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People have been praising the Halo franchise for decades (and are mostly furious about the terrible TV adaptation), so I figured it was time to try them out for myself. I bought The Master Chief Collection. I'm playing the campaigns (in release order), so that'll be what I'm reviewing.
Halo: Combat Evolved
The gameplay is very dated. No surprise for a game that's 23 years old. I gather it was pretty ground-breaking when it came out, but from a modern point of view it's missing some key features.
First of all, apart from the sniper rifle (which has a scope) there's no aiming down the sights. You get a big round aiming circle and you have to get up-close and personal with basically any enemy in order to have a chance of doing any decent damage to them. Now I understand the big reticle and lack of precision may partially owe to being a console-designed game, where precision with the thumb-controls wasn't really much of a thing to begin with. Still it feels rough.
The semi-auto's are a little more forgiving in terms of accuracy, but they don't generally do much damage to begin with. The full-auto's are basically spray-and-pray at anything other than point-blank. And boy can most of these enemies soak up damage, even on Normal Difficulty. (I can only imagine it on Heroic or Legendary. I definitely don't have the skill or dedication for that.) The shotgun is devastating point-blank, but useless otherwise. The rocket launcher fires a dumb-missile in a straight line, SLOWLY, and most enemy vehicles could easily dodge it at any reasonable range, once again necessitating getting unreasonably close (made worse by the fact that you generally picked up 2-4 rockets total. Any miss was crippling.)
The lack of accuracy and enemy damage-sponges means you're going to run out of ammo frequently. I think this is by design, as they wanted to force you to try all the different weapons and to frequently have to scavenge enemy weapons as you go. It feels like a fundamental part of the campaigns, and I'm on board. But if you're the type of player who likes to find the 1-2 weapons you like and just stick to them, you're probably seriously out of luck. Overall though, I was rarely stuck with no weapons I felt like I could work with, although I was frequently worried I might end up that way. So unless I just got lucky, the campaign was VERY well designed to give you what you need.
Limiting the player to just 2 weapons (not including grenades, which are thrown without having to switch to them ) definitely increased the challenge, and there were times when I really wanted more options. I might need rocket launcher for enemy vehicles and a sniper rifle for long-range engagement, but I would ALWAYS need a short-range heavy-damage gun for the normal enemies. Even the option of a side-arm that didn't count as one of the 2 would have been nice, but I get that they wanted to make people carefully choose. When I chose wrong though, it really sucked.
But the very worst thing about the weapons was how the game would take away the ones you'd carefully collected and gotten ammo for between chapters. Sometimes you were redeploying, so it was a little more forgivable (but still frustrating), but other times you were just moving from one part of the Halo to another and suddenly the weapons you'd carefully been saving were gone and you were back with generic equipment. This was absolutely infuriating, and it happened basically every time. Honestly, this annoyed me enough to knock off serious points from the game's final score.
Moving on from weapons, this one really got me: You can't sprint. Now Master Chief moves relatively quickly (faster than most modern games), so that's good, but the inability to sprint out of danger or across exposed spaces really feels crippling. Continuing on the subject of movement, Master Chief can jump REALLY HIGH. I remember that this used to be a thing in video games, before they decided to try to be more realistic and Nerfed the jumping. I wish I could have kept this in mind throughout the gameplay, because not realizing I could jump up places really made things so much harder.
Next, the vehicle controls are TERRIBLE. Now I know this was one of the first games to even include vehicles in a FPS, and I'm sure the controls were designed for thumb-controls, but my god. The vehicles also roll really easily, which combined with terrible controls means a lot of crashes. Unfortunately the NPCs who jump on board with you get smushed every single time. I was starting to feel bad.
The game uses a combination of non-regenerating health and regenerating shields. The delay on shield regeneration was painful, but the speed of shield regeneration was even worse. The infrequency of health-restoratives meant taking damage to health could be crippling, so you HAD to wait to get shields back each time. My complaint is that I spent an absurd amount of my playthrough just hiding, waiting for my shields. Other games with similar mechanics have gotten the balance better. But hey, it's 23 years old.
Navigation. Getting around in this game could be EXTREMELY confusing at times. I can't count how many times I ended up going backwards through areas because backwards, forwards, sideways, etc. all looked the same. Which is good alien ship design, but poor game design. I needed more markers to tell me where to go next, and sometimes what to do next. It often felt like the game lacked proper directions, and not knowing which physical direction to go made this much worse. I admit I had to use the internet to tell me where to go several times.
On to the story. People love this, that's why they got mad about the TV show. So how was it? Decent-to-Good I'd say. Probably could have used a little more (cleverly inserted) backstory, but I got the general gist. The Covenant were interesting, their motives mostly clear, the slowly-revealed mystery of the Halo was engaging, the Flood was a nice twist that altered the gameplay somewhat, and overall it told a good heroic story. Some of the elements needed more explanation, like why a Human was required to activate the Halo, but it was fine. Good ending. I wasn't desperate for more of the story, but knowing there were more games coming I was looking forward to seeing where it went next and getting some more questions answered. And to continuing the Master Chief's adventures.
So what's my conclusion? Well, it's very dated which means it was clunky in a lot of ways. That having been said it was still mostly enjoyable apart from the various frustrations, and the story was Decent-to-Good. Keeping in mind that I'm playing it 23 years after release, I gave it a 5 out of 10. It was just entertaining enough to hold my interest, but I wouldn't go recommending people try it unless they're like me and just want to experience the phenomenon of Halo.