Halo

Halo, Microsoft’s epic sci-fi video game franchise, holds a very special place in my heart. Growing up, I loved Halo an embarrassing amount: To this day, my email address contains a barely veiled reference to the series protagonist.

But, after my Xbox 360 died several years ago, I drifted away from the series. Other video games, movies and books filled that Master Chief-sized hole in my life. That is, of course, until I played the Destiny beta, the next big game from Bungie, the creators of Halo.

Plucking away at space wizards and grunts brought back fond memories of a misspent youth filled with, um, plucking away at space wizards and grunts. Yet I had a nagging feeling that my recollections of the earlier games were tainted by nostalgia, that Halo probably hasn’t stood the test of time.

So, in honor of Destiny’s upcoming release, this winter’s Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Ridley Scott’s Halo: Nightfall, that Halo 5 beta, the Master Chief Master Chef knife collection, the limited edition bath towels and the many other Halo events slated for the end of this year, I decided to play through all of the old Halo games this past week to see how they’ve held up.

It was a terrible, terrible mistake.

Halo: Combat Evolved

In retrospect, it’s surprising how quickly Master Chief became a pop culture icon. I can totally see why his AI buddy Cortana, a scantily clad female hologram in a game marketed mostly to teenage boys, hit it off, but Master Chief?

He was basically a dude in green power armor, like a souped-up version of a Warhammer 40K space marine. Since the very first game, he’s been largely devoid of personality and only occasionally speaks during brief cutscenes.

Still, at least in Halo: Combat Evolved, his nonpresence largely works. The game’s story relied on Master Chief and gang trying to make sense of alien prophecies and ancient superweapons, leaving little time for Master Chief’s blandness to be detrimental.

Importantly, the game’s core mechanics and design have aged well. Halo: Combat Evolved popularized many tenants of modern shooter design, including recharging health and limited weapon slots, so going back didn’t feel particularly strange or jarring.

The game is, however, significantly more difficult than most modern shooters and, indeed, its descendants. I played through all of these games on normal difficulty, and Halo: Combat Evolved was the only installment to seriously kick my ass. The less said about “The Library,” the better.

It is, however, incredibly obvious that Bungie ran out of time midway through development. Right around the time the alien super-zombie things known as the Flood are introduced, Halo: Combat Evolved starts recycling old level designs like there’s no tomorrow.

No conversation about Halo: Combat Evolved is complete without a discussion about the game’s multiplayer … except for this one. I couldn’t get both this and Halo 2’s split-screen mode to work on a borrowed Xbox 360. Also, I got deadlines. So, moving on.

Halo 2

Halo 2 began the series’ long struggle with grandiosity. To me, the stories lost a lot of their pulpy charm as the writers progressed from trying to be iconic to trying to be mythical. All of the backstory, all of the political intrigue, Forerunners, Arks, Reclaimers — all that crap has nothing to do with actual game part of the video game.

Even worse, it’s uninspired. Halo 2 introduces some brewing civil war between various factions of the enemy alien Covenant, and I couldn’t really care less. On the other hand, the big plot twist of Halo 2 (that you end up playing as an alien known as The Arbiter for half the game) is still pretty nifty.

The cutscenes were far too long, pushing me behind schedule (nothing a Double Big Gulp filled with Red Bull couldn’t fix), but they’re eminently watchable, thanks to some decent voice acting and actual characterization, for once. Not of the Master Chief, of course, but of The Arbiter and his Scooby gang of alien badasses.

Disappointing ending and horrific boss fights aside, Halo 2’s campaign holds up fairly well. The same mix of vehicular and standard combat from Halo: Combat Evolved injects a good amount of variety, while the game’s designers up the ante with more imaginative and grander setpieces.

Halo 3

I’ll say this for Halo 3: It’s probably the best designed, best balanced game of the bunch. Every mission, minus a horrifically terrible Flood level, shines with immaculate polish and craft. The simple act of firing a battle rifle just feels awesome — weighty, powerful and tactile.

While there’s still some of the backtracking seemingly endemic to the series, Halo 3 is far better than its predecessors and, indeed, successors at providing enough context and visual cues to prevent players from getting lost.

On the other hand, the story is easily the most disappointing of the bunch, even compared to Halo 2’s cop-out cliffhanger ending. I didn’t mind it so much when I played it for the first time, three years after Halo 2, but juxtaposing the two games together really highlights the problems in Halo 3’s narrative.

