O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
I never played Halo on the “intended platform”. Never owned an Xbox, don’t plan to unless Series X impresses me with something exclusive and unique and even when I was borrowing one of the 360 from a friend of mine, I never ever played Halo on it. Yet, I did play Halo: Combat Evolved. The PC port done by Gearbox Software in 2003 which had some improvements and unique features, but also several bizarre downgrades. And back when I played it, I didn’t like it much. I did, however, feel that it was still a curious game to look at.
With the Master Chief Collection available and slowly updated with supported titles on PC, however, the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary brings the newest remaster of the original game to PCs. And, being curious about the series for a long time, I’ve decided to give it a go and play the games in the order they were released. As usual for me, I don’t plan to play the multiplayer or even the coop in these games, which is an important point to stress since Halo has always been most loved specifically for those modes. Yet, I feel that even with coop, I wouldn’t have enjoyed this revisit of the original Halo. Because by 2020 its campaign is genuinely unpleasant to go through.
Back in 2001, even without going “for a console FPS”, Halo had some cool ideas and tricks up its sleeve. Its levels had a sense of scale that wasn’t really unheard of, looking at you Unreal or Serious Sam, but were still only becoming popular. You were also often fighting alongside lots of AI soldiers, something that would become popular with the growing trend of first WW2 games and later other military shooters. The regenerating shield system, while paired with the health points underneath that had to be healed with traditional first aid kits, was a fresh take on how the health could work in FPS titles and it did change the pace of the game, constantly urging you to push through the enemies. You could commandeer vehicles, including the ones that could fly, which was also pretty innovative for an FPS title, even if not new (Tribes series, for example, already had those). And in general it felt like a rather curious mix of the more arcadey FPS titles from mid-90s and the post-Half-Life games that had a far greater emphasis on the story.
It also had things that didn’t work even in 2001. The levels, for all of the scale, were mostly copy-pasted rooms that looked the same. You had a few truly beautiful outdoor levels that even today look impressive and feature some unique visual tricks, but the majority of the game was spent in horribly tedious corridors and rooms that look like they’re the exact same prefab repeated again and again (because they are). And to add insult to injury, a few levels are actually repeating levels from before, just with some alterations (like moving through the level backwards). The new visuals added in the Anniversary version of the game somewhat help in at least making the levels not look like flat geometry (and even add the arrows showing where to go in the horrible Library level), but they can’t fix the tedium. The way checkpoints work, only triggering when the game thinks you’re “safe” after you’ve passed the point where a checkpoint can be made, also leads to moments where you push way past several checkpoint locations but the game never decides to checkpoint you and you must restart far away from where you died.
The Flood, the new enemy that gets revealed about halfway through is also dreadful. Hard to kill critters and critter-infested zombies that rush at you in huge numbers, never introducing any sort of interesting challenge, just boring you to death. Which is a shame, because the main enemies up until then are still pretty fun to fight against. Even if fighting the simplest grunts feels like a firefight with teletubbies, their AI and distinct behavior patterns are really good even now. They have weaponry that’s fun to use, they use whatever advantages they have in a smart way and even though the grenades in this game can be annoying (they tend to kill you immediately), fighting the Covenant rarely feels unfair or not fun.
Another thing that has aged pretty well is the music in the game. The main theme is still incredibly catchy and memorable and most of the rest of the music is really good as well. What is a shame is that, at least at the moment, the music loop doesn’t seem to work correctly in the game which seems to affect both the original and the remastered sound. The sound mixing in general in this release of the game is all over the place. Some things sound really good, some really badly mixed or at inconsistent volumes. Though, to be fair, the visuals can be weird as well. While I’d say the Anniversary look is in general less boring than that of the original game, it does take a few strange artistic liberties with it and occasionally even changes some geometry in a way that affects the gameplay, like making some parts of cover non-see-through which means that you can’t track enemies when behind it. It’s rarely problematic, but it is weird.
The story was rather “normal” for 2001, but for today it just feels incredibly primitive. There are hints at bigger lore, one that gets expanded in other games, but in this game alone it’s pretty bad. It doesn’t help that the tone is all over the place either, with the chapter names within the levels being the “wacky developer titles” that don’t fit the tone of the game at all. And what’s the most bizarre is the additional content you get when the Anniversary visuals are on – you see weird “terminals” you can interact with, that show you cutscenes about the things that aren’t even hinted upon in the original Halo. Meaning that if you’re playing Halo for the first time and you have no knowledge of the series, you’re suddenly getting glimpses at events, terminology, characters and what not that you have absolutely no idea about and no one in the game acknowledges that.
Frankly, though, going through the game is just not fun. And coop wouldn’t help. The levels are horrendous, the lackluster story barely does anything to motivate you, fun enemy encounters are switched up for terrible enemies halfway through, some of the things are just not obvious (“That little decorative thing in the corner is something you must interact with to progress”) and it takes far too long for all the same-looking stuff you must go through. It is not enjoyable whatsoever. I’m glad that this game happened a long time ago and left a mark on the industry and did all of the cool things it did. And maybe multiplayer is still fun, sadly I don’t care. But playing the campaign of Halo: Combat Evolved in any version that exists is just not recommended at all.