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