I'm sure there still exists some embarrassing forum posts of me proclaiming Halo: Combat Evolved to be the greatest game ever made. I was young and easily impressed, though in my defense Halo felt like massive leap forward for console shooters at the time. Despite the very strong impression it left, I never got as deep into the Halo franchise as my friends did. Sure I played 2 and 3, but I didn't touch a Halo game again until Reach released for the PC version of The Master Chief Collection.
In a lot of ways, going back to Halo now feels like revisiting a childhood home. The halls and rooms may feel familiar, but age warps our perception of the past, making the experience just as alien as it is nostalgic. Was this room always so small, isn't the carpet different...? Did they really copy and paste this much geometry, was the assault rifle always trash?
Escaping the siege on the Pillar of Autumn, touching down on Halo for the first time, finding Keyes' horribly mutated and inhuman form; story beats and set pieces that take me back bookended by deeply flawed gameplay and poor level layouts that I apparently gave a huge pass in the early 2000s. The initial joys of pistol-whipping Grunts in the head and hearing the crunch of their skulls caving quickly dissipates when you remember how atrocious the AR is at anything further than mid-range. Excitement building as I remember how good the final escape sequence is in The Maw turns to foreboding as I get the Warthog stuck in a hallway like I'm god damn Austin Powers.
At its absolute worst, however, Halo is a sequence of repeating hallways that become disorientingly samey with combat encounters that rarely present a challenge any more complex than "we put a hell of a lot of dudes in this room." It starts to drag, but then you reach 343 Guilty Spark. The introduction to the Flood is one of the highlights of the entire game. Yet again you're infiltrating a Forerunner facility, and yet again you're probably expecting a series of rote firefights. But, things are different this time. The first few Covenant you encounter are fleeing for their lives, the rest are dead. You quickly come to accept that there is nothing here for you to point your gun at, just halls lined with corpses and painted in blood, and as you descend further into the facility, you start to feel as if you're delivering yourself to something horrible, incomprehensible.
Unfortunately, Halo wastes its greatest twist by making the Flood no damn fun to fight, and from this point on the rest of the game amounts to trudging your way backwards through several levels with the only real variation being that you now get to fight zombies. The Library catches a lot of shit, and rightfully so, but to be completely honest I don't think that level does anything that isn't emblematic of Halo's many flaws so much as it brings them to a scale that is impossible for even the most ardent defenders of the game to ignore. Thankfully, the final two levels (Keyes and The Maw) bring things back around again. Sure, they're just reusing large portions of levels you already played, but I am a sucker for stories that end where they began, and seeing the Covenant so overwhelmed with the havoc they've unleashed that neither side is at all concerned with you creates an excellent sense of urgency. This is no longer a battle between humanity and the Covenant, but rather the Covenant and the Flood. Your side already lost, and that occasional feeling of isolation you've felt during your journey has now become pure dread. You aren't just alone, you're the only one left. There's nothing to save here.
The parts of Halo that hold up for me are those more emotional elements. The story beats, the tension, the atmosphere. I still really like how the Forerunner facilities have this architecture that somewhat betrays the utilitarian nature of the instillation, they're both sterile yet somehow religious. Martin O'Donnell's score is as energetic and quiet as it needs to be, punctuating the action (or lack thereof) perfectly.
The Anniversary Edition features all new graphics, but I played with those off 90% of the time, only turning them on to find skulls and terminals that are only present in that version of the game. It impressive to me that you can hot swap between both versions with just the touch of a button, and that it only takes a few seconds to do so. The few bits I've seen of the updated graphics are.... I don't know, it's alright I guess. Not really a fan, I think Halo loses some of its visual personality despite obviously having more graphical fidelity in Anniversary mode.
My girlfriend and I played through all of Halo in co-op when it first came out, and while fooling around together after beating it I started humming the main theme. "Dun-dun-dun-dunnnnn, dun-dun-dah-dunnnnn..." She broke up with me. Greatest game of all time.
In a lot of ways, going back to Halo now feels like revisiting a childhood home. The halls and rooms may feel familiar, but age warps our perception of the past, making the experience just as alien as it is nostalgic. Was this room always so small, isn't the carpet different...? Did they really copy and paste this much geometry, was the assault rifle always trash?
Escaping the siege on the Pillar of Autumn, touching down on Halo for the first time, finding Keyes' horribly mutated and inhuman form; story beats and set pieces that take me back bookended by deeply flawed gameplay and poor level layouts that I apparently gave a huge pass in the early 2000s. The initial joys of pistol-whipping Grunts in the head and hearing the crunch of their skulls caving quickly dissipates when you remember how atrocious the AR is at anything further than mid-range. Excitement building as I remember how good the final escape sequence is in The Maw turns to foreboding as I get the Warthog stuck in a hallway like I'm god damn Austin Powers.
At its absolute worst, however, Halo is a sequence of repeating hallways that become disorientingly samey with combat encounters that rarely present a challenge any more complex than "we put a hell of a lot of dudes in this room." It starts to drag, but then you reach 343 Guilty Spark. The introduction to the Flood is one of the highlights of the entire game. Yet again you're infiltrating a Forerunner facility, and yet again you're probably expecting a series of rote firefights. But, things are different this time. The first few Covenant you encounter are fleeing for their lives, the rest are dead. You quickly come to accept that there is nothing here for you to point your gun at, just halls lined with corpses and painted in blood, and as you descend further into the facility, you start to feel as if you're delivering yourself to something horrible, incomprehensible.
Unfortunately, Halo wastes its greatest twist by making the Flood no damn fun to fight, and from this point on the rest of the game amounts to trudging your way backwards through several levels with the only real variation being that you now get to fight zombies. The Library catches a lot of shit, and rightfully so, but to be completely honest I don't think that level does anything that isn't emblematic of Halo's many flaws so much as it brings them to a scale that is impossible for even the most ardent defenders of the game to ignore. Thankfully, the final two levels (Keyes and The Maw) bring things back around again. Sure, they're just reusing large portions of levels you already played, but I am a sucker for stories that end where they began, and seeing the Covenant so overwhelmed with the havoc they've unleashed that neither side is at all concerned with you creates an excellent sense of urgency. This is no longer a battle between humanity and the Covenant, but rather the Covenant and the Flood. Your side already lost, and that occasional feeling of isolation you've felt during your journey has now become pure dread. You aren't just alone, you're the only one left. There's nothing to save here.
The parts of Halo that hold up for me are those more emotional elements. The story beats, the tension, the atmosphere. I still really like how the Forerunner facilities have this architecture that somewhat betrays the utilitarian nature of the instillation, they're both sterile yet somehow religious. Martin O'Donnell's score is as energetic and quiet as it needs to be, punctuating the action (or lack thereof) perfectly.
The Anniversary Edition features all new graphics, but I played with those off 90% of the time, only turning them on to find skulls and terminals that are only present in that version of the game. It impressive to me that you can hot swap between both versions with just the touch of a button, and that it only takes a few seconds to do so. The few bits I've seen of the updated graphics are.... I don't know, it's alright I guess. Not really a fan, I think Halo loses some of its visual personality despite obviously having more graphical fidelity in Anniversary mode.
My girlfriend and I played through all of Halo in co-op when it first came out, and while fooling around together after beating it I started humming the main theme. "Dun-dun-dun-dunnnnn, dun-dun-dah-dunnnnn..." She broke up with me. Greatest game of all time.