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My Review of Halo: Combat Evolved

A Brent Salmon Game Review

By Brent SalmonPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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My Review of Halo: Combat Evolved
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

You’ll probably think this is hilarious, but I’ve never played a Halo game before. I haven’t been an obsessive gamer for decades but I think of myself as better-than-casual and my Steam library and achievements are pretty decent and broad, but I could never get into most things that hordes of other people become slavering mad-people over. I HATE fanboys, mostly. As a result, I never caught Halo fever. It wasn’t until recently that my best friend started telling me all about the story and nagging me to play it that I decided to give it a shot if I could find it on sale. Well, Steam is having their Autumn sale at this time of writing, and the Master Chief Collection was 23 bucks Canadian, so I say the heck with it and purchased.

At the time I’ve writing I’ve played 2.5 hours of Halo: CE and gotten to the gravity lift to infiltrate the ship and rescue the captain. I’m inside the ship and that’s where I decided to call it a night and start writing. My first take on Halo will not make me popular; It’s not good. Storyline is alright space fun so far, Cortana is smart, capable, and hot, the voice acting is decent, but it’s not inspiring me to keep playing and if it hadn’t been highly recommended by people I respect so much (my BFF for months and my brother for YEARS), I’d probably not pick it back up again.

No sprint, no map, awful objective markers, it sucks. The same handful of identical enemies over and over and over again is boring me to tears. We just got attacked by 2 big powerful mini-boss looking dudes before hitting the gravity lift, so that was a nice change, and I enjoyed the fact that I could jump in turrets or use the Warthog jeep thing. I hate the controls of the jeep but being able to use it is fun. And don’t give me that “Oh well it was the first of its kind, nobody had those features!”. Deus Ex 1 is 2 years older and it had nanotech super speed legs and all kinds of mapping and intel gathering.

Another thing that bothered me; the Chief is a neat character, and he looks cool, but he’s a genetically engineered, cybernetically and bioware enhanced super soldier in a nuclear-powered Iron Man knockoff. And he can kind of jump 10 or so feet high, but apart from that he just feels like a regular dude. I want my super soldiers to FEEL SUPER. I’m told he gets more super in the follow-up games to I’m hoping to see SOMETHING of it.

I will keep playing this series (I PAID for it after all and I’m something of a completionist achievement glutton), but what’s going to keep me going isn’t the gameplay. What’s going to keep me in the Halo universe is the recommendations of my people and the world it’s building for me. The story is formulaic so far, but I’ve seen some neat tech ideas I’d love to speculate on regarding real science in future articles, so that’ll have to keep me going.

The idea of Master Chief being something of a bio-enhanced child soldier isn’t new by any stretch (in gaming Metal Gear Solid did it years earlier for example), but it’s something I find both fascinating and heart breaking and would like to comment on.

End of day, Halo CE as a game wasn’t worth the purchase or play, but as a cheap series that I can use as Pomodoro rewards for a couple weeks, I probably got my money’s worth. And hey, it might get better.

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About the Creator

Brent Salmon

Dad, Dog Dad, wannabe polyglot, amateur engineer of all the things, pre-med biologist, medic, psych major, ex trauma-counsellor, programmer, artist, serial entrepreneur, occasional cyborg, and now, writer.

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