Halo: Combat Evolved

Notice:I'm only discussing the original Versions of these games. I don't care about re-releases and never played them.

Halo’s subtitle “Combat Evolved” is a misnomer. The game omits several features that were already standard in console FPS games. Still, it popularized a now standard control scheme. Previous console FPS like Turok, South Park, and Duke Nukem 64 all controlled like crap. Perfect Dark, GoldenEye, and the World is Not Enough controlled better, but were still clunky. Halo didn’t invent it's control scheme though; Some PS1 Alien VS. Predator game did. I remember being in one of the PS1 Medal of Honor games too. It was a dual stick setup where the left stick controlled movement and strafing while the right was for turning and looking around. It's effective and accurate. The only major addition since then has been gyro based tuning. Analog controls are nowhere near as accurate as a mouse. The gyro helps with the accuracy issues. With Halo, it's easy to overshoot what you're aiming at with the right stick. Especially in heated multiplayer fights. Compared to something like Turok, it's incredible how far things had come in only a few short years. Even so, a good control scheme a good game does not make.

Halo makes the mistake of taking away player autonomy. There are very few guns in Halo, and you can only carry two at once. Duke Nukem, Doom, and Perfect Dark are all known for the huge variety of weapons. There’s a gun for everything and you could carry them all as you progressed through the game. Dying meant losing the armory you've amassed. It was pretty brutal, actually. A well designed game will emphasize how punishing this is while also giving you a fair chance to rebuild. Some games, like Perfect Dark, would take guns away between missions. This prevented the player from being overpowered. Halo goes a steps aside from any of this and limits you to carrying two guns at a time. I've read multiple reasons as to why this change was made. None of them hold any water though. Maybe the developers wanted to give a sense of realism? I mean, who could reasonably carry around 30 guns? If you were to really fight aliens in space with plasma weapons, you'd only be able to carry two at best.

There are two varieties of gun in Halo: human made ballistic weaponry and alien made plasma weaponry. Plasma weaponry is better for taking out energy shields, while ballistic weaponry is better at tearing up flesh. A sound foundation for strategy, but it's not built upon; that's just how things are. You end up going through the motions while avoiding other strategies because they're not effective, save for unintended exploits. For some reason, the pistol is one of the most powerful weapons in the game. You can snipe enemies over huge distances with it, and why shouldn't you? The assault rifle is completely useless by comparison. Contrast to Perfect Dark. The Falcon 2 is great, but you'd never use it if you have access to a K7 Avenger or a Super Dragon. You'd be crazy to try it. Yet, multiplayer in Halo 1 amounts to people sniping one another with pistols or mowing each other down with jeeps. Jeeps aren't even guns, man. Your preferences in the Nintendo 64 game come from abundance. You have the opportunity to determine what works for you and form complex strategies that'll involve everything from baiting the enemy to using your gun to turn invisible and slip past them. What the fuck were Halo's designers doing? When playing Perfect Dark's Multiplayer, we'd often bargain with each other for which guns to include within the map we were playing.

"Alright, you can have the RCP-120, but I'm adding the Super-Dragon."

Conversations like this happened constantly while we played. Halo doesn't even distinguish which guns can appear on a map if I'm not mistaken. There's simply not enough of them and they pigeonhole you anyway.

Most damning: Halo's guns rarely pack any kind of punch. I mean from a "player feedback" perspective. This is an issue that the original trilogy never figured out. They all feel like NERF guns. Think about how the shotgun in Doom feels. It's powerful, fucks your enemies up badly, and it’s loud as shit. Compare that to the shotgun in Halo. The thing's a toy by comparison. It’s ironic because the shotgun as depicted in Doom is a photo of an actual toy shotgun. A toy that ID Software used to give the illusion of unimaginable power. Even then, it's only powerful compared to the pistol. There were even better weapons to come. Halo’s strength is in its sniping. When you snipe an alien, it feels good. Every other gun feels like this flimsy weird little thing. The plasma weapons especially feel like this. The Plasma Rifle is at least fun to use. If you fire it continuously, it'll overheat. Since it's battery powered, this is functionally a reload. But if you can avoid overheating it, you'll never have to. This is good design. Rather than pointing it at whatever you want to die, you need genuine skill to use it effectively. Still, it's hard to tell that you've caused any damage with it.

