Halo: Combat Evolved (

2001

) ½

There is something about Halo: Combat Evolved that engenders extreme opinions, and as near as I can tell it has nothing to do with the game itself. Halo: CE is a pretty good FPS, from a point in history where there are plenty of pretty good FPS games floating around. I certainly enjoyed playing it, but I'm just downright mystified by people who lavish such grandiose praise on it. Indeed, you don't have to look very hard to find all manner of histrionic praise for this game. Just perusing the reviews on Metacritic quickly brings up such gems as “Halo is quite simply the closest thing we have ever experienced to a living, breathing alternate universe” and “It may be the best FPS ever created. Yet from my standpoint, Halo is one of the greatest games ever created. Ever.” Obviously, both these claims are absolute nonsense coming out as they did in 2001, years after games like Half-Life [1998] and Deus Ex [2000] came along. At least I can see why somebody would love this game. Halo: Combat Evolved is a damn fine FPS, no matter which way you slice it. Hell, removed from the halcyon days of the late 90s and early 2000s shooter scene, Halo looks downright brilliant when measured against the lackluster fair of the modern age. I just don't think it warrants anywhere near the level of praise and acclaim that it has accrued.

On the other hand, you have guys like Movie Bob, whose commentary on the series has got to be the highest concentration of horseshit that I've ever seen outside a manure factory. Bob starts off by admitting that he prefers the game's villains The Covenant, to the game's heroes The UNSC, because they are more visually varied. Fair enough, I'm a Warhammer 40k fan myself so I understand the visual appeal of theocratic space empire with a highly diverse military. However, from that observation, he goes on to imply that the game is tacitly endorsing fascism because it's arguing that the more diverse side are the bad guys. Let's ignore the fact that the Covenant is only more diverse because games are more interesting when you have to battle a variety of enemies, and being able to tell one type of enemy apart from the other is a pretty handy trait for an FPS to have. After all, there's a perfectly good justification in the game's lore for why the Covenant is made up of a variety of alien races. They are a diverse group of species not because they are have decided democratically to work together, but because they are a group of races that have been conquered and enslaved by a space-faring empire. What's more, Bob even acknowledges this distinction before discarding it with a shrug and going on to castigate the developers for promoting fascism (before saying that he's not doing that... before going on to do it again). The amount of cognitive dissonance that this man is operating under is simply staggering.

The frustrating part here is that Bob's arguments are so basic and so willfully ignorant of the context of the game's story that if you used a similar ideological lens you could make the same argument about virtually every game ever made. King Koopa's army in Super Mario World [1990] is far more diverse than their opponents (two identical Italian plumbers). They have Goombas, Koopas (with a rainbow of different shell colors), Hammer Brothers, ghosts, football players, moles, and fish. Hell, the argument that Nintendo was secretly promoting fascism makes more sense here because the heroes of this game, Mario and Luigi are Italians and Italy was the country that invented fascism! Unlike Halo, this argument isn't undercut by the fact that the “good guys” are made up of all different human races with heroic figures belonging to every race and gender under the sun.

Impressively, Bob's bad takes aren't even confined to the game! In-between willfully misinterpreting the story, accusing the developer of promoting fascism, and insisting that he's not accusing the developer of fascism he finds time to say Heinlein was anti-individualist and ancient Sparta was proto-fascist. Now, anyone who's actually read a Heinlein book already knows that bullshit (if I was going to criticize Heinlein I'd say his faith in individualism is naive) so I won't bother refuting that here but knowledge of ancient Sparta is a touch more specialized and those without a background in classics might be suckered in by Bob's baloney. Fortunately, I was a classics scholar in a previous career path, and I know a thing or two about Sparta, well at least a good deal more than people whose closest study of the civilization was watching the movie 300 (2007). Far from being proto-fascist, the ancient Spartans could more accurately be described as proto-communist (though this is still a gross anachronism). All wealth (this being the ancient world it was primarily in the form of land and slaves) was controlled by the state and parceled out to each citizen in semi-hereditary fiefs. Children were raised collectively, by the state rather than by their families in a system that most communists would like to administer but are unsure of how to enforce. Moreover, while the Spartans were as militaristic as the 20th-century fascists, their military was almost exclusively a defensive force because they lived in constant fear of their slaves, the helots, revolting and destroying their society. Part of the reason why the Peloponnesian War dragged on as long as it did was because the Spartans couldn't leave their own lands for extended military campaigns without risking the complete destruction of their society. To top it all off, Sparta wasn't a dictatorship or even a monarchy. It was a mixed-constitution that balanced monarchy (two hereditary kingships), oligarchy (the council of elders), and democracy (the assembly of all adult male citizens).

