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Halo Combat Evolved The following report compares gadgets using the SERCount Rating (base on the result count from the search engine). |
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POPULAR HAT - 2006-02-13 11:27:00 | © Copyright 2004 - www.hat.net () | sitemap | top |
Halo's story, in a nutshell, is basically this: humanity is at war with a collection of races known as the Covenant, who are basically religious fanatics and the gods of which have declared humanity unclean and therefore must be exterminated. Naturally, the humans are losing the war so they concoct a plan to engineer super cyborg soldiers to combat Covenant, which they do successfully, but it's a case of too little too late. The last Spartacus II, the Master Chief, a.k.a you, are onboard the human starship Pillar of Autumn, when it engages several Covenant warships while investigating a ring word (I wonder if Niven got any royalties for that.), known as Halo. The ship is damaged and crash lands on the ring, but not before the Master Chief escapes with the Autumn's sexy babe AI core, Cortana. It is soon revealed that the Covenant have discovered that Halo is of course a weapon, but don't quite understand just how powerful it is and what it was originally intended for. Both sides race against time to gain control of the device to use it against the other side.
There is so much in this game that's really darn cool- the overall look and feel of the weapons, characters and vehicles in spot on, as are the exterior vistas and buildings seen through out the experience. Music is top notch, though sometimes it sounds like it came from a cheap Casio keyboard, it is for the most part as good as the main theme. The sound effects lack, especially in how the weapons sound, and especially how the aliens sound- they grunt and roar like cheap cartoon monsters, not the kind of thing you expect to hear from slick looking beasties in colored chrome battle armor wielding plasma guns. Game play is pretty good, though I don't like the fact that you can't double jump, that is jump on to an object then use that momentum to immediately jump again to a higher position. Then there is the vehicles- whether flying or driving, it has to be experienced to be believed, because it's that good. In either the 4WD Warthog or the Ghost hover bike, ground vehicles are a snap to drive and a lot of fun, meaning you concentrate more on the game than figuring out how to steer. The Covenant Banshee, a small attack fighter, is also a cinch to fly, steer and attack with. Plus the enemy AI is superb- Covenant dodge, shoot from cover and attack intelligently.
Now for the bad news. There is no gentle way to say this: Level design sucks. Maybe the bland stainless steel-like interior textures were meant to give everything a high tech look, but there are few elements of contrast and most every wall looks like every other wall. Worse, moving through levels is like a bad case of deja vu- because basically each new room is pretty much like the one you left, the main difference being there aren't any bodies or weapons lying around in the new ones. It appears as though the level designers merely cloned rooms, stuck tunnels between them to link a level together. Further, there aren't a lot of objects in them, either, and everything looks very sterile. There aren't a lot of computer screens, tools, junk or anything else lying around to look it. This doesn't just go for Halo's interiors- the insides of Covenant and human vessels are just as bland, with the same repetitive layout as their counterparts. If places, chambers, rooms, etc. had been decorated with as much care as the ones in Unreal II, I feel it might have made things a little more fun to explore and look at.
What's also weird is that for all the hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of space on the ring world, I never saw one example of fauna larger than insects- no animals, no fish, no birds, nothing. It's like the biosphere gave up after trees and bugs. Exterior vistas are quite large, especially in Banshee missions, and as I said, 2-3 years ago, the graphics would have been ground breaking, but even outside the textures seem kind of plain, though still attractive. Other annoyances is the switching of weapons from one mission to the next. There are a couple of instances where the next mission picks up right after the last one ends, but you no longer have the weapons you finished with- and that makes no sense. This is doubly bad since you can only carry two of them at any given time. I find the shotgun and the Covenant plasma rifle to be the best of the lot, though the latter must be discarded once out of ammo in order to find another, because for some reason you can't reload them. And for all the work Gearbox said they did on this game, would it have been too much to ask for to give us real save game options rather than stinky console check points?
My expectations were high and they were only partially met. There is a lot that's good in Halo- story, music, characters, vehicles and voice acting, but the things that are wrong with it are really wrong. It's a good game and it has a lot of elements that I love, but the uninspired level design, bland textures, dated graphics and silly aliens detract a great deal from what had the potential to be one of the greatest games ever made.