Review

I don't think I've ever wanted a game to suck. Often, I'll lament what I perceive as unwarranted acclaim, or I'll feel disappointment in gamers, collectively, for heaping financial success upon a particular game while simultaneously sentencing a better game to retail failure, and perhaps even the game's developer to insolvency.

But when I actually sit down to play a game, regardless of how I feel about it politically, aesthetically, technically, I want to have a good time. I want to enjoy myself and to have fun playing the game. Ultimately, my good will and affection for the hobby of videogames is robust enough that I want games to be good. Bad games beget bad games, and then nobody wins, except EA.

Furthermore, I take very seriously the (self-imposed) responsibility for being objective and honest when I write these reviews. Even though I may lead in with a tangent (as I'm doing right now), when I finally register my official analysis of a game I try very hard to make sure it is about the *game* and nothing else.

I've said some negative things about Halo. In particular, I suggested that Bungie and Gearbox are smacktards for ditching co-op on the PC, and even more so for making lame excuses for it. And frequently in conversations I've berated some of my gamer companions for putting Halo at the top of a ritualistic totem and worshiping it as an idol. Also, and I freely admit the irrationality of this, Halo has the stink of Microsoft on it, and I've harbored ill will towards both it and Bungie ever since Bungie became Microsoft's concubine.

But what I earnestly want to convey is that although I may have said these things, when it came time to play Halo, I wanted to have fun. I wanted Halo to be a good game. This review is about Halo the game and about whether or not I had fun playing it and why. It isn't about Halo the XBox savior, or Halo the MS cash cow, or Halo the Judas of Mac gamers. Anything I've said previously (or may say in the future) can be completely true and have no bearing on this review. Bungie and Gearbox can be smacktards. Microsoft can continue to wrestle with EA to see who can suck the soul from gaming the fastest. These things won't change what Halo is, and I hope you believe me when I say that they didn't affect me as I played through Halo in its entirety and that they don't affect me now as I write about Halo the game.

If nothing else, note that though I may still wish to burn Randy Pitchford in effigy, the score for 'Cooperative MP' is still 'N/A' and has no effect on the score.

All of this feels a bit like a disclaimer required to precede my declaration that Halo sucks, after which I gloat haughtily over my obviously superior gaming acumen. I certainly wouldn't fault you for expecting exactly that, given my chronically disdainful attitude. However, what I'm going to do instead is declare that Halo is a very good game. The fact of the matter is that I had what I would consider a 'hoot' playing Halo. I plowed through it nearly without pause, wrinkling my noise at a scant few issues, and generally having a grand time.

Good

• The AI. There are, upon reflection, exactly three things that shoulder the burden of making Halo enjoyable. First is the AI. Halo is, first and foremost, about small squad-level tactical combat encounters. I've heard Halo described as the same 30 seconds of fun repeated over and over. While dismissive, that's not exactly untrue. Luckily, that "same" 30 second encounter, admittedly uniform when viewed from afar, actually plays out each time with enough variability and unpredictability that it survives being exploited ad infinitum. That's not to say that you're guaranteed to like it. If you're not enjoying yourself within the first 20 minutes or so of Halo (cut-scenes not included), then you should just go ahead and quit it, because you've essentially just seen what Halo is. Sure, you'll get to jump in a few vehicles along the way, and they throw some new weapons at you as you go, but the toy doesn't change and if you aren't having fun then quit playing with it.

  Now you're probably wondering what this has to do with AI. I'll (get back on track and) tell you. The reason Halo can get away with belt-feeding you its patented 30 second bites of combat is because of its AI. The AI is responsible for the variability and unpredictability that I mentioned above. A lot of shooters fail in this regard, and attempt to make up for their automatonlike unit AI through either quantity (Serious Sam), gimmicks (Max Payne), presentation and atmosphere (AvP2), or good old-fashioned smoke and mirrors (Half-Life) in the hopes that you'll stay distracted enough not to notice how bad it is. Halo, instead, unequivocally relies on its unit AI. In this respect, it's a lot like Blade of Darkness, which is one of my favorite games. It takes a lot of guts to predicate your game on AI, to say that if your AI doesn't deliver, neither does your game, but that's exactly what Halo does.