Halo's environments aren't particularly interesting. I'd say that this is more an issue with the genre than Halo specifically. Wolfenstein 3D started it all with flat corridors. Doom gave us expansive corridors with stairs. Duke Nukem 64 upped things a bit and gave us corridors that actually looked like things. Then, GoldenEye came along and we finally had discernable worlds. First Person Shooter gameplay relied on enclosed spaces. For one thing, technical issues made it a necessity. GoldenEye had a few open environments. These stages would take place in the snow or at night. This helped mask the poor draw distances. Halo blows this all out of the water. The first stage is a traditional corridor with plenty of cover. As you gain your bearings, the game slowly opens up. The second stage drops you into what you assume is a forest themed set of corridors. you make your way around and find yourself staring into a truly massive expanse. After an overly long fire fight, the game literally drops a jeep on you and invites you to hop in.

As you drive this jeep throughout, you realize just how empty this expanse is. You make your way into this massive complex built into a mountain, and it too is empty. This is more or less how the entire game feels. It's empty, and the world is lifeless. The lifelessness sort of works in the games favor tonally. It's not very fun to play, but it's certainly memorable. The Campaign is very front loaded. Around the time you hit The Library the game falls apart entirely. Copy Paste level design, waves upon waves of enemies, and ugly, boring environments. When you combine this with the games weapons system you end up with an incredibly monotonous experience.

Halo is a limited game in every sense. Let’s once again go back to Perfect Dark. You start the game on the roof of a skyscraper armed only with a silenced pistol. you make your way down the helipad and encounter a guard. You shoot him in the gut. You hear the “BYOOP" of your silenced gunshot, the subtle sound of the bullets impact, and witness your enemies reaction: he drops his gun to grab his gut with both hands and drops to the ground on his side while screaming in agony. There's a subtle thud and what sounds like his keys jingling as he drops to the ground. Now THAT is feedback. Your gun feels powerful because it did all of that. You walk through a door and meet another guard. He says “what the?!” in an incredulous tone as you shoot him in the arm. The guard grabs his arm in pain before you shoot him in the head, killing him instantly. These kills are dynamically scripted. Sometimes it doesn’t work correctly, but it’s still effective at giving the player feedback and making the guns feel powerful. The sounds effects of the guns and the recoil animations reinforce this further. I merely described the first two kills in a game where you’ll kill hundreds of people and aliens. It’s brutal and causes you to feel for the enemy. Remember: this is an N64 game. Surely, the Xbox game would blow all of this out of the water, right?

marines! hoo rah and so forth.

Similar scenarios don’t exist in Halo. Death animations are left to the game physics engine to figure out. You kill an enemy, and it merely goes limp. Sometimes, you’ll shoot something and it’ll rag-doll in an amusing way. That’s it. Nobody surrenders. At best, aliens will run around in circles after you’ve attached a sticky grenade to it. Guns that aren't the sniper rifle sound muffled. Imagine playing a 10 hour game with guns like this as you run through corridors that all look the same. Sometimes, you’ll be driving a jeep around an empty field while your gunner in the back tries and fails to kill things. It's remarkably lackluster as a video game.

Halo's strength is in it's atmosphere. Sometimes, you’ll be taking enemy fire, trying to find somewhere to hide while your shield recharges. The complete silence broken only by distant gunfire and the sound of your shield recharging is very striking. Older FPS tend to have bombastic soundtracks that loosen gameplay tension. Halo wasn’t the first to do this, Half Life was (to my knowledge), but it’s well represented here. The cold, lifeless corridors and huge empty fields unintentionally create a sense of dread. The sound design, while disappointing, is surprisingly eerie and I like it.

You wouldn't be able to guess, but I never had interest in Halo’s Multiplayer. With only four people, it didn’t have a chance to shine. There was no way my friends and I were having LAN parties in 2008, and the lack of bots, customization, stat tracking, and various other features Perfect Dark had meant we were just going to play the Nintendo 64 game instead. I don't understand where the appeal was. Was it the controls combined with the LAN stuff? I guess that makes sense. Four Player Split-screen on N64 was cramped. Screen-lookers were a plague too. Those were the guys that'd look at your screen to see what you were up to. C'mon! You know that's cheating! Only complete assholes did it. Of course there's appeal in having your own screen to play on. Maybe they saw Halo as an exciting stopgap. I mean, that's really all it ended up being. People played LAN until they got their hands on a version of the game that was playable online.

I don’t blindly dislike Halo. There are people out there that hate it simply for being “baby’s first FPS”. While it’s certainly no masterpiece, it’s competent, if regressive. Everything is technically sound. It's not overly buggy and runs at a smooth 30FPS. I think the developers were trying to dip their toes into something they were woefully unequipped to deliver. It's like a skeleton; structurally sound but devoid of anything to make it stand out. There are smidgens of brilliance sprinkled about. The very first sequence of the game allows you to customize the controls without you even knowing it. Hey, that’s cool. Before you build anything, you gotta have a framework. Halo: Combat Evolved had that framework nailed. Maybe Halo 2 will expand heavily on it?