So why does a pretty good game inspire such extreme opinions? No doubt it has something to do with the game's lasting popularity and its role as the premier console FPS. There had, of course, been FPS games on the console before Halo was released but they were nearly always ports of PC games, and in the cases, they weren't, like Goldeneye [1997], they felt like the should have been played on a PC (don't believe me, download the emulated version of Goldeneye [1997] and the program that lets you play it with mouse and keyboard and compare it with the old N64 controller). Halo was the first real console FPS, with a control scheme and de-emphasized aiming that felt natural on a controller. So much so that playing it on a mouse and keyboard feels a bit like cheating (not that it's going to stop me). Consequently, everyone that wasn't gaming on PCs got subjected to a decade's worth of FPS innovations all at once. For this audience of genre newcomers, it was like Doom [1993], Quake [1996], and Half-Life [1998] all rolled up into one package! No surprise that early adopters of the Xbox were so enthusiastic about it.

Of course, there was a good deal of just dumb luck involved in Halo's initial success. Nobody during development could have known that America would be targeted by religious extremists two months before the game released. The Covenant with their theocratic leadership was a perfect target for the simmering rage against Jihadists that had blossomed in the wake of 9/11. So in addition to providing a solid FPS experience, Halo also scratched the same itch as those primitive flash cartoons where you could put Osama bin Laden in a blender. Indeed, in the days after 9/11 it was probably the most cathartic video game experience on the market save for Counter-Strike [1999].

The degree of success that Halo enjoyed though comes at a cost though. The mere act of being popular makes you a target for the various groups of smug contrarians and intolerable hipsters. Not to mention jealous kids with a PlayStation 2 or a Gamecube who'd hate any Xbox exclusive just because they wouldn't be able to play it. There were also the PC gamers who were probably stupefied, wondering what all the fuss was about for a game that was like a dumbed-down Half-Life [1998] where you didn't need to aim and could only carry two weapons at a time. Yet both those calling Halo the greatest game of all time and those referring to it as derivative trash were missing the mark. Halo: Combat Evolved is, at the end of the day, a pretty good game. Nothing more and nothing less, and if either set of fanatics took a look with eyes unclouded by nostalgia or spite they'd probably have to agree with me on that.

Halo: Combat Evolved takes place in a world where humanity has untied into one super nation and has begun to colonize distant planets. The only problem is that we are not alone in the galaxy and that our stellar neighbors are real dicks. As soon as a few worlds were settled by human colonists they came under attack by The Covenant, a space-faring theocracy that had already conquered and enslaved several sentient races. Halo: CE isn't a strategy game or an RPG, so the exact details of the conflict are glossed over in favor of throwing the player right into the middle of the action, but all the same we can quickly gather that things are not going in humanity's favor. Indeed, the game opens with a spaceship, The Pillar of Autumn, fleeing a decisive human defeat. The survivors are running scared against a significantly larger Covenant fleet. The situation is hopeless, so it's all the captain can do to make sure that the Covenant does not get their hands on Cortana, the ship's AI, lest the enemy use her to discover the location of earth along with the schematics for earth's defenses. For some asinine reason, the captain is also forbidden from just wiping the AI or putting her core chip in the microwave, so he passes her off instead to the player character, a Doom-guy clone (right down to the green armor) called Master Chief. The player along with the rest of the ship's compliment abandon the Pillar of Autumn and evacuate to the surface of a strange nearby ring-shaped planet-size space station called Halo. Personally, I'm surprised nobody in the game makes a bigger deal about such a massive structure floating in the void. I know that if I saw something like that the first question I'd ask is who built it, and why?

This turns out to be a pertinent question because Halo is not just a derelict space station, but rather an ancient weapon built by a long-vanished galactic empire called the Forerunners. Along with the seven other Halo stations scattered across the galaxy, the weapon has the power to completely eradicate all life in the galaxy. The Forerunners built them, when they were fighting a galaxy-wide war against a parasitic life form called The Flood (think the Zerg from Starcraft [1998] or The Tyranids from Warhammer 40k and you won't be far off). For some insane reason, the Forerunners kept samples of The Flood onboard Halo, which escape during the ongoing battle between the humans and the Covenant. I have to ask: why keep any trace of The Flood around when they are such a significant threat that they make sterilizing the entire galaxy a reasonable strategic option? Maybe this is answered in one of this game's sequels or some of the multitude of spin-off media, but there is no reason given here.

