Halo: Combat Evolved - Review

Okay, I have a geeky confession to make. I never beat Halo. I've owned it for years, and yet I've never managed to finish it. Every time I tried to I made it about halfway through and then just stopped.

You see, I didn't actually like Halo. Never really enjoyed it. I kept hearing how great it was and how it was the best first person shooter ever... and yet I just didn't like it.

I was about twenty when Halo came out. I had heard very good things about it, but at the time I didn't have an Xbox. Well that year was my grandpa's 80th birthday, and my dad and I were going to drive out to Illinois to surprise him (great idea, surprising an 80 year old man), well there's not a whole lot to do at my grandparents house so my dad said that he would buy me an Xbox to bring out and play. It was great, I would finally get to play this amazing game I had heard so much about.

We went to CompUSA and bought an Xbox, the first games I got were Halo: Combat Evolved, Silent Hill 2, and Amped. I immediately went home to play some Halo.

It was somewhat fun at first. I had a good time... it wasn't great, but it was fun. The more I played it though, the more I found it kind of mediocre.

I had one main problem... at this point in time I was still pretty much a PC gamer. The controller felt so odd, I had a very difficult time getting used to. It just felt so foreign in my hands. It was fine for other games, but I just couldn't get used to controlling an FPS without a mouse and keyboard. I think this very much effected how I felt about the game. My other problems were with how the vehicles handled and how the levels were designed.

Several times in the last couple years I've tried to make it through the game. I usually get about halfway through before getting frustrated and giving up.

Nine years later I'm now a console gamer almost exclusively. All of the sudden the game I couldn't grasp the controls of felt much, much more natural. And something else, I was enjoying it a whole lot more.

Don't get me wrong, the warthog still handles like absolute crap... I constantly feel like I'm driving on ice. It's like the warthog's driving physics were coded by someone who had never been in an actual vehicle before and doesn't know what friction is. The level design is still atrocious as well. I don't know how many times I though "Wait, am I walking in circles? This corridor looks exactly like ever other corridor." You also have to love when the level you're in now is just the same level you recently played but it's nighttime now.

Okay, those are really my only gripes. Besides the level design and the warthog the game is good. I'm not going to hop on the bandwagon and say it's the best first person shooter, however I will say that it was a very good console first person shooter... especially at the time when it was released.

I know I've said this before, but bear with me. By 2001 I had been playing Half Life, Deus Ex, Alien Vs. Predator 2, Strife, Counter Strike, Team Fortress Classic, and to a lesser extent Doom, Doom 2, and Wolfenstein as well as a host of other PC first person shooters. The PC had tons of great first person shooters while consoles had... Goldeneye and Halo. And despite the fact that these were the best of their genre on the console, they really couldn't compare to what we had on the PC. In today's world a game is more likely to be released to a console then it is to the PC, and almost certainly if it gets a PC release it's getting a console release. Back then? That didn't happen as much. So console gamers missed out on a lot of very good games that PC players had.

I'm glad that I finally beat Halo, it was a good game that I didn't really give a fair shot. The story was good, and overall I enjoyed the game a lot despite it's flaws. I've never really wanted to play the Halo series, but now I'm looking forward to picking up Halo 2 & 3 somewhere down the line.

Is it the greatest FPS ever made? No, not in my opinion. It's a good game and a great console FPS, and we certainly have to give it a lot of thanks. Without Halo you probably wouldn't have a lot of the first person shooters being released now, and frankly without Halo you might not be playing your Xbox 360. So go ahead and give it a shot if you've never played it before, it's certainly worth a try.

Squid.