Halo: Combat Evolved

"A decent game marred by unoriginality and plagiarism."

Halo is the long awaited action scifi shooter from developer Bungie Studios. With a journey that started for the fans at MacWorld NY in 1999 it has been a long road and certainly an even longer road for the developers. After beating the game twice, once in single player mode and then again in co-op, I wanted to give this game some time before I dove into a review.

To begin with, this game is in many ways the spiritual successor, or precursor if you stick to dates in the Bungie universe, to Bungie's earlier FPS trilogy Marathon. As a Mac user, I have fond memories of endless nights of death match and long nights just playing the single player game for its great design and engrossing narrative. It's what distinguished Marathon from Wolfenstein or Doom. Realistic weapons with alternate fire modes, auto-mappers, motion sensors, etc. Marathon was the genre breaker.

Enter Halo 5 years later. Gorgeous outdoor environments, richly animated characters, lifelike textures, surround sound, advanced AI, insert buzzword here ad infinitum and you have a incredibly articulated engine rendering a highly interactive world. This engine sets the stage for the massive space opera that unfolds, pitting the human race against a collective of aliens called the Covenant and eventually the nemesis of them all, the Flood.

Gameplay. Well it's an FPS on a console that controls very nicely. Run speeds are a tad slow, but probably far more realistic than in some of their peers titles. The designers have also seen fit to add some strategic elements into weapons/munitions management. Players can only carry 2 weapons, plus grenades, and limited munitions for each weapon. Players, and human NPCs, have a choice of human and alien weapons so there's no shortage of variety or style to be had. Besides there will be numerous dead bodies loaded with weapons and ammo from the endless fire fights you will endure.

Which leads to AI. On normal...the AI is pretty smart. On legendary, it's downright scarey. Friend and foe alike are extremely ''smart'', gathering weapons, launching attacks, flanking you, marshalling other troops...it can get very intimidating ^o^

I mentioned slower run speeds than other FPS titles? There are several vehicles to help you ''speed your trip'', and with a little practice, all of them control fairly well. Players will have access to both human and alien vehicles from jeeps to tanks to hover cycles and aircraft. Vehicles are very cool in Halo, especially if you have another player or some NPCs nearby who will join you and add to the mayhem by manning subweapons or just riding shotgun.

Unlike previous Bungie games, there is cinematic score that pervades key scenes of the game, pushing Halo towards the cinematic and out of the hard FPS style. Many of the players I have conversed with about this game have expressed their favorite part of playing was the feeling that they were the hero in a giant scifi movie. In the end, I think that's what Bungie has really accomplished here. A scifi movie sim. (A tidbit of trivia supporting this further, the story boards for the cut scenes were created by the same artist who provided the storyboards for ''The Fifth Element''.)

There are environments spanning for up to a mile in any given direction that are truly a sight to behold. Above ground or underground you really get the sense that this alien world exists.

But, a lot of the underground environments have a similar look and can be hard to differentiate in a firefight. There's no auto-mapper so you'll spend a bit of time being lost or retracing your footsteps. I often felt like I was trapped in ''Alien Ressurection'', where the set designers had obviously built 3 spans of corridor and simply kept recycling them in shot after shot.

A lot of the missions will also have you retracing your steps after an objective is completed, as opposed to just showing a cut scene and allowing the game to continue. That can get tiring and boring, fast. Stephen King mentions in his book, ''On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft'', that it's not necessary to detail every moment of a character's life in a story...just the interesting parts. I whole heartedly agree.

This is the spiral that the gameplay follows throughout the title. Level design starts fairly strong but deteriorates quickly to almost sub-amateur by the end.

Early levels seem to move quickly and flow fairly well. By the end you'll be slogging through enemies of Robotron-esque proportions (note: the engine holds up quite well during these encounters...a testament to it's power ^_^). But is this a good thing? At first it seems pretty cool...all that build-up to the final battle(s). But those battles are just followed by more and more epic battles. I have never played a game where I killed so many things and was totally sick of it well before the end of the game.