The addition of The Flood, while adding some nice variety to the combat really screws with the difficulty curve. The Covenant are one of the better examples of AI in FPS games, certainly one of the better examples I've seen in recent years. In higher difficulties they will flank you, fall back from tough fights, dodge grenades and use grenades of their own to flush you out of entrenched positions. Fighting Covenant forces is pretty damn tough, especially at the start when I didn't understand their tactics or what the different castes of soldiers were capable of. Elites are an especially big pain because they have a shield which can regenerate and are practically ballerinas the way they can dodge and weave out of incoming fire. The Flood, on the other hand, are all either tiny parasitic organisms that die in one hit from a pistol shot or mindless zombies that have no self-preservation instinct and will throw themselves at you regardless of your position. Half the time I ran into a group of Flood I would just double back till I found a corner and then pick them off one by one with the shotgun as they shuffled into view. As a result, the levels where I was only fighting the Flood were considerably easier than the one where I was only fighting The Covenant. Levels where both turned up could be even easier as the two factions would spend as much time fighting each other as they would going after me. In the final level of the game, I remember ducking into a side passageway, waiting for The Covenant forces to thin out the ranks of Flood before I charged their lines. From a difficulty standpoint, it would have been far better if The Flood were the first enemy race encountered, with The Covenant coming in later, though this would require the game's plot and probably a good chunk of the lore to be completely re-written. Still, it makes me wonder how the Flood managed to pose a threat to the whole galaxy when they can't even deal with one dude, a shotgun and a right angle.

Despite that issue, the campaign is, on the whole, very good. In 2001 the industry still operating on the idea that a shooter campaign should be an actual video game unto itself and not a five hour tutorial for the multiplayer. The levels here are nicely varied, you have massive levels where your traversing across vast distances and multiple installations like “Assault on the Control Room” on one hand and more confined and linear levels like “The Maw” on the other. The game even dabbles a bit with pseudo survival horror in “343 Guilty Spark” the level where the Flood are introduced. The very best levels, like “The Silent Cartographer”, weave all this together so you're traversing wide-open areas one minute, delving into some ancient ruin the next. The campaign is also just the right length, as soon as it runs out of tricks it promptly ends. There is quite a bit of recycling going on here, as some levels are virtually identical only played in reverse (most notable “Assault on the Control Room” and “Two Betrayals”) but the game at least takes some pains to make sure the enemy placement and overall feel of the levels remain distinct.

I rather like Halo's approach to storytelling. The surface plot is very simple and straightforward: mankind is waging a losing war against alien zealots and in the process of that war one ship has been forced down on an ancient alien artifact. Cut scenes are kept to a minimum to move the plot along and establish the characters, and there is no point where you're left crouch-jumping onto tables while some dope drops a whole load of expository dialogue onto you. Yet despite this, it's obvious that there is a considerable amount of lore and backstory in place. Said lore is not delivered as cryptically as in Dark Souls [2011] or as elegantly as in Half-Life [1998], yet it is there all the same. In each level, there is a hidden terminal that if accessed will clue you into some of the game's backstory and world-building. Thus the most engaged players will track down these secrets and be rewarded for their efforts, while the ones who just want to blast alien scum are free to do so at their leisure.

Indeed, I find myself sympathetic to the gamers in the latter camp for once because the combat in Halo is excellent. In particular, the game handles health and damage exquisitely. Your character is equipped with a force shield that diminishes as you take hits if you go long enough without taking any damage though it will start to regenerate. In addition, you have your regular health which will not regenerate but only gets damaged when your shields are down. The game effectively combines the advantages of a static health system with a regenerating one. Better yet, this was before game designers thought they needed to hide the health bar from players so all this information is displayed in the top right of the screen. Rather than smear your screen with dirt and blood when you take damage (and consequently obscure your vision) the game warns you by having your shield let out an annoying beep when it gets low. As a result, you have an incentive to use cover, when your shield is regenerating but no reason to simply cower behind it all the time for fear of losing precious health. This system encourages an aggressive fast-moving play style, broken up by bursts of calm as you wait to recover. Since taking shield damage doesn't matter in the long run, you can take calculated risks and reap the rewards for them. Since low shields have an auditory cue you don't even have to be looking at your health bar to know you're in trouble. How can a game as popular as Halo: CE knew how to do this in 2001, and practically nobody bothered to copy them for the next two decades?

