Ok, so I bought Halo: Combat Evolved, 2 days ago and beat it just yesterday. Yes, I know I am five years late in playing this title, but I was never a FPS fan in the first place. After beating it I don't see what the big fuss was over this game. I was expecting it to blow me away because of all the high scores it got and how many people say that this is one of the greatest FPS ever. To be honest I was sorely disappointed and for many reasons too.

I liked how the game started out storywise, but the story seemed to have been a afterthought afterwards. The characters aren't fleshed out and there are many unanswered question. Who is Master Chief? Who is Cortana? Who created Cortana? Why was Master Chief preserved? Is Master Chief even human? When did the conflict between humans and Covenent start? Why was there conflict? What is the flood? So many questions, but so little answers. So why did so many people say this game had a great story? The level design in this game was not great. They used so many of the same structures that it would sometimes confuse me or I would sometimes get lost because every hallway, every corridor looked the same. This leads to the amount of backtracking that you have to do in the entire game. You back track atleast once in every level that you already explored, which made the game kind of boring. You face the many of the same enemies throughout the game like the elites, the grunts, the hunters, the small parasite floods and two other flood types, not much variety in enemies. I'm not going to go into graphics because they are pretty much outdated and this game most likely looked great when it first came out. The game was pretty short, I finished it in 8 hours.

Ok, enough with the negatives, the great thing about Halo is the great A.I. for the Covenet and the rest of the enemies and your allies. The Elites would take cover when they start taking fire, if you get close they will hit you with their rifle or if you are far away taking cover they will throw a plasma grenade to flush you out, when you throw a grenade near them they will jump out of the way and basically the A.I. was great. The Marines that you sometimes encounter will also act the same throw grenades, take cover, and so forth. The weapons had a nice feel to them, especially the melee attacks for each of them. I really like the vehicles especially the Warthog and Banshee.

To conclude the story wasn't great, the level design wasn't great, not much variety in enemy types, and short campaign. Halo had great A.I., great feeling weapons, and vehicles. So why was this game rated so high in the first place, maybe because of all the hype it received? I wouldn't give this game 9.7 like most review sites, this game is more like a 8.8 in my book.

this is a classic case of over-hyping.. people bitch all the time about Final Fantasy Fan Boys but wait until you see the halo fan boys.. its crazy.. Game sucks, story is ok, game sucks.. there is really nothing good about the halo games...

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this is a classic case of over-hyping.. people bitch all the time about Final Fantasy Fan Boys but wait until you see the halo fan boys.. its crazy.. Game sucks, story is ok, game sucks.. there is really nothing good about the halo games...

I thought you said you never played an Xbox game? And in that case, how would you know how good/bad Halo 2 is? Oh, right. It's not a Sony title, so it has to suck. I almost forgot.

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there are many unanswered question. Who is Master Chief? Who is Cortana? Who created Cortana? Why was Master Chief preserved? Is Master Chief even human? When did the conflict between humans and Covenent start? Why was there conflict? What is the flood? So many questions, but so little answers. So why did so many people say this game had a great story?

Apparently you're not too familiar with the way most trilogy stories play out. The first title is never meant to be anything more than a huge cliff-hanger. You can't honestly expect to get every detail and secret of the storyline in the first title, when there's 2 more following it. Whatever wasn't answered in Halo 1 and 2 will be concluded in Halo 3. While the story may be overhyped, it's unfair to demand the entire storyline to be told in only the first of 3 titles.

And as for the rest of your post... It's not really the campaign mode that people go wild over; It's the multiplayer. I'll warn you ahead of time though... there's some serious bullet-lag in the PC version, which basically results in the need to shoot a little ahead of them in the direction they're moving in order to hit, otherwise known as "leading". I never even beat the story mode in Halo 1 or 2, to be honest. I only played through a little of each to get familiar with the game mechanics before I jumped right into multiplayer. But from what I played, it was definitely worlds above most shooters of and before it's time.

Leaving a cliff-hangar ending is never a bad thing as long as you answer some questions and not leaving the player completely in the dark like Halo did. There is not much story development besides the destroy the super weapon so it saves the universe plot. There is not character development whatsoever. The story was not great if your just looking at Halo and who would have thought there would have been a sequel or if the game would be successful. A game like Metal Gear Solid had a great story and character development and it didn't need to have to rely on a sequel to flush out the characters or the plot. I mean Bungie is lazy enough to leave all the backstory in the game manual instead of putting it in the game.

I played a bit of multiplayer and it was nothing special. I have been playing Call of Duty online so Halo multiplayer is nothing new. I haven't encountered the bullet lag you mentioned, but it is damn fun running people over with Warthog.

Dude it's an FPS title what are you expecting with the storyline? You're lucky they went as deep into the storyline as they did.

Also the storyline is evolving through the titles... I'm not really defending Halo here because it doesn't break any new ground or anything. It IS a decent FPS title though and was really one of the best available for console gaming at the time.

Really Halo is pretty outdated now and I don't understand why people play it online when there's games like BF2142, HL2, Serious Sam 2, Quake 4 or even Halo 2 on the Xbox. Even any of the other numerous FPS titles available on the PC now.

I'm sure the game is cheap enough though and if you haven't gone through it before the PC version would be the way to go with it. I find myself buying old cheapies that aren't like the best FPS titles just for the experience sometimes like Clive Barkers Undying or something.

It was decent when it came out... Kinda like Halo 2. For some reason though the multiplayer in Halo 2 kept me coming back and not so much with the first one. I can't really explain it because it wasn't anything amazing but there's just something about it...

I bought Halo and Call of Duty because my laptop could run them. My laptop can't run games like Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Battlefield 2142, etc. This is why I miss out on PC games and usually stick to console games.

Ah understandable.

Well if you haven't you should see if your computer can run Unreal 2 or Unreal Tournament... Both are most excellent FPS titles and don't really have too high of settings. I believe if you can run Halo you should be able to get both of those titles workin and they're pretty cheap to pick up if you can find them.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is really leet too if you can find it... It's a toughie but definitely one of the most amazing FPS titles in existance next to its big brother Serious Sam 2. The number of enemies you go through each stage is ridiculous.

actually i dont remember ever saying that my son.. actually i owned a crapbox once and then sold it. I played both Halo(with friends, never owned) and Halo 2(my brother won it in a contest) and they both were terrible.. I really thought very little of both.

Thank you drive-thru

It's a shame about Halo, really. Back when it was originally supposed to come out for the PC (not sure how many people actually knew that), it was an amazing game, with graphics that were ahead of it's time. But, then the Xbox came, and it dissapeared from the PC, only to come back many years later. Way too late though, it had lost it's charm.

Still, it was fun to play when I tried it last time.

QUOTE (Loomis @ Dec 26 2006, 03:27 AM)

and it dissapeared from the PC, only to come back many years later. Way too late though, it had lost it's charm.

I dunno... The really odd thing about PC Halo is the fact that it's still as active, if not more active than a lot of the more recent shooters on Xbox Live, even 360 titles. I used to play it constantly up until around July when I got my 360, which now hogs all my gaming attention for the time being. But I recently popped in PC Halo and was surprised to see it was even more active than when I stopped playing, even with Halo 2 having been out so long among other great shooters that came out since then. Not to mention the fact that it's one of the laggiest, glitchiest, most modded and aimbotted PC shooters in existence. It's just...odd that it's still alive and kicking to this day.

Half Life 1, Counter Strike, Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Quake 2 and Quake 3 still have fairly strong communities as well. Sometimes FPS titles stand the test of time due to people loving them so dearly.