Halo: Combat Evolved Review (Kyezoar)
The Start of John Halo's Journey, and bad level design.
Halo: Combat Evolved is the first entry of the famous Halo series. Following Master Chief as he discovers super weapon Halo as well as fighting off the Alien Alliance known as the Covenant as well as some of the most obnoxiously annoying enemies ever. It's a pretty fun shooter that suffers from poor aspects in other areas of the game. That isn't the Anniversary's editions fault, just strange design choices that don't age well. At least it makes for some fun co-op.
Gameplay of Halo 1 follows a handful of long levels, set in pretty big levels with a lot of shooting, usually against the alien forces. Mr. Halo is equipped with decently sizable arsenal with a handful of Human weapons and Covenant weapons. However, since he can't hold more than two weapons for some reason, you'll often find yourself swapping/dropping weapons often. Compared to other games in the franchise, Halo 1 by far has the best shooting with just a perfect combination of great sound design and weapons that can hit things, especially the Pistol magnum and the Shotgun. Combined with a lot of closed quarters combat broken up occasional with surprisingly really fun vehicles segments. However this starts to fall apart when the general level design starts to come into play.... it's bad. Granted the outdoor segments do NOT have this problem but basically all the interior segments are just copy and pasted over, and over and over again. Which isn't bad mind you, just incredibly boring and tedious. This issue is made worse by the other set of alien enemies, The Flood. These mindless creatures turn the game into Serious Sam, except without all the things that make a Serious Sam game fun. While you do get a pretty beefy shotgun, the last few levels of Halo 1 are a absolute slog to get through, minus one pretty fun ending escape sequence. However I will say, the boring-ness does get dampened a bit if you're playing co-op as there's plenty of opportunities for funny moments and being able to split up the work load.
Style wise, Halo looks pretty good. Both with the Anniversary AND the original Xbox Graphics. The orginial graphics give off that feeling that early 3D games like Half Life or I guess more accurately console shooters like Turoks or maybe even Goldeneye, just with a lot more visual clarity and bigger levels. Mainly the outdoor areas are the best looking overall, mainly because they are reused over and over again. Basically the same case with the Anniversary graphics, a bit more pretty, improved sound design, and generally faithfully to the original aesthetics. Though I do think some of the levels become way brighter than the original levels and kinda lose the atmosphere. Thankfully with a press of the button you can basically swap between these modes as you wish!
Overall, Halo 1 has aged not perfectly. While the gunplay absolutely has and I can totally see why the multiplayer of Halo 1 is so well remembered. The campaign's level design combined with annoying enemies really bring it down for me. Thankfully the game's plot was just enough to let me see it through as I found it quite interesting and worth it to see it to the end. I finally understand why people like Mister Chief: John Halo and agree that this game has a good shotgun.