You can feel the tension. The air is hard and the anxious glances amongst normally calm people raises the pulse. Let’s be brutally honest this hasn’t exactly been a great year for games. Vice City aside there’s been very little out this year that you could truly consider a classic game. Hell, if you want you could argue that there has been very few great games this century let alone this year.

We want a return to a forgotten era where special games were around in abundance rather than a rarity and the afore-mentioned tension is due to the brave new world we seem to be entering. We’re nearly there. Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex: Invisible War should be with us in the not too distant future so why would we want to bother with a two year old game that the X-Box stole from us?

Well for many it’s one of the best games ever made. I purposely avoid playing console games if I know they’re going to be ported to the PC and it’s been a long weary wait for me to experience Halo as it was meant to be experienced. For two years now all my X-Box owning mates have been telling me how great the game is and how it sets a new benchmark and all the time I’ve had to bite my lip knowing it should’ve been a PC game first until Microsoft decided to steal it from us. The thing is having played it now Halo is merely a great game not the classic I was led to believe it was.

In many ways it should be a better game than the X-Box version as we can play as God intended us to play shooters with a mouse and keyboard combo. Whilst it’s undoubtedly an improvement it also serves to put the game in direct competition with the abundance of quality shooters we already have on the PC.

This leads to problems as whilst Halo is full of good things and is a great gaming experience there’s very little here that us PC owners haven’t seen before in countless other games.

The game takes place largely on an alien world inhabited by tons of aliens all intent on using your head as dinner. It has lots of good things like the large landscapes, interesting vehicles and the ability to fight alongside fellow marines in epic battles. It gets rid of the all the things not needed in a shooter like pointless platform sections, end of level bosses and no puzzles involving keys needed for unlocking doors.

The opening level is superb and takes the Half-Life approach of drawing you into the game. After playing through the opening level I got a little carried away and wrote on my notepad ‘greatest game ever’. It’s not but the opening level is one of the best openings to a game I’ve ever played through. After this you find yourself outside on the planet looking for survivors whilst trying to make sure you don’t get made into alien food.

These outdoor levels are huge but somehow require tiny loading times, which is great, as it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the game. As you’d expect for a game over two years old the graphics aren’t the best around and the character models especially look a little dated yet the system requirements are still rather high for a game that looks as average as Halo does. To max out the settings you’re going to need one hell of a beast of a machine, something we’d expect from Doom 3 but not Halo.

As good as these outdoor levels undoubtedly are they do become repetitive after a while and this isn’t helped by the rather drab interiors and boring corridor based levels that you come across in bases and ships.

Thankfully one feature that hasn’t aged is the great enemy AI that makes the little beggars a tough proposition to kill. Throw a grenade and they’ll run off, the cute little ones will become scared and hide away from you if you impress them and they have a tendency to rush at you when you’re reloading. The buggers.

However, and we’re giving you prior warning now, those of you who don’t want to know any events that happen later on in the game will be advised to skip this paragraph. Where were we? Oh yeah, however, later on in the game a new race of alien is introduced and apparently all the good work that was done on the AI seems to have been forgotten and you face enemies reminiscent of the Doom days which is very disappointing.

It’s the vehicles that set the game apart from the others on the market though, and once you get used to how they handle they are quite simply a joy to use. The first one you get to pilot is the Warthog jeep, which you bounce around the levels in with your gunman exclaiming at any particularly impressive demonstrations of driving. The tank that you come across later on is excellent as well but the only gripe we have is that you don’t get to use them enough.

When you do get to use them you have some tactical decisions to make though as taking on the alien hordes in the Warthog is a completely different prospect to going through on foot using a sniper rifle. Also, the fact that you can only carry two weapons at any times adds another dimension to the gameplay.

Saving isn’t really an issue as although it’s restricted to checkpoints, there are so many of them that you if you do die you don’t have far to go to get back to where you were. The real reason for owning Halo on the PC though is the online options which are as good as you’d expect without ever really pushing the boat out.

So the million-dollar question is does Halo justify the hype? Well, honestly, no not quite. It may be a classic on the X-Box but then how many classic games does the X-Box really have? For the more discerning PC owner we’re spoilt for choice and whilst Halo is definitely one of the best shooters on the market at the moment with Half-Life 2 just around the corner and Halo 2 itself out on X-Box next spring it feels as though it could well get left behind.

85%

Great, but not a classic

Halo: Combat Evolved Review

85%