Summary

I'm not going to mindlessly praise this game, so please don't skip over because of the high rating I gave it. I'm not some mindless fanboy here to tell you this is the greatest game ever, it isn't. This will be an honest consideration of the game as a whole. First, the game has a good story. They went to some trouble to make it interesting and keep up the surprises. There is good transition and you meet the right mix of characters for a given situation. There isn't really a moment where you find yourself saying "How did these guy's just show up here?" There was only one or two missions I asked myself "Why am I doing this, it makes no sense." You get some good helper AI's which seem to use weapons and pick up new ones like you would rather than just using their starting weapons or using the same one forever. It's pretty realistic. The friendly AI has to be one of my biggest praises for this game. In general, they are actually useful in battles! This is a far cry from many games where your "helpers" just get in the way or shoot you in the back. As a nice touch, these AI even apologize in the rare instance they hit a friendly unit (like yourself) by mistake. They are even effective when they hop onboard a vehicle with you. A disapointment is you can't give AI units commands; it'd be nice to have more choice of who to replace with whom when one of the guys gets injured and a healthy one is available. Another thing I found astonishing is this is probably the first game I've played where you go to where a battle supposedly took place and there are weapons, bodies, etc. laying around like there was actually a battle. You get more of a fell that a conflict occured there rather than just a random body here and there. The enemy AI is realistic too. The little guys will hang around the bigger ones for support and tend to get startled and run screaming if caught alone. On the other hand, the Covenant sometimes has a habit of just sitting in their area and waiting for you chaising you down would be more realistic behavior, but maybe they figured it'd make it too hard on the player. I don't want to spoil anything, but if you like games where you can see two groups fighting and use the distaraction to tip the tide and then waste the winner this is the game for you. You get a few chances to do that. Reminds me of the Max Payne II mob wars. To sum it up, the characters act realistically for the most part, there is pretty good voice acting, the graphics look sufficient and run fine, the friendly AI is helpful and not annoying like most games, the levels are somtimes repetative but the outside ones are varied and imaginative, there aren't any really cheesey bits, and the vehicles rock. All this adds up to an enjoyable experience that is worth the $30 pricetag on it.

Sound

Music is OK, sound effects are OK, voice acting isn't bad. I have nothing to complain about, though a few more funny comments from the little guys would have been nice. BAD CYBORG!

Gameplay

The gameplay can get a little repetative at times (especially late game), but there are a lot of different things you get to do to break up the shooting. You get to try a variety of vehicles that are realy fun to drive/fly. They are one of my favorite parts of the game. Oh, just to prepare you ammo is done differently in Halo. You can hold up to two weapons at the same time and if you pick up a Covenant weapon you can't reload it or find any more ammo. You have to keep killing guys and picking up weapons you find on the ground. Neat idea. As the manual indicates, they are alien weapons so humans don't know how to recharge them. Human weapons you can however find more ammo for. The only really useful human weapons are the rocket launcher and the shotgun (you'll see what I mean late game). As a general rule go for Covenant plasma guns. The final gameplay issue involves your hitpoints. Again this game goes a long way in making things more fun. You have both shields and a health bar. Take too many hits and your shield collapses and you take damage, however if you avoid taking any hits for a few seconds your shields recharge to full. If you take a blast while they are recharging, you have to wait a few seconds for them to go back up again. It's a good way to make it so it's risky to try to let the shields recharge in the middle of a firefight, but if you can run away for a while you can come back refreshed without having to hunt down shield powerups.

Summary

Okay, first. I've been a Halo fan since the day when it was announced by Bungie. That was until 1999 when Bungie was gobbled by Microsoft to make the game into an Xbox. I resisted of buying the Xbox and after years and years of no call for Halo PC, the xbox sales have decline, and now Halo PC is out but under the Microsoft banner. Sound far fitch? No doubt a money milking effect to trick the PC gamers until playing an outdated game like Halo, but is the wait worth it? Just read on.

Sound

Voice acting was top notched but didn't match the lip movement of the character. Sound track movement was a direct copy of Half Life where it plays the music where it looks about right. Overall: Not a bad game, but it would have been best that Halo shouldn't have gone to the PC after so many years of nothing.

Gameplay

First off, the gameplay is FPS and this is an exact copy of the so called Xbox's best shooter. The single player campaign as I heard was not changed at all. The only thing different is the added multiplayer game where we can have deathmatch, CTF, and alot online gameplay. The one thing that struck me was the no coop mode on the PC version. Sure I didn't care about it much, but after months of it, I do wished Gearbox had made the coop for the game.

Summary

Okay, come on guys, lets be real about this game. It's a port from a console system, plain and simple. So nothing about Halo will impress an experienced pc gamer. I saw the problems in this game coming a mile away and actually didn't buy it. I borrowed it from a friend for the weekend and uninstalled it after that. Yup, I was right; Halo was great on X-Box and pure garbage on pc. I mean really, with games like Unreal 2, Farcry, and the soon to be released Doom 3 pushing our pc systems to their limit, do we really need a silly little console port with childish graphics and blocky, disnyland aliens? More games are ported from pc to platform than the other way around, and for good reason. There is no home entertainment system out there that can match the graphics, sound, and general performance of even a mid-range pc. I feel sorry for you if fell for the hype and actually purchased Halo, only to find that it's graphics were blocky, the gameplay was lame and it was full of bugs. But admit it, you should have known.

Sound

Zap, woosh, ratatatat...whatever.

Gameplay

Once again, great on X-Box, lousy on pc. Developers of console games will never awe pc gamers with innovation in gameplay. PC's are just to versatile and graphiclly superior. Halo really came across as just a sub-par first person shooter for me. The cutesy, brightly colored aliens (all 10 of them) were SO not scary. I wanted to kill them just because they were annoying to look at. The weapons were actually pretty nice looking and fun to shoot, but the game overall is just plain boring. Unreal 2 does it much better. For the weekend I had Halo I couldn't shake the feeling that this game, in it's premise, format and gameplay was just a kiddie game.