Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) by Bungie

A great remaster that still manages to show its age

Argh, so this is another difficult one for me to recommend against because although I loved it so much back when it released, it is undoubtedly showing its age. Like many old games, it's aged rather poorly and I'm afraid most modern shooter fans coming to it now will not see what made it so great in the first place.

If you—like me—played this back in 2001, and you're considering purchasing it again for nostalgic purposes, then I would probably recommend it. The remaster work done here is pretty solid. The new textures look like the original game does in my idealized memory, which has without a doubt been colored strongly with nostalgia. I'm in awe when flipping back to the original textures, which look pretty terrible by comparison. It also runs extremely well on my machine; I'm pretty much locked at 144 frames per second, no matter how many enemies or explosions are on-screen.

Halo: Combat Evolved featured several groundbreaking new ideas that made it far-and-away the best console-based shooter when it released. It features an epic science fiction story with quality voice acting and a superb soundtrack (see below video)—I'm talking all-time great caliber video game original soundtrack, to the level of something akin to a John Williams film score. It's so good it's half the reason I still play this game. This was also one of the first console shooters to feature wide-open spaces and vehicles, like something you'd find in a PC-style multiplayer shooter such as Unreal Tournament. And the AI in this game was the best console players had ever seen. Watching enemies clash with other enemy factions and with your allies was so entertaining back in the day, and this game helped to inspire other which also include dynamic AI such as this.

That said, some of these levels are bad. Like, really bad. They often feel like poor multiplayer designs, shoehorned into a single-player game. Your trek to the control room and through the library are so poorly laid out that the devs had to put giant arrows on the ground to help you find your way. They don't feel organic and they're not at all fun to traverse. Some of them are reused ad nauseam and make up entire stages of the game, such as the infamous library, which is literally just the same room repeated nearly a dozen times, which you traverse repeatedly while being swarmed by the same 3-4 enemy types. The entire game is thus permeated with a feeling of tedium and pacing issues. While the shooting feels good and the assault rifle and shotgun have an excellent impact to them, there are only so many times you can satisfyingly shotgun an enemy in the face, or time your melee perfectly so that an enemy elite's shields break when your assault rifle magazine runs empty and you execute him with a rifle butt to the face. The rest of the gameplay has to rely on its level traversal, or its story which—although inspired—is extremely bare-bones, and the game often falls flat due to that. In the later stages the game throws a seemingly endless horde of enemies at you, which becomes extremely repetitive, tedious, and frustrating. You end up trying to navigate these labyrinthine levels in which each turn looks the same as another while battling a seemingly inexhaustible stream of the exact same enemies. Additionally, vehicles all have some overly floaty physics and clipping issues which make them a chore to use in any kind of environment other than an extremely wide open one.

Despite loving the game back in 2001, replaying it today has left me with a strong opinion that an awful lot of Halo: Combat Evolved is a tedious slog that's severely lacking in fun. Playing this immediately after Reach has been eye-opening. But if you can properly look at Halo: Combat Evolved with 2001-era eyes, you might see a lot of what made it so special back then. It's got a lot of heart. It's got one of the best plot twists in video game history. And every time you're moving from cover-to-cover, shotgunning flood in the face, with that epic soundtrack pumping, perhaps you'll touch a bit of what made this game so special to us old farts, and perhaps you can enjoy it like we did back on the original Xbox in 2001.

But if you're looking for a solid shooting experience, this entry of the Master Chief Collection is completely skippable. Try Halo: Reach instead, which features a far better campaign in my opinion.

⭐⭐