First things first is that there's not a lot of story IN the first Halo game. What little backstory you can glean is in the instruction manual, but doesn't really give you a feel for the universe's mythology. I'm currently reading the prequel novel Halo: The Fall of Reach and would highly recommend reading it before starting this game. Or I guess you could just play Halo Reach in about 2 weeks.
In the far future, humanity has mastered interstellar travel and has moved to colonize other worlds and systems. Earth has become unified under the United Nations Space Command (UNSC), which serves as the peacekeeper of all of our far-flung settlements. But things aren't all hunky dory as there are some who want to rebel against its authority, and yep, you still have criminal pirates that raid ships. Some in the UNSC fear that eventually even bigger threats will emerge as humans move ever further from the centralized authority of Earth.
A secret program, called the Spartan-II project, is initiated to breed and train the ultimate super-soldier. If successful, the genetically and bionically enhanced Spartan-IIs will be much stronger, faster, and intelligent than a normal human and serve as the go-to black ops arm of the UNSC. Unfortunately, just as the Spartan-II soldiers complete some of their first missions, a new and unexpected threat arrives on the scene. We have our first alien contact with beings calling themselves "The Covenant". The Covenant has no interest in friendly relations. In fact, their priests have declared all humans an abomination to their god and instigate a holy war to wipe us out. The humans have plenty of ships and weapons to fight the Covenant, but they are mostly ineffective against the energy shields and laser and pulse weapons that the aliens possess. In effect, we are completely outgunned.
A desperate plan is launched to smuggle the Spartan-IIs, led by their commander, Master Chief, onto a Covenant ship and take the war to the Covenant homeworld. Before the mission can be carried out the Spartan-II homebase is invaded by the Covenant and they are all killed, except Master Chief, who is saved by the ship Pillar of Autumn. When the ship comes out of a blind jump into deep space, they encounter a huge ring-shaped artificial world called Halo...and a Covenant space fleet. It is said that the Covenant think that Halo is a powerful weapon and are attempting to figure out how to use it. The UNSC needs to find out if if this is true, but the Pillar suffers severe damage from the Covenant fleet. As the Pillar heads for a crash landing with Halo, Master Chief and the ship's AI, Cortana, enter an escape pod that will take them to the ring's surface.
I have to say I found myself unimpressed by the Halo experience and found myself a bit bored in this first game. Is it just because it's almost a decade old or because it's just not as good as advertised? Probably a bit of both. First of all, I would have liked to have had more story in the game itself instead of having to read a prequel novel to get the full impact. Because of its age, what cutscenes there are really show stand out in all their polygonal and automaton movement glory. From all of the other media that has come out since the game's release, I realize that the universe of Halo is very rich and deep, but within the game itself, I get none of that. It just feels like playing any other pointless shooter.
A negative by-product of this game being an Xbox launch release is that the original Xbox became synonymous with First Person Shooters, while the PS2 offered a more diverse game catalog. And really, I don't see how this game was so "evolved" over earlier FPSs like Doom or Quake. A lot of this had to do with the boring weaponry and enemies. You basically have about 4 types of each. Master Chief's main weapon, the MA5B assault Rifle was probably my least favorite gun in the game. In fact, spoiled as I am with COD, it felt like a noisy dart gun. I found myself gravitating to the sniper and shotgun most of the time or picking up Covenant plasma weapons over the human assault rifle. If you can't get anything right, at least make your protagonist's main weapon interesting. The levels themselves were quite lacking in imagination as well.
The vehicle controls, especially of the Warthog, the equivalent of a Humvee, were awful, and were frustratingly cumbersome in the latter stages of the game.
One of my pet peeves about videogames is when they have a "fake save system". By that I mean they have an option that says "save and quit", but in actuality, if you use it, it only takes you to your last saved checkpoint. What makes this fake is that your last saved checkpoint is where the game will automatically start you anyway. So the game makes you believe you are saving when in actuality you will lose all progress since the last checkpoint. I also felt that Halo suffered a bit because it didn't offer many checkpoints when it came to longer battles where you had a ton of enemies to take down. In fact, a lot of times, I just tried to rush past some of the battles instead of getting involved in them and dying and having to repeat myself. I actually found myself repeating out loud as I played "OMG, this is so frickin boring...so boring....so boring". This happened a lot when I had to repeat whole battles over and over. I finally got through them, or found a way to bypass them, but it was not an enjoyable experience.
Really, I guess in the end I could sum up my thoughts on Halo Combat Evolved with the word tedious. I did not have fun playing this game. It seemed more like work. I never had a "wow" moment. The lack of story and the lack of variety in the environments, weapons, and enemies all served to make this game a major downer for me. I guess it's worth playing for its historical value but I didn't think it was a very good game. If you do choose to pick it up, definitely check out The Fall of Reach novel first to give it some context.
My Grade: C-
(This game was developed by Bungie. You can get it on Xbox On Demand for $15 or boxed for around $10 in stores)
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