  Speaking more specifically, it's the non-homogeneity of the AI that delivers, as well as an intangible sense of coordination. First, the different enemies you encounter all have character. Obviously the standout example here are the Grunts, which are probably the most endearing enemy I've seen in a shooter. Their battle chatter and panic attacks brought a smile to my face throughout the game. More importantly, though, is that the enemy AI does smart and interesting things. They retreat, flank, take pot shots, move in groups, etc.. I read an interview with Bungie's AI guy (Chris Butcher) in which he discusses in a general way what makes the AI tick. The manner in which their different AI profiles "sense" and "remember" the circumstances of their situations explains why their subsequent behavior is better than the average shooter. A telling statement by Chris was this, "We try to go for predictable actions but unpredictable consequences." It's those unpredictable consequences that Halo absolutely depends upon to allow its campaign to be (mostly) fun.

  The real tragedy here, having said these nice things about the AI, is that Bungie then goes and loses faith in it about half-way through the game. More about that later.

• I said there were three main things that deserved credit for Halo's fun factor. The second is the physics. I won't wax as verbose on this topic as I did for AI. Living in the real world (most of the time) we all have a good feel for how things should, well, feel. And I don't mean feel as in 'tactile', but rather how stuff interacts. Games are notoriously bad at replicating that. Weight, momentum, inertia. In Halo, this manifests primarily in how the vehicles behave, and the consequences of grenades and tank shells. For this reason, it doesn't have nearly as much influence on the execution of the gameplay as does the AI, but does contribute hugely to the suspension of disbelief and the overall impression of the gameworld. Grenades launch bodies into the air, bodies which don't instantly go limp noodle in a dead giveaway of ragdoll physics but rather flail about futilely. Cracking a grunt on the head with your gun butt has a (*very*) satisfying effect. A well-placed tank round can send a ghost spinning and hurtling through the air in manner that you didn't anticipate but that feels exactly right. What's important is that the physics aren't overdone. Having a system that powerful under the hood would be an incredibly tempting thing to exaggerate and shove in the players face. Thankfully, Bungie resisted that urge and their physics engine does what its supposed to do: make things react believably, no more and no less. You know physics is done right when you begin to take it for granted. It stands out in games like Halo because as gamers we've acclimated to sucky physics.

• The last leg of Halo's tripod of fun is its treatment of Shield vs. Health. Shooter Design 101 states that you have armor and health, and that armor depletes as its absorbs damage. Generally this has more of an impact on the level designers than it does on the player, as the designers need to be sure to sprinkle armor around the game in sufficient quantities to sustain the player, without having any idea how the player is going to play. Halo bucks tradition and uses automatically recharging armor. I absolutely loved this. It was liberating. Shooters frequently leave a bad taste in my mouth as I play them because the item breadcrumbs left by the designers are such a blatant reminder that my actions are, in some sense, predetermined. This is one of the reasons why I like Metroid so much, because all of the resources you collect are the byproduct of your own actions. Halo isn't quite that pristine, relying still on breadcrumbs for health and, to some extent, ammo, but even just the armor made a huge difference in the level of mental zen that I experienced playing the game. Had I not had such a fondness for the assault rifle and opted instead to use covenant weapons, I would have been relieved of the dependence on caches of rifle ammo. Not being completely enslaved to blind faith in the designers to keep feeding me fresh supplies of armor and other items was very refreshing. Furthermore, if I got into trouble, drained my armor, and began taking health damage, I knew it was because I was performing poorly right then and there, rather than wondering if I'd mismanaged my armor points over the last several encounters and needed to wax overly conservative until I found the next stash.

• Halo gets grenades right! They're a first class citizen, and by that I mean that they aren't treated as just another weapon. Grenades have a tactical niche and deserve special treatment. The special treatment they get in Halo is by being categorized separately. Direct fire weapons go in one hand, and grenades (indirect fire) go in the other. They're available instantly, for heat-of-the-moment reactions, and assuming you haven't currently run out, they're available always. Furthermore, the effective difference between frag and plasma grenades is meaningful and provides yet another tactical layer to your offensive options. It was such a pleasure to be able to easily and effectively incorporate grenades into combat, particularly after playing games that get it so horribly wrong (most notably Soldier of Fortune 2).