Like the aforementioned ''Aliens'' films that now have a patented ''surprise'' second ending, ''Halo'' is a movie that should've ended a few hours earlier...

There is one level in the game that has the player traversing passageways loaded with hostile aliens, going from one point to another without any interaction in the game other than wasting bad guys and waiting for the next door to be opened by an NPC immune to these enemies. When the player reaches the final destination, he is instantly teleported to the next stage in the game, where once again, it's time to fight through hordes of enemies. Go to the target point, blow something up and repeat.

Why weren't we simply teleported from point A to point B for a quick hit and run in the first place? It certainly would make sense tactically and given the technology on hand, it would seem the smart way of doing it.

Not to mention the utter nonsense that is the final location of this game. Everyone and their mother is hanging out in the wreckage of the Pillar of Autumn and trying to kill you. What they are all doing aboard a dead space craft with no tactical import, only Bungie will ever know. Once again it's time to wade through some corridors and kill lots of things. Whee. Is this supposed to be fun? I certainly prefer a horde of enemies to a boss but it just get's painful after a while.

Enough about gameplay...let's talk story. I've heard it hailed as everything from genius to infantile. There have been some incredibly interesting posts regarding the story on halo.bungie.org as well as marathon.bungie.org/story/ and on my first take I thought the story was pretty cool. There were a few standard elements, aliens bent on the extermination of the human race, an unknown third party technology that could save the humans, etc. But everything was crafted into a pretty interesting tale, with a fairly mature ending (though the dialogue is fairly amateurish--not quite Resident Evil bad, but in the same class).

Recently Jason Jones did an interesting interview, posted on bungie.net, regarding Halo's story. He mentioned the team was greatly influenced by some fantastic scifi authors, he even details some specific books/series: Peter F Hamilton's ''The Night's Dawn'' trilogy, Iain M Banks ''Culture'' books and Christopher Rowley's ''Starhammer'' series. Of course enjoying many elements of the story I checked out all of the books, which I had not previously read, only to find myself really starting to hate this game.

Now I don't say this lightly. The idea of orbitals and pan galactic warfare have been used in different ways many times in modern scifi. This is totally acceptable, if the author(s) places a different emotional spin on the characters/plot than their predecessors, but Bungie has not done this. Bungie has outright ripped off the aliens called the Vang, from the ''Starhammer'' series. They have changed their names to the Flood and copied everything from how they look to how they move to their philosophical take on their universe. It's exactly as described in the books.

Even the concept of the Halo, a piece of xenotech that contains the flood/Vang, is right out of ''Starhammer''. In the book it is a giant tank called The Starhammer and not an orbital, but it possesses the same capabilities of the Halo. It's shameless. Especially in a day when processors and graphics are no longer a constraint and artistry is allowed to run amok.

This doesn't even take into account the fact, that other than the protagonist, every human bit of technology is basically lifted right out the film ''Aliens''. Even the human soldier's dialogue is often lifted verbatim from the panicked cries of James Cameron's US Colonial Marines fighting it out on LV427.

There was another film a few years ago that did something like this called ''Waterworld''. However since most people have seen ''Mad Max'', Kevin Costner got killed in the reviews. I feel Bungie has fared better mostly due to the fact that the gaming press these days just don't do their homework.

So in the end I judge this piece not as an action game alone but as a interactive narrative. Whether that was Bungie's intention or not, adding characters and story to a game makes it transcend the original paradigm of games(like chess, checkers, etc.) and stand in this new hybrid genre.

In the end Halo is a very impressive piece of technology. The multiplayer, which is another entire review in itself, is equally well executed. The gameplay is solid, though suffering in the design areas, especially later in the game. But the narrative that ties the whole thing together is unoriginal at best or plagiarism at worst, depending on your definition of originality.

As an FPS this game gets a 8/10, maybe even 9/10 if I am really in an FPS mood.

As an original and rich experience, it gets a 0/10. I am deeply disappointed in Bungie. They were one of the few US developers that had a precedent of rich and original story telling with Marathon and Myth. Instead, they've fallen to just another game company that wished they were making movies.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/08/02, Updated 01/08/02