“One final effort is all that remains…”
This is it. The last Bungie-made Halo game. After five titles and more than a decade of working on the franchise, Bungie is now passing the torch to 343 Industries and moving on to a new IP. So, how does their grand farewell to the series compare to past Halo games? Is Reach everything I have hoped for in a Halo game? Read on to find out.
A world falls. An era ends.
(SPOILER ALERT: If you’re one of the few who still hasn’t played the game but wants to, you might not want to read this review right now. It contains spoilers for the Campaign.)
Halo 3: ODST, the latest entry in the Halo series, landed on store shelves about two months ago. Now that I’ve logged in a good amount of time playing the game, I feel I’m familiar enough with it to offer my opinions on how it stands on its own as well as against its predecessors. This review will be rather short compared to my review of Halo 3 (about one-fifth the number of words) due to the large number of similarities between the two; it will focus primarily on the things that changed from Halo 3 to ODST, as well as things specific to ODST (story & Campaign, etc.).
UPDATE (October 2011): After first publishing it in April 2009, I decided to go back and revisit this article and update it to take in to account the releases of Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach and all they brought to the table in terms of gameplay. The revision is not yet complete, so pardon any mess.
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For me, the Halo series has always stood out from the countless other FPSs out there. The enemy units and the environments you fought them in were inventive and varied. The graphics and art design were wonderful. The sound was great, with the music being some of the greatest to ever grace a video game. The storytelling (at least that in the first two games and in the expanded universe novels) was outstanding as well, with the Haloverse being one of the most well-developed fictional settings in all of video gaming. Also, while console FPSs started to emerge on the Nintendo 64 with exclusive titles like GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and Turok (and various ports of PC shooters), it was the Halo series that really started the shift of first-person shooters being primarily a PC-dominated genre to being a primarily console-dominated genre.
The original game had superb gameplay that set the bar for console FPSs, and it was incredibly fun as well as innovative. The basic controls were excellent and intuitive, with the Xbox gamepad showing how well-suited it was for console FPSs, especially as compared to the N64 controller. The “Golden Tripod” was another revolution. Being able to melee opponents or throw grenades without having to cycle through your inventory and formally equip a melee weapon (fists, chainsaw, or whatever) or grenades was something I had yet to experience in an FPS. Halo also had the first truly effective integration of vehicular combat in the genre, whereas in previous shooters I played you either didn’t have vehicles, or they were poorly implemented and tacked-on affairs. Both the Campaign and multiplayer stage designs were incredible and included a good mix of massive outdoors environments in addition to the smaller indoors arenas. The AI (at least that of the enemies) was often rather clever, especially compared to what had come before, and it has held up rather well over the past decade. Finally, you could only carry two weapons at a time instead of an entire arsenal — something that was as far as I know a first in the genre. The weapons themselves were generally well designed and useful, and included genre standards such as a machine gun and shotgun as well as interesting alien weapons such as the Needler. Truly, Halo was the most revolutionary FPS since Doom was released in 1993, and many of the things we take for granted today in FPSs we have Halo to thank for. It really was “Combat Evolved.”
However, the series has had its ups and downs, with each entry having its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, I feel that the sequels weren’t quite as good in terms of gameplay despite having the same solid controls as well as the high-quality visuals, sound, and music that Bungie is known for, not to mention a couple of interesting additions. Numerous changes and additions detracted from the gameplay and made for a less enjoyable and sometimes very frustrating experience, though in other ways the sequels surpassed the original. I have written extensive criticisms of the sequels elsewhere, so refer to those for in-depth details (there will be some commentary here as well, however). Of course, while the sequels didn’t quite measure up to the original, Combat Evolved was itself flawed in certain ways, and its follow-ups each had aspects that were the series’ strongest. Halo 1 was strongest on gameplay and had superb writing but its weakest aspect is the lack of XBL support. Halo 2 was strongest on storyline (just edging out Halo 1) but had the weakest gameplay in the series. Halo 3 was the weakest on storyline but was the strongest on extra features, at least until Reach came along. ODST had great gameplay and was an interesting change of pace from the typical Halo game, but it was too short. Finally, Reach had much better gameplay than Halo 2 & 3 (but not quite as good as Halo 1) and was even more feature-rich than Halo 3, but it had terrible writing as well as difficulty balancing issues in Campaign that were as bad or worse than those in Halo 2 (overpowered enemies + great AI = Beyond Nintendo Hard).
While a combination of the best parts of the first three games as well as a refinement of many game elements could benefit a future Halo game, it might not be enough to keep the Halo series on the cutting edge of shooters. Certain aspects of the series as a whole may have to be rethought entirely. If there are going to be other Halo FPSs in the future, perhaps it is time for combat to evolve once again.