• I reminisce back to the days of Rise of the Triad, which had great weapon design. One defining characteristic was that you could only carry 4 weapons at a time, and could only carry one of the missile or "magic" weapons. If you had the Heat Seeker and wanted the Flamewall, you had to give up the Heat Seeker. Personally, I believe this kind of restriction, while frustrating to some, translates into fantastic tactical choices. Halo employs the same technique. So instead of turning into a walking arsenal, carrying 8 different weapons and crates of ammo for each, you're limited to two direct fire weapons, and two kinds of grenades. I loved this.

• Halo does level transitions probably better than any game I can think of at the moment without thinking too hard. I only manually loaded a savegame once, maybe twice. And that's saying a lot for me, as I definitely lean towards the compulsive quickload. Furthermore, I don't remember ever manually saving, which again is nearly irrefutable evidence that Halo spaced the checkpoints out almost perfectly. It's important to point out that I strongly advocate the existence of explicit milestones in a game's campaign (milestone, chapter, level, use your synonym of choice). I appreciate the improved flow that comes from the soft transitions like checkpoints, and the fact that they ween me off of the obsessive quicksave/quickload dance. However, milestones serve a different purpose, and are, I believe, critical to the success of a single-player campaign. Sure, they provide a convenient opportunity to reward the player with a pretty cutscene, which in turn is a convenient opportunity to advance the story arc in ways that can't necessarily be accommodated within the game. But those aren't the reasons why I think milestones are so important. Rather, a milestone's most critical purpose is to break up the game into digestible pieces for the player. Perhaps the most important opportunity they provide is for the player to actually stop playing. That may sound odd, but consider instead a totally uninterrupted campaign which never gives the player a chance to pause and take stock of their progress and their accomplishments. Even though the average length of the single-player campaign in shooters today seems to be ever-shrinking, they're all still long enough that I'm not about to attempt them in one sitting. And even if I were, I need signposts, so to speak, to help me measure my progress, and to provide strong doses of both a sense of accomplishment and psychological relief. The relief comes from the "reset" associated with milestones. Most shooters require the player to manage resources of some kind (be it ammo, armor, health, time, etc..). That management is mentally taxing, not to mention the fact that the nature of the game itself requires mental focus and concentration from the player. That focus and concentration needs to be periodically abated. Checkpoints don't really provide that, but explicit breaks in the play do.

  So kudos to Halo for getting both parts right, the convenience of automatic checkpoints at appropriate intervals, and the divisions of the campaign to provide both respite and reward.

• Though I didn't spend much time in multiplayer (due to no co-op and no bots) I do appreciate the amount of configurability available. A lot of the settings for the different gametypes are exposed right in the menus to allow for the definition of your own custom flavored game, be it a variant of CTF, team DM, king of the hill, etc.. Granted, it's no UT, but then, what is?

Bad

• Controlling vehicles. I realize that this can be simply a taste issue, but since this is my review, I get to say what tastes good and what doesn't. Controlling the vehicles left a bad taste in my mouth. I yearned for a nice, reliable set of keys to steer left and right. The view-controlled steering was sloppy and frustrating. I recognize that it had the convenience of providing a uniform control scheme for all vehicles, be they land or air, but I'd have gladly traded a little complication in the air to get a more intuitive and more responsive steering mode for the Warthog. While we're on the topic of vehicles - the traction for the Warthog was almost equally frustrating. Every surface felt like a mudslick. Whoever was responsible for this would probably get along great with whomever implemented the helicopters in Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat, since they both confuse 'annoying' with 'fun'. So despite the nice things I said above regarding the physics, when it came to the warthog's traction, it was way off.

