Old style graphics look terrible but the lighting is apt, overall I find it a two out of five because there's really no reason I should be switching styles constantly because the lighting sucks.
Final Score: around 2 or 3 stars out of 5
Bienvenidos a un tutorial sobre cómo hacer una primera mitad de un videojuego tan buena y una segunda mitad tan desastroza.
Omitiendo este detalle, el primer Halo no ha envejecido tan, tan mal. Es un shooter muy simplón tanto en historia como en gameplay pero que se deja jugar y disfrutar. En los peros hay zonas con un diseño horrible donde todas las salas son iguales o donde solo te limitas a subir y matar hordas y hordas y hordas de enemigos convirtiendo la experiencia en algo innecesariamente tedioso, sumado a que la acción ante estos se limita a retroceder y disparar sin fin.
No es buen juego, pero tampoco es malo.
Omitiendo este detalle, el primer Halo no ha envejecido tan, tan mal. Es un shooter muy simplón tanto en historia como en gameplay pero que se deja jugar y disfrutar. En los peros hay zonas con un diseño horrible donde todas las salas son iguales o donde solo te limitas a subir y matar hordas y hordas y hordas de enemigos convirtiendo la experiencia en algo innecesariamente tedioso, sumado a que la acción ante estos se limita a retroceder y disparar sin fin.
No es buen juego, pero tampoco es malo.
I've never played through this one on my own and completely. I played the actual demo version back then in 2001 on demo stations in video game stores and a few missions here and there in co-op at a friends place, but never straight in one playthrough. I only started to get into the series from 2007 on with Halo 3.
And after finishing it, it really aged badly. The opening missions are iconic, how you start the game and go through the first ship and then getting introduced to the big open world (of that level) and it brings back instant memories of the demo station back then and the feeling of 2001 where it was something you haven't played before.
But later in the game it goes a bit downhill. In my opinion, the difficulty on normal really goes bonkers and straight up feels unfair at some points, you die so freaking fast with not always the best checkpoints and the level design of the second half of the game is straight up garbage. From the point on where you are in that flood level and you go down this area again and again and again and again in circles and everything looks the same only to go this up again later (if I remember correctly) and having to continue this backtracking galore through the ice area where you need to blow up this generators with your shield. It felt like it suck actual life out of me.
From todays perspective, phew. But the last level was good again where you had to escape with the Warthog. Not as good as I remember the one in Halo 3, but a section I hugely respect and I'm still mad about that the devs abandoned this after ODST. Still, it is the start of a legendary series with an unforgettable soundtrack , fun multiplayer, amazing co-op play and it opened the door for what first person shooters on consoles can be.
And after finishing it, it really aged badly. The opening missions are iconic, how you start the game and go through the first ship and then getting introduced to the big open world (of that level) and it brings back instant memories of the demo station back then and the feeling of 2001 where it was something you haven't played before.
But later in the game it goes a bit downhill. In my opinion, the difficulty on normal really goes bonkers and straight up feels unfair at some points, you die so freaking fast with not always the best checkpoints and the level design of the second half of the game is straight up garbage. From the point on where you are in that flood level and you go down this area again and again and again and again in circles and everything looks the same only to go this up again later (if I remember correctly) and having to continue this backtracking galore through the ice area where you need to blow up this generators with your shield. It felt like it suck actual life out of me.
From todays perspective, phew. But the last level was good again where you had to escape with the Warthog. Not as good as I remember the one in Halo 3, but a section I hugely respect and I'm still mad about that the devs abandoned this after ODST. Still, it is the start of a legendary series with an unforgettable soundtrack , fun multiplayer, amazing co-op play and it opened the door for what first person shooters on consoles can be.
I'm 26 and I finally played Halo for the first time.
For a game where you spend the entire time going through samey looking environments and clearing room after room of similar enemies, it's pretty fantastic.
Halo's level design is so simple but that's also what makes the gameplay shine so much. Once I'd get into a groove, clearing room after room full of enemies is thrilling. The shotgun especially feels amazing to use.
Also need to give a major shout out to the OST. Genuinely some of the best most epic stuff I've ever heard in a video game. It elevated each and every encounter. I can see why this is considered such a classic. i will say that the story didn't do much for me. I think I understood the general idea but it often felt like things were just happening and I didn't really understand why.
For a game where you spend the entire time going through samey looking environments and clearing room after room of similar enemies, it's pretty fantastic.
Halo's level design is so simple but that's also what makes the gameplay shine so much. Once I'd get into a groove, clearing room after room full of enemies is thrilling. The shotgun especially feels amazing to use.
Also need to give a major shout out to the OST. Genuinely some of the best most epic stuff I've ever heard in a video game. It elevated each and every encounter. I can see why this is considered such a classic. i will say that the story didn't do much for me. I think I understood the general idea but it often felt like things were just happening and I didn't really understand why.
My introduction to the Halo games was Halo 3, than ODST, 2, 4,5, Reach and finally Halo. So when I say this is still one of the better Halo games, i really do mean it without any nostalgia blinding me and understanding fully what the series becomes. While it doesn't have some of the mechanics that were streamlined in other Halo games, you can tell exactly how Halo 2 and 3 built on this games legacy and became the games they are today.
In a lot of ways, Halo reminds me more of Halo 3 and my fond memories with that campaign. From the flood's introduction, to the struggles on bridges, to the banshees / vechile runs, Halo really set all these elements up well and Halo 3 expand amazingly on a winning formula. One of the best parts of this game was seeing how the flood were introduced and seeing 343 slowly being revealed to be the ass that he is. With Cortana also getting in a few sassy lines as well, it's easy to see why teens are horny for her. Overall Halo's first outing does a great job of establishing lore and level design that makes Halo.
In a lot of ways, Halo reminds me more of Halo 3 and my fond memories with that campaign. From the flood's introduction, to the struggles on bridges, to the banshees / vechile runs, Halo really set all these elements up well and Halo 3 expand amazingly on a winning formula. One of the best parts of this game was seeing how the flood were introduced and seeing 343 slowly being revealed to be the ass that he is. With Cortana also getting in a few sassy lines as well, it's easy to see why teens are horny for her. Overall Halo's first outing does a great job of establishing lore and level design that makes Halo.
ancient gamers will tell you this is their top 1