Written By: Blake Elens
The year is 2552. Earth’s colonies are under attack by a ruthless group of alien races come to be known as the Covenant. The ship you’re on is the last ship to leave to massacre on Reach, Earth’s last major colony. You traveled to some unknown location in space, hopefully to lead the Covenant away from Earth. At this location, a mysterious halo ring-world is between a planet and it’s moon. Suddenly, your ship is under attack and you crash on this mysterious “Halo”. Now, you must lead a gorilla attack against the Covenant and find out Halo’s deep secrets before the enemy does.
This is possibly the most perfectly balanced FPS in history. Even Half-Life would be glad to be Halo. The A.I. is some of the smartest of all. The weapons are perfectly designed. Everything is just so well mixed in this game.
Let’s talk about multiplayer. Even without the inclusion of LIVE, Halo does very well to keep you playing this game. If you have one special friend, you can get together and play through Halo’s 10 campaign levels on co-op. One Saturday, you could invite 3 friends and you can play through Halo’s big colorful multiplayer levels. You can even hook up 4 Xboxes and have 16 controllers and have an all-night Halo marathon party.
If you have 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound, you will be totally immersed in Halo’s realistic sound effects. The gunshots and explosions will make you feel that you are in a real war. The dialogue is some of the funniest of this generation. Some of the lines you may have heard from such movies like “Animal House” and “Jerry Maguire”. The music is some of the best my ears have ever listened to. If Marty O’Donnell went into movies, James Horner will have some new competition.
These controls may get some getting used to for the console FPS fan. But, if you are a PC FPS fan and hate all the FPS controls that have come out for consoles, this is a breath of very nice fresh air. The left joystick controls the movements and the right joystick controls where you see. The right trigger is your fire button and the left trigger is the grenade button. That is really good for people tired of switching weapons just to throw grenades. The only reason why I didn’t give it a 10 is because of the time it takes for console FPS fans to get used to it. Otherwise, it’s perfect. All future console FPSs should have the exact same controls as Halo.
These are some of the best graphics this generation. The environments are just jaw dropping. You can just sit for hours just looking at the environments. The scenery does something that has hardly been done before; they actually look better when you get closer to them! The character models are as amazing as the environments. You can just stare at your fellow marine comrades. Speaking of fellow comrades, many of them flow on the screen at once. As well as your marine buddies, many of the enemies are on the screen at once, also. Each never losing a single graphical detail.
Halo is the best FPS and one of the best games of all time. The story, the graphics, and the multiplayer make for one hell of an experience. If you own an Xbox, get Halo. If you don’t have an Xbox, buy one and then buy Halo. Trust me on this one; you’ll thank me later.