Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo: Combat Evolved, a game created by Bungie studios, which is well known for the Halo series. This company is known for it’s great quality products and Halo: Combat Evolved is no exception. Being the first in the series this game still remains to be a classic, with an active community, even after all these years. This game is available for pc, mac and xbox.

The human race has been cornered by aliens and are under threat. In an attempt to turn things around and to make sure that they don’t find out the coordinates of planet Earth, they active an super-marine known as the Masterchief, which the player plays as. This is used as a last resort, since they haven’t tested him properly, due to lack of time. Your task is to try and destroy the attack or at least put a serious dent in their attack force.

Both singleplayer and multiplayer are very good, I’ll start with singleplayer. In singleplayer, you’ll be dropped/enter various areas from spaceships to various landscapes, there is no urbanised area however, since you’re fighting in enemy bases most of the time. During singleplayer you’ll find the weapon of the planet Halo, The Flood, which are enemies in various shapes, but the weapon can’t be controlled so you’re fighting both the Covenant and the Flood at the same time, which fight against each other as well. During single player you’re alone most of the time, because the normal marines are quite weak. There are multiple difficulty levels, Easy, Normal, Heroic and Legendary, Legendary being the hardest, making the game accessible to pretty much anyone, with or without experience with the genre or gaming as a whole.

The gameplay is smooth, it’s basic First Person Shooter gameplay but the controls feel great and everything works like a charm. Unlike other FPS’es you’re only capable of carrying 2 guns, which adds another challenge to the game, since you’ll have to scrounge for enemy weapons that you can use, when your ammo runs out. It also helps in multiplayer, because your enemies aren’t able to carry a lot of weapons, meaning that you won’t fight people wearing overpowered weapons which have less ammo with which they switch. In Halo you’re better of wearing one great weapon and a standard one, which comes with more ammo. Halo incorporates the use of vehicles fluently in the game, switching from a first person view to a third person view giving the player a better sight of his surroundings.

The graphics are great, albeit a little bit outdated, nowadays we’re used to HD-quality and bloom effects. This game offers good graphics which don’t require a great pc to run. The effects in the game are very nice, objects reflect sunshine in this game, which was an exception around the time it was released.

The sound is great in this game, the theme song is just fantastic and gets you immediately in the mood to play the game, which is sung by a Georgian choir(from Georgia, the country, not the state). The sound effects coming out of your guns and even the aliens ones, sound pretty realistic. The voices in this game also sound good, Cortana for example (a digital woman), sounds very realistic so do the marines you meet in this game and the screaming enemies. The Covenant even has their own language and you can hear them talking sometimes and you hear the occasional “wort, wort, wort” when they’re walking and haven’t seen you yet.

Multiplayer is the best part about the whole game in my opinion, it’s most of the time fair(you have the occasional cheats and modificated servers). The only complaint I’ve been hearing from various sources is that online gameplay is laggy, I haven’t actually experienced it myself, I have been in servers with severe lag issues, but those were exceptions, usually the games run smooth. There are various gameplay modes, most of which are quite standard, but the player has the ability to create his own game modes. Slayer is your average deathmatch mode(DM), Team Slayer is team deathmatch (TDM), Capture the flag(CTF), King of the hill, in which players have to stay within a switching or unmoving area for a certain time in order to win. Can be done both with teams and solo. Further more you have: Racing, in which you have to drive through certain checkpoints and oddball in which the player has to keep a skull for a certain time limit, whilst doing so he has no means of defending himself except for doing a melee attack with it. Halo: Custom Edition expands the multiplayer aspect of the game even more, granting players the ability to play on custom maps and with various other custom things on it, such as character models, weapons and vehicles.

So when you see this in a shop, don’t hesitate to buy, it’s probably cheap since it’s been released quite some years ago, but not to worry the online community is still alive and kicking, proving that this game is truly a classic.