With Halo 4 a year away, is HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED ANNIVERSARY enough to sate the desires of Master Chief’s rabid fanbase? Or is this ancient shooter well past its prime? Find out in our review!
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is the very same game that launched the Xbox ten years ago, give or take the multiplayer mode. A remaster more than a remake, its changes are slight, subtle and sensible. A decade is practically two lifetimes in the games industry, though, and by now Halo: CE should be as geriatric as modern games come, usurped by four follow-ups and countless formula refinements that have evolved the FPS genre. So, why then does Halo: CEA feel so damn new?
Playing through Halo: CEA’s campaign is very much the celebration of the original game that 343 Industries promised. There’s no tweaking of mechanics, beyond defaulting to a Reach-like control system and a few adjustments during cutscenes. There’s been no ‘dicking around’ with settings, adjustment of balances or bringing the physics in line with modern updates. Neither, though, is this one of the pathetic ‘HD’ updates publishers have been shovelling out for months, where work has been limited to achieving HD as a technical goal, rather than a content objective.
At the heart of Halo: CEA is the original Combat Evolved code, exactly as gorgeous as it was back in 2001. Today, it looks positively hideous: plain, flat textures fill empty voids that we gamers once used to drool over. At the press of the Back button, however, everything changes. After a second or two of a not-exactly subtle black screen, Saber Interactive’s Saber3d engine roars into life to sit on top of the Xbox code, and ten years of progress floods onto the screen.
To say the effect is jarring would be underselling the project. Like me, you’ll find yourself constantly switching back and forth as you step out of the Chief’s cryo tube, adjust your inversion and test out your shield. Everything’s the same, but completely different: architecture is identical in structure, but packed with more ornate and colourful details. Character models are packed full of thousands of extra polygons and meshes and whatever else makes up humans and Covenant creatures, instead of boxy approximations.
Old glories
The staggering new detail comes at a couple of costs, however. For one, in order to preserve the experience, the animation is still exactly the same, and particularly during cutscenes can look robotic and jerky. Few of the game’s achievements occur while playing, due to some rather hideous ‘hitching’ and freezing that stick out rather badly. Another historical hitch leaves in momentary freezes while ‘loading’ the next location on maps, an unfortunate legacy of what was once cutting-edge streaming tech. You can even flip between the Remastered and Classic soundtracks on the menu, which is a really difficult choice as both are equally fantastic.
Perhaps the most damning side-effect of the upgrade for 343 is that after a while, hitting the Back button will become a redundant feature. Hardcore fans might occasionally stop to coo at the changes, but at some point everyone will just leave the function alone. The new look does everything you’d ever need or want: it brings the game bang up to date, filling what are now empty and plain looking environments to life and stop them looking so damn vacant. Beyond a few momentary hits of nostalgia, why would you ever leave the Classic look on?
Thankfully, there are extras in there beyond the visuals. On each of the ten missions, there’s a Terminal to be found that unlocks a new video, adding a bit more backstory and giving tantalising glimpses into the possibilities of the next ‘new’ Halo game. Chances are rabid fans will be poring over all ten of them for the next 12 months, while everyone else will be content to also collect the Skulls, new to Combat Evolved. Skulls modify the play experience, either by making things more challenging or, with the likes of Grunt Birthday, far more entertaining. They work best in the new online co-op or classic split-screen, unless you enjoy playing on Legendary, with doubly healthy foes and limited ammunition.
Chief concern
If you’ve somehow made it this far in life without playing a Halo game, Combat Evolved’s story is by far the simplest and most accessible (Reach comes a close second, losing out only due to its lack of Master Chief). After escaping the planet Reach as it’s glassed by invading Covenant forces, the starship Pillar of Autumn jumps into slip space and emerges by a mysterious ring world, with a contingent of the alien collective in hot pursuit. You, the Master Chief, are awoken to do what you do best: kill those alien sons of bitches.
With the fight going badly, you escape to the Halo only to be pursued by Covenant forces, and stumble upon a parasitic lifeform known as the Flood, which just so happens to threaten every living thing in the universe. Turns out, Halo has a defensive mechanism to deal with the Flood that the Covenant wants to activate, but it might be a little too genocidal to be practical. So, it’s up to a lone super-soldier SPARTAN and a handful of surviving marines to stop the activation, whatever the cost. Sci-fi schlock, maybe, but there’s none of the religious brouhaha and nothing’s overwrought.
Despite spending much of its troubled development as either an RTS or third-person shooter, Halo: Combat Evolved brought with it a legacy that so few shooters – even its sequels – ever truly offer: a combat sandbox. Environments on the ringworld were, and still are, gigantic in scale and labyrinthine in their structure, almost to a fault, and Master Chief is rarely funnelled through kill corridors unless the story demands it. When lined up against the likes of Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3, Halo’s campaign could almost be described as lethergic. Until the combat starts, that is.
Each and every firefight always plays out differently, presenting you with a wealth of options and approaches and truly random outcomes. The “30 seconds of fun” championed by Bungie is every bit as engaging now as it’s ever been. Battles are hectic and more tactical than most shooters, giving you breathing space to think and manoeuvre but pitting you against surprisingly canny AI. You can never predict attack patterns or positions, but you could almost always count on a grunt screaming or fleeing if you took down an Elite or one of his friends. There’s a beauty to it that can make every single encounter a joy or a neon-twinged nightmare, and make you long for the next.
Guilty sparks
Sadly, for all the openness of the environments and glorious combat against the grunts and elites, Halo does have its divisive elements. Mission design, while mostly open and fluid, takes a big dip in the second half of the campaign. Level length is repeatedly dragged out way too much by overlong repetitive sections, although some of its more confusing areas (especially The Library) are helped by the inclusion of some handy directional markers to reduce inadvertent backtracking. There’s also some very tedious map repetition, although retreading the same ground while going in a different direction isn’t nearly as off-putting as it might seem.