• Halo's level design was spotty. You'll be hard-pressed to read a Halo review that doesn't rail against the repetitiveness of the levels, and I'm certainly not going to discredit those claims. I will say, however, that having read those reviews, I found things to be not nearly as repetitive as I'd expected. I'll offer that perhaps I didn't perceive the issue to be as severe a grievance as did others because I was having enough fun just killing Covenant. The complaint is still completely valid, though, and I'll join in the angry mob and call out Bungie for appearing to have done bulk cut-n-pasting on their levels. Halo may in fact be the same 30 seconds of fun repeated over and over but I don't think it's too much to expect that the same 30 seconds not appear to occur in the same place over and over. On many occasions, after a furious gunfight, I'd have completely lost my bearings and been briefly unable to tell which the hell direction I'd come from. The surroundings were often so homogeneous and so symmetric that it was nearly maze-like. It's telling that Bungie frequently placed arrows in the floor to indicate where to go.

• I've already said that the AI is one of Halo's strongest assets. What I should have said was that the *enemy* AI is one of Halo's strongest assets. In stark contrast, the friendly AI is disappointing. Oh, make no mistake, your marine comrades have good path-finding, and their battle chatter helps immersion, and they behave sufficiently life-like. The problem is that they just seem to suck at combat. You won't notice it immediately on the Normal skill level, but play again at the higher difficulties, and you'll be lucky if your squadmates survive the first encounter. They do alright if they're riding shotgun in the warthog with you, but on foot they're fodder. This is very disappointing because the promise of squad-on-squad (vs. maverick-on-squad) combat is a real jewel when it happens, and it feels like the ingredients are all there for it to happen regularly in Halo. But it doesn't. I've recently been playing Viet Cong, and the friendly AI is fantastic, allowing for gameplay exactly like you'd expect when you're just one member of a squad. Unfortunately for Halo, too quickly it degenerates into the stereotypical player-as-uber-soldier vs. the enemy horde.

• Never fade to white. Ever. Don't playtesters ever play in low-light conditions? Fading to white in a game when your eyes have adjusted to dark scenes is like nails on a chalkboard.

• The Chief's voice-acting is horrible! Really, really horrible. That's all I have to say about that.

• Halo uses a little too much flattering emulation of the Alien movies, which ultimately only hurts immersion. Early on, there's a bulletin board on the ship with a notice about a lost cat named Jonesy. That's fine, you had to be really paying attention to catch that. But then they pile on the stereotyped hard-assed black drill sergeant, the Pillar of Autumn looks just like the Sulaco from Aliens, the assault rifles are nearly identical to the Colonial Marine weapons, not to mention the marines themselves! Cumulatively, it ends up feeling more like hackneyed plagiarism than an homage to classic sci-fi.

Ugly

• This might be considered a semi-spoiler. So if you really don't want to know anything specific about the campaign, skip this bullet. Halo just falls completely flat on its face when it switches from the fun, sophisticated, challenging Covenant to the boring, boorish, and banal Flood. The Flood nearly ruin the game. The problem isn't their concept, or the role they play in the story, but specifically how they affect the gameplay. Halo goes from being one of the rare games that actually succeeds in its attempts at tactical combat to just another shooting gallery that throws hordes of stupid magnet AI at you.

  I was similarly disgusted with RTCW when it veered off course and replaced the nazi soldiers with stupid, unfun zombie warriors. The disgust was about tenfold with Halo because the flood are even more stupid and boring and because, comparatively, the Covenent had been so consistently smart and engaging.

  Honestly, if I were to partake of the campaign again, and I can see that happening, I will probably play right up to the Library level and quit.

• Speaking of the Library... Worst Level Ever. I never understand how part of an otherwise solid game can survive playtesting when that part is so heinously unfun that having endured it you think to yourself, in hindsight, that if you'd known how sucky that was going to be, you'd have either skipped it or possibly even quit altogether. Anytime part of your game makes a player consider not having anything to do with the rest of the game, you should probably take that part out. You know, just as a rule of thumb.