Weapon variety is excellent, despite a small number of options. Every weapon does something different and has situations where it is unquestionably the best choice. The Rocket Launcher clears out crowds and enemy vehicles like nothing else but only holds ten shots and ammo drops are about as common a virgin in your local brothel. The shotgun is absolutely devastating at short range, but like all video game shotguns only tickles your enemies when they're more than five feet away. It's great against Flood who you can get to endlessly follow you around corners, but less helpful against enemies with brains. Still, during my play-through, I found ample opportunities to sprint out of cover and take out a particularly annoying Elite with a couple of point-blank shots. The assault rifle is basically worthless against anything bigger or better armored than a Covenant Grunt, but turns into a must-have when dealing with swarms of Flood parasites. The Plasma Rifle and the Plasma Pistol are the closet thing the game has to identically weapons fortunately they are saved by a small but crucial difference. The Plasma Rifle does more damage normally, but the plasma pistol can be overcharged to take out an enemy's shields in one hit, making it invaluable against Elites and Jackals. There's also a Sniper Rifle, which is great for taking out enemies from a distance but unfortunately you only really get to use it for about five minutes in the whole campaign. About the only bad thing I can say about the weapons is that you can only hold two of them at a time, which is a real step down from the big-ass weapon wheel that I've grown accustomed to in older shooters.

It's not all good mind you. For one thing, the game is a bit nuts with the one-hit kill weapons. You have Plasma Grenades that Covenant troops are armed with. These things are basically sicky grenades and if they manage to tag you with one (or toss one next to you without you noticing) then you're toast as soon as it detonates. Getting stuck with one is thus especially annoying since it will be three agonizing seconds before the damn thing blows up and all the while you know there's nothing you can do about it. Then there's the plasma sword that some Covenant Elites are armed with, one swipe with that thing will cut through all your shields and health regardless of how much remain. At least in this case the enemy has to get within melee range of you before they can off you, giving you at least some chance to save yourself. Too bad they are only carried by elites who have shields and a massive health pool to boot. Worst of all though are the Flood zombies that carry rocket launchers. All they need to do is land one rocket in your general direction and then it's back to the checkpoint once again. In and of themselves, these one-hit kill weapons are not so bad, the problem comes when they are placed right before a checkpoint, often hidden around a corner or barricade. Nothing is more frustrating that surviving a hellish gantlet only to get one-shotted by some asshole inches from the finish line.

The vehicles are all varying degrees of awful to pilot, generally handling like they are strapped to ice-skates and will topple over if there is a light breeze. None are more offensive then the standard Humvee-esque vehicle you'll be obliged to pilot at certain points in the game: The warthog. This thing is such a piece of crap. The top speed is about 12 miles per hour, but it more than makes up for this by having the turning radius of an aircraft carrier. Also, it's unbelievably top heavy so if you make a jump there's always a chance that it will go ass over head and send you flying. Seriously, whenever I got in one of these rolling coffins I would use it as a taxi, just getting close to the enemy lines before hopping out and taking out the enemy conventionally. So naturally, when I got to the climax of the game and found that I had to drive one of these pieces of shit four kilometers while a timer ticked down to my death I was less than enthusiastic about it. It's a damn shame too, because as I was carefully navigating my warthog around lethal small bumps at speeds that would make my Grandma yell “step on the gas!” I caught a glimpse of the thrilling escape sequence the developers must have imagined. It wouldn't take that much to make the Warthog playable either, too bad as it stands right now it's just an obnoxious chore to drive the damn thing.

The difficulty curve is also not as smooth as one would like. As I mentioned before, the appearance of The Flood makes the whole game considerably easier, just by virtue of their easily exploitable AI. Still, I think it's always a bad sign when the single hardest moment in your game comes halfway through the third mission in a ten mission campaign. It probably wasn't the best decision to have half a dozen invisible Elites spawn in with one-hit-kill weapons so early on in the campaign. Especially when I didn't even know they had cloaked bad guys at this point! Maybe save this bit for the final mission and send in more conventionally armed Elites at this point.