Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary review

Halo Anniversary not only marks 10 years since the release of the first game – Halo: Combat Evolved – it also marks 10 years since the launch of the first Xbox. Looking back it’s impossible to say just how much Microsoft benefited from this truly ground-breaking shooter, but Xbox sales certainly owe a huge debt to Halo developer Bungie.

Halo took the PC-centric first person shooter and reworked it brilliantly for games consoles, with all respect to the sterling work done by Rare on Goldeneye. Halo practically wrote the rulebook for shooters on consoles, a rulebook that hasn’t been deviated from even on the latest Call of Duty on Xbox 360. It’s place in gaming history is cemented then, making this commemorative edition seem more than justified.

Anniversary leaves the gameplay unchanged, instead providing a purely cosmetic upgrade. It’s a pretty impressive one too, with hi-res textures and plenty of new details layered over the now bland-looking original graphics – such as additional foliage and extra particle effects. You can switch back and forth at will to compare the two. We were surprised to see some dropped frames in cut scenes, but during play it was incredibly smooth. The game now runs in widescreen, and although this works fine we’d have liked the option to switch back to a traditional 4:3 aspect ratio.

Here’s a nice wide shot of the graphics from the original version of Halo – click to enlarge

The new graphics certainly won’t fool you into thinking this is a new game, the level design of the interiors are still to simple and repetitive, for that. However, it now looks sharp enough that modern eyes certainly won’t be offended – some achievement for a ten-year old game. There’s also support for 3D TVs if you really want to bring this old warhorse bang up to date.

With the shiny new graphics in place, Halo feels surprisingly well preserved for a game of its age. This is because it set the trends for first-person shooters for generations to come. Not convinced, well lets take a quick tour of Halo’s greatest innovations.

And here are the updated ones, with plenty of extra texture detail, bump-mapping and even new (albeit incidental) geometry – click to enlarge

The big one has to be recharging health, now seen in practically every shooter, but before Halo most games simply gave you a big health bar that needed to be conserved. In Call of Duty your ability to miraculously recover from bullet wounds in seconds makes little sense; but Halo’s Master Chief has an energy shield. This can take a great deal of punishment before you must duck into cover to let it recharge. Halo does still have a small health bar, discarded in sequels, but even when its almost depleted you can complete any level relying solely on the shield. This gives Halo, and most modern shooters, their cover-to-cover style of gunplay.

Next up is the two-weapon limit, a radical move away from PC shooters where players often carried an armoury of up to ten weapons. In such games, the trick was successfully managing a large inventory of varying ammo types. Halo took a more streamlined approach, with just two weapon slots and one button press required to switch between them. The restriction proved revolutionary, forcing players to experiment with different weapon combinations.

Another masterstroke is the Master Chief’s instant access to grenades. Previously, most shooters forced you to select grenades as a weapon type before letting you throw one. In Halo grenades are plentiful and easily tossed using just the left trigger, which made them an integral part of the Chief’s armoury. The same can be said for melee attacks, which were powerful and easy to use – much like Modern Warfare’s knife.

Modern shooter enthusiasts might miss sprinting, with the Chief capable of moving at a constant high speed while shooting. He can’t go prone either, so it’s literally a more stand up fight. Also absent is iron sights aiming, with the majority of the Master Chief’s arsenal being perfectly accurate when shot from the hip, with only two scoped guns requiring the zoom button.

And what an arsenal it is too. Every gun is distinct, from the powerful headshot-capable pistol you start out with, through the more specialised projectile guns such as the awesome shotgun and sniper rifle – all of which are highly effective against unshielded targets. Then there are the alien Covenant’s plasma weapons, which knock down energy shielding quicker. Some can feel underpowered, but only if they’re used incorrectly.

All of these features combine to create combat that still feels special today. Combining plasma and projectile weapons in quick succession allows you to down tough opponents almost instantly. Toss in a few grenades and some brutal melee finishers, and Halo put down the template for Modern Warfare the best part of a decade before it. Better still, like the best console games, it had amazing replayability, from the knockabout shooting of Normal mode, to the full range of skills required for Heroic mode, and the incredibly challenging test of Legendary – where every Covenant Elite becomes a lethal threat.

Last but not least, we come to vehicles and allies. Halo pushed the boundaries in both of these areas for a shooter, with driving and flying neatly integrated into levels that still functioned if you were left on foot. Whizzing across the surface of Halo in your Warthog with a bevy of accompanying marines for company has to rate among the greatest moments in video game history.

The scale of such levels is perfectly epic, switching from tight corridors to massive bridges that span huge canyons, canyons that you later find yourself flying back down in a Covenant aircraft, strafing enemy positions. The Halo itself is a fantastic setting, simple in concept, but awe inspiring to behold, curving away from you overhead. We can’t think of a more brilliantly-executed sky effect in any game.

In terms of production values, Halo was enough ahead of its time to still stand up today. There’s uniformly decent voice acting and a plot that doesn’t get in the way of the action – but which hints at much larger events going on elsewhere (Halo follows the example of Star Wars in this respects, rather than its prequels). The music is simply one of the greatest video game scores of all time, and has now been remastered for additional fidelity (we couldn’t tell, admittedly).

The original campaign still supports two player co-op, which goes to show just how well engineered the game was, with the excellent AI capably handling two human protagonists – plus you can now play it over Xbox Live for the first time. Multiplayer isn’t available as it was originally, instead six of the multiplayer maps have been rejigged for play using the Halo: Reach engine. These can be played standalone from the Anniversary disc; or, using a supplied code, they can be integrated into Reach’s own multiplayer offering, which should provide them with a far larger player base than this release alone could have managed.

The incredible success of the Halo sequels means they sold many times what the original game did, though we imagine that a lot of copies of Halo have done the rounds via friends and second-hand shops. Still, there must be many gamers out there who haven’t played this gem of a game, and they shouldn’t hesitate to buy it.

For those who have already played it extensively, but aren’t die-hard fans, it’s a tougher choice. It’s not cheap at around £28, even considering the amount of work that’s been put into it. It would be nice to have a level select option too, as at this time of year we’re inundated with titles to play and would like to cherry pick our favourite levels, both for solo and co-op play.

Despite an excellent update, we simply can’t recommend you play Halo again instead of playing the best new titles released this Christmas, which is why we haven’t given it an award. However, once you’re done with those, there are few gaming greats more worthy of revisiting than this one. We never use the ‘c’ word lightly, but Halo deserves it – it’s a classic.