For an allegedly epic conclusion to an epic trilogy, Halo 3 lacks almost any sort of satisfying closure. Everything that happens is either thuddingly obvious, embarrassingly flat or incomprehensibly obtuse, with the resolution to Cortana’s kidnapping at the end of Halo 2 being the worst offender.

The stellar multiplayer, however, is still insanely fun to play. Halo 3’s multiplayer is worth digging through thinly populated multiplayer servers. The game mode perfects the already great multiplayer modes from Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 while introducing tons of fun extras like theater mode and Forge mode.

Against the likes of Call of Duty and even its ancestors, Halo 3’s multiplayer stands tall; the culmination of seven years of refinement and tweaking. It’s simple yet deep, a mode whose lack of bling-filled extras and visual overstimulation provides welcome relief to the onslaught of Call of Duty clones.

Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach

The two redheaded stepchildren of the franchise, Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach saw Bungie dabbling and experimenting before flying the Microsoft coop. Of the two, Halo 3: ODST is the more interesting, an inspired mix of Halo mechanics and detective noir.

Though its open-world hub now seems simplistic compared to the likes of Far Cry and Destiny, Halo 3: ODST makes up for limited play area with an abundance of atmosphere. The gloomy nighttime landscapes of New Mombasa push the Halo 3 graphics engine to its expressive max, creating visuals that hold up to this day and lacquering an otherwise boilerplate story with intrigue and mystery.

Halo Reach, by comparison, tells a more straightforward sci-fi spin on a war story. Its handling of an alien invasion doesn’t quite connect emotionally, largely because of how insignificant a role the civilians of the doomed planet play and because of how utterly generic its main characters are.

The desaturated dourness of Halo Reach doesn’t suit the game well. Halo 3’s colorful encounters provided a stark relief from the majority of modern shooters, but Halo Reach’s dim, grey aesthetic takes its boring, mundane self far too seriously.

I also didn’t appreciate how long this stupid freaking game was, with some bullshit save point in the last mission costing me several hours of sleep, that Xbox 360 controller I threw and a TV that somehow got an Xbox 360 controller lodged in it. Screw Reach, screw the characters, and just let me finish the game while my caffeine high is still kicking.

Halo 4

I cut myself on the case while opening the game, so my first impressions actually weren’t great.

Being without an Xbox 360 at the time, I never played Halo 4 on release. Going through the game now, divorced from the weight of expectations, I ended up with fairly mixed impressions. It’s easy to see why Halo 4 courted such a strong backlash.

After Bungie left for greener pastures, new developers 343 Industries attempted to catch Halo up with the rest of the gaming world, specifically Call of Duty’s multiplayer and Uncharted’s storytelling.

The result is a game that foolishly delves head first into the muck and mire that is the Halo “mythology”. This past week, I played through all of the Halo games in order and watched every cutscene, but I still don’t understand what the hell Halo 4 was about.

Admittedly, my patience had completely eroded away at this point. I was five days in this poorly conceived Halo jag, and I really, really just wanted to finish the damn game. All of those cutscenes and those stupid goddamn “cinematic gameplay” moments caused me to throw several bottles of urine at my new TV and, subsequently, get kicked out of the house briefly by my housemates.

I don’t have a f****** problem, Halo 4 is the one with the f****** problem.

Halo 4 introduces a new race of enemies that are incredibly frustrating to fight and weapons that are incredibly boring to use in service of a story that is incredibly boring and difficult to follow. So the story is definitely the weakest of the bunch, and yet, paradoxically, the writing is the strongest in the series.

343 Industries manage, somehow, to turn Cortana from a blandly spunky sidekick to a three-dimensional character whose arc and story actually adds a bit of personality and unique perspective to Master Chief. And even though the resolution to her story is all sorts of creepy in the worst way possible, Halo 4’s strong characterization makes me genuinely interested to see where Halo 5 goes.

It also looks really, really pretty. Like seriously pretty. If you told me that this was an Xbox One game, I would probably believe you.

On the other hand, the multiplayer wholeheartedly embraces Call of Duty with lackluster results. It retains just enough of the Halo formula to remain recognizable, but it radically alters the rhythm of the old Halo games to its own detriment.

The game just moved way too fast for me to keep up, though the massive caffeine crash I had at the end of this week might have had something to do with it. The controls were also too twitchy, though, again, it might have been because my whole body, er … sweaty hands just won’t stop shaking.

On the whole, the Halo franchise has aged remarkably well. Basically, they’re still fun and not at all soul-crushingly frustrating to play. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to hurl this Xbox 360 out my window, shred these demonic discs into oblivion and pass out in the middle of a road somewhere.