The most divisive part of the experience though has to be the Flood itself. Where battling against the Covenant are quick, deadly and effortlessly random affairs, the Flood are predictable and dull because they’re all after one thing: your face, and the straightest line towards it. Instead of diving for cover, and having to precisely time your plasma throws to catch an elite when he’s vulnerable, fighting the parasites mostly involves running backwards and crowd control.
It’s zombie combat, both in terms of quality of enemy and quantity. Even when you fight Flood forms armed with human or covenant guns, there’s no change to their attack patterns or challenge: you just have to play keep-away. By the time you get to face a three-way battle, the Flood make more sense – wading into an already-active battlefield or watching the action play out from afar is an immensely satisfying experience – but there’s no escaping that their presence does more harm than good.
Still, the sheer quality of the experience shines through, and with its comprehensive new look Halo: Combat Evolved’s singleplayer is still a brilliant experience. So few games offer up battles as dynamic and intoxicating, or weapon sets as satisfying and perfectly balanced. It’s got its troubles and really doesn’t justify being called a classic anymore, but it’s so different to the reams of scripted, single-path shooters we’re used to in 2011 it honestly feels as fresh today as it did ten years ago, all with largely cosmetic changes. Surely that’s the greatest testament to Halo’s success, that with just a lick of paint it’s got so much more life in it than a million ‘HD Collections’, and gameplay that could out-flank 95 percent of shooters put out in the past decade.
Local area networking
It’s a shame then that the multiplayer component doesn’t have quite the same amount of affection and care poured into it. As cruel as that statement might be to the fine folks at Certain Affinity who are behind Halo: CEA’s multiplayer component, there simply isn’t any escaping the fact that it’s little more than a glorified map pack for Halo: Reach. Admittedly, it’s a standalone experience and doesn’t require Reach (hell, new copies even come with a code for all the maps to use in Reach), but beyond a few familiar and updated maps there’s nothing new or different about Anniversary’s multiplayer component.
The sad truth of the matter is, though, that recreating Halo: CE’s multiplayer and maybe recoding the PC version’s online multiplayer was never going to be on the cards, because in Reach lies Halo’s most complete multiplayer package to date. A cut-price remaster of the original game is fine, but taking more time and budget to rework a multiplayer experience when there’s a perfectly good one to build upon is a no-brainer. After all, they kinda did the same with ODST and kept Halo 3‘s multiplayer going strong for another year.
Classic Slayer and using System Link is perhaps the closest gamers can get to scratching the oft-forgotten itch that the original Halo: Combat Evolved hit a decade back. It’s still amazing that a game with no online functionality revolutionised console multiplayer like it did, so a paltry four competitive maps pulled and remade from the original Halo, one from the PC version and one from Halo 2 just doesn’t do justice to the legacy. It doesn’t come close to evoking the same kind of memories of LAN parties, lugging around the big black box and a bag full of ‘Duke’ controllers to a friend’s house and having drunken King of the Hill sessions, or epic CTF matches on the only version of Blood Gulch worth a damn.
Expanded reach
At least the maps are pretty damn good, mind. Certain Affinity has done a sterling job converting and updating their designs, whether they’re just giving a modern update to Breakneck, Halo 2′s Headlong, or adding in an icy chill to Solitary, the remake of Prisoner. The extra Firefight map, Installation 04, has been plucked and tweaked from the campaign’s second mission, ‘Halo’, and adds in vehicles and even a few friendly AI’s to help players out, making it one of the more unique environments for a final stand. Sadly, if you’ve only got Anniversary, it also happens to be your only option for Firefight.
It’s hard to hold the multiplayer’s utilisation of Reach’s engine and rulesets against it, but it is very easy to feel aggrieved by just how limited an experience it is. A few more maps and it could have been great, but as it stands it really doesn’t much more than a standalone map pack – you’ll get far more use out of it by activating the download code and playing the maps in Reach itself.
Sadly, at the time of review Anniversary’s Kinect functionality wasn’t available. Given how optional some of its uses are (voice commands for “grenade”, “reload” etc to compliment your play instead of replacing buttons, perhaps some additional gesture commands), we could only speculate about its substantive use. No gameplay is tied to Kinect, however: everything’s extraneous and totally optional leaving the game itself in its original form. The only thing real Halo fans will miss out on is the ability to yell ‘analyse’ at their TV, and get a Library entry for the object or enemy they’re aiming at for further information.
Combat, Evolution
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is so close to being everything it should be. As a remaster, it doesn’t mess with the formula Bungie crafted, it just brings it bang up to date, warts and all. Although it can’t avoid having aged significantly and its numerous flaws, its core action is still as sharp as it’s ever been. It can still give its numerous follow-ups a run for their money and has more style, atmosphere and cinematic flair to its combat than an army of glum military shooters could ever hope for.
Our heroes today can only carry two weapons because of the Chief, regenerating shields were the precursor to player characters being able to absorb bullets and get healthy ducking behind cover, and without him there would be no Xbox. It’s crazy to imagine, but ten years ago first-person shooters were still an unknown quantity on consoles. Halo: Combat Evolved truly exploded the FPS into the modern mainstream, and for that alone it deserves a finely crafted restoration like Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for a new generation to discover, and an old one to revisit.
It’s amazing how well Halo: Combat Evolved has aged. Even if you’re crazy enough to ignore the gorgeous new visuals every fight is 30 seconds or more of fun that never tires. It’s not a perfect package by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a welcome return for the game that launched a billion sticky-kills.
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, by 343 Industries/Certain Affinity/Saber Interactive and Microsoft, is out 15/11/2011 on Xbox 360.
Comments (0)