Beautiful

• Look at this screenshot, or this one. Notice anything? Here, let's compare it to this one. See the difference? Not yet? Ok, how about this one? In Halo, enemies bleed when you kill them. Seems like a simple enough thing. But thanks to the world according to litigious fascists and Electronic Arts, while it may be perfectly acceptable to peddle wholesale slaughter of nazis, aliens, and communists, it is unacceptable to show their blood. So it came as quite a pleasant surprise to me when the holes I put into my enemies' bodies in Halo resulted in not just blood, but copious amounts of it. Look at those first two screenshots again. I mean, some bad shit happened there, and you can tell. I've never understood how games based exclusively on killing your enemies magically transform into family-friendly (T)een-rated affairs through nothing other than the removal of visible blood. You still kill everything. It's not like the game changes into a pillow fight where you have to share cookies and milk with the bad guys. At any rate, I am very glad that Microsoft/Bungie didn't water down Halo to avoid the (M)ature rating. It's a better game for it. Bright neon-colored blood is much better than no blood at all, even if it did feel vaguely like I was slaughtering aliens from Planet Easter Egg.

  Along the same lines, the bodies of your fallen enemies in Halo stay dead and stay put, right where you left them. Not indefinitely, unfortunately, but longer than the industry's standard 15 seconds. One of my shooter pet peeves that annoys me as much as having things not bleed when I shoot them is having them disappear right under my nose moments after I dispatch them, as though the grim reaper is hovering around me with a giant broom and dust pan picking up the mess I make like a compulsively clean house mom.

• The melee attack is sublime! Like the grenades, having a tactically unique method of attack always at your disposal makes the combat much more engaging. After a few hours of Halo, during which I was making a conscious effort to remind myself that at my discretion I could bash anyone upside the head with my gun butt, I found it to be a totally natural and obvious thing to be able to do. Forthwith, I feel compelled to list the gun-butt-bash melee attack alongside leaning and mantling as things that every single shooter should have. From here on out, any shooter that doesn't let me crack heads with my gun butt will register immediate disappointment.

• One last little thing, which really isn't much, but when it's done wrong it makes you want to pull your hair out, right after you tar and feather whichever developer didn't do his job: it's the fact that friendly AI get the hell out of whatever seat you want in the warthog. I can't tell you how many years I've probably taken off my life by getting my blood pressure amped when playing Battlefield 1942, whose AI abso-friggin-lutely refuses to budge from whatever position it happens to occupy in any of the vehicles. It was the painful memories of this nearly suicidal frustration that made me giddy when I played Halo and the marines would politely hop in and out of the warthog with the crisp immediacy that you would expect from a good soldier. See how these much these tiny little things affect the enjoyment one gets out of a game?

Summary

Like GTA 3, which I played and reviewed just before this, Halo is not gaming's Panacea, and it is also, contrary to the reverberation of rabid fanboys the world over, NOT the Best Game Ever. It's easily an above average shooter, in terms of gameplay. In terms of campaign-play, not so much. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but whenever I play one of these console games (either on the console or as a port) that have spawned their own religions, the strongest conclusion I draw is that these people need to (a) fucking relax and (b) get out and play more games. Halo's a really good shooter, and I had fun playing it, but it nevertheless has some deep flaws. I'd throw it in a bucket with about a dozen other FPSs that I could see myself playing again, but probably won't because there are, at any given time, a handful of new ones of roughly the same calibre, and even if there weren't, shooters rarely entertain me enough to get me to choose a second helping over the gigantic pile of games that I haven't played yet.

Is Halo fun? As always, that's up to you. The strength of the combat had enough pull to get me to the end of the campaign. Its multiplayer suffers from a lack of bots, and no dedicated linux server. Oh, and NO FUCKING CO-OP!!! (Sorry, just had to get that in one more time.) Note that for the record, I still consider Halo for the XBox to be unplayable, for the same reason that I don't use chopsticks to eat soup. I couldn't stomach playing GTA 3 on the console, either, but I enjoyed its gameplay on the PC and was thankful for the port. Similarly, I'm glad that MS had enough wits about them to allow for the PC version of Halo. It's a well-executed shooter and deserves to be in its native element - i.e. where the player can precisely aim.