Halo: Combat Evolved Review (meitou めいとう)
Having grown up playing Halo CE: PC edition religiously, Halo: Anniversary was in all honesty an underwhelming remaster. There is no one big thing, but numerous small things that made me dislike this.
-Constant sound/audio bugs. Certain music and sounds cut out (The Ghost FX stop after a few seconds.)
-Unimpressive graphics that honestly detract from the charm of the original game with none of the "wow" factor that came with Halo 2: Anniversary. I found myself playing more on original graphics on subsequent playthroughs.
-It may sound trivial but matters to me: In Anniversary graphics, Keyes is wearing his Captain's uniform on 343 Guilty Spark, where in the original version he was sporting more functional combat clothing. Dude must have been sweating his balls off wearing that suit in such a humid swamp environment.
Now a critique of Halo: CE itself based on a Legendary playthrough:
-Much slower gameplay in comparison to Halo: Reach (if you play in in-game chronological order.) I'm honestly grateful this gameplay style was left behind, though I will say the large scale of Halo CE's maps were certainly absent in Halo 2's campaign.
-I found the AI on the original PC version was very impressive the first time I played through on Legendary. Enemies were aggressive, exercised flanking tactics and knew when to apply pressure and when to retreat. For some reason I did not get that same experience here. Maybe the AI was affected by the remaster, maybe not.
-Dogshit checkpoint system, easily the worst in the Halo franchise.
-I'm certainly biased given I have played this campaign a thousand times, but there is certainly some laziness in the level design (I'm looking at you, Library.) Several maps also reuse previous maps and/or feature quite a bit of backtracking (This works well on Two Betrayals, which is the reverse of AOTCR because the intensity is ramped up due to the openness of the map and scale of the Covenant/Flood battles, but doesn't really work on 343 Guilty Spark, which just becomes tedious looking at those boring rooms.)
-Best Flood IMO, given how satisfying they are to fight and their aggression.
-Halo 1 shotgun and pistol gang rise up.