Halo, as a whole, is mediocre, if inoffensively so.
I remember watching a friend of mine from down the street play the first two Halo games on PC, he preferred to drive the tank with a flightstick. I remember playing the Halo 3 coop with my neighbor when I was in middle school, playing the multiplayer on a tiny CRT at an acquaintance's house in high school. While I was in college my friends and I would regularly gather at someone's house to play the maps he had made in various Halo games' Forge mode; he would draw these maps out on graph paper while we ate together at restaurants and mall food courts. For a long time, I only ever played Halo as a social activity, in short bursts, and never really got a feel for what any particular game in the series was like.
In 2015, I bought an Xbox One for the sole purpose of playing games with my friends who also had an Xbox. It came with Halo: MCC, a digital copy. My parents' internet at the time was so slow that I had to bring my console and a small TV to my aforementioned Forge friend's house to use his internet to download the game.
Since then I've tried time and time again to play these games and I always bounce off of them, hard.
Levels feel like copy and pasted pre-fabs, their structure feels completely directionless. Despite the game being a fairly linear, narrative driven sequence that often consists of literal hallways, I find myself getting lost about as often as the first time I played Doom. The purpose of objects and settings is never clear, nothing is interesting, everything is just sleek metal walls and plain grassy hills. Everything about the story and setting feels like it should be minimal set dressing to focus on action, but the serious tone of dialogue and the epic score make it all seem pretentious. Halo takes the plodding narrative focus of a game like Half Life, but goes one step further to interject cutscenes between the action, but the story is just plain boring, and the action isn't even any good.
Every enemy takes a ludicrous amount of time and shots to kill. Simple things like moving and shooting never feel satisfying. Master Chief never feels unstoppable, he feels pathetically slow and weak compared to nearly every other recognizable FPS player character I can think of. The gameplay additions in the sequels and the further expanding story are, past a certain point, often just different enough to disappoint some fans, though it never goes far enough to interest me.
Halo is, in every way, more shallow than its predecessors in the FPS genre, yet instead of giving an appropriately snappy rhythm, it slows to a crawl, demanding more time for less action. It blares Skyrim-esque chants and orchestral arrangements in your ear to let you know its all actually very important.
It's not quite accurate to say that I don't understand Halo's appeal, it's just that to me the things that draw people in seem like little more than cheap tricks.
I don't think I will ever spend the time to review any of these games individually.
I remember watching a friend of mine from down the street play the first two Halo games on PC, he preferred to drive the tank with a flightstick. I remember playing the Halo 3 coop with my neighbor when I was in middle school, playing the multiplayer on a tiny CRT at an acquaintance's house in high school. While I was in college my friends and I would regularly gather at someone's house to play the maps he had made in various Halo games' Forge mode; he would draw these maps out on graph paper while we ate together at restaurants and mall food courts. For a long time, I only ever played Halo as a social activity, in short bursts, and never really got a feel for what any particular game in the series was like.
In 2015, I bought an Xbox One for the sole purpose of playing games with my friends who also had an Xbox. It came with Halo: MCC, a digital copy. My parents' internet at the time was so slow that I had to bring my console and a small TV to my aforementioned Forge friend's house to use his internet to download the game.
Since then I've tried time and time again to play these games and I always bounce off of them, hard.
Levels feel like copy and pasted pre-fabs, their structure feels completely directionless. Despite the game being a fairly linear, narrative driven sequence that often consists of literal hallways, I find myself getting lost about as often as the first time I played Doom. The purpose of objects and settings is never clear, nothing is interesting, everything is just sleek metal walls and plain grassy hills. Everything about the story and setting feels like it should be minimal set dressing to focus on action, but the serious tone of dialogue and the epic score make it all seem pretentious. Halo takes the plodding narrative focus of a game like Half Life, but goes one step further to interject cutscenes between the action, but the story is just plain boring, and the action isn't even any good.
Every enemy takes a ludicrous amount of time and shots to kill. Simple things like moving and shooting never feel satisfying. Master Chief never feels unstoppable, he feels pathetically slow and weak compared to nearly every other recognizable FPS player character I can think of. The gameplay additions in the sequels and the further expanding story are, past a certain point, often just different enough to disappoint some fans, though it never goes far enough to interest me.
Halo is, in every way, more shallow than its predecessors in the FPS genre, yet instead of giving an appropriately snappy rhythm, it slows to a crawl, demanding more time for less action. It blares Skyrim-esque chants and orchestral arrangements in your ear to let you know its all actually very important.
It's not quite accurate to say that I don't understand Halo's appeal, it's just that to me the things that draw people in seem like little more than cheap tricks.
I don't think I will ever spend the time to review any of these games individually.