Halo my friend Halo: game review

Halo is not the “best” game out there, at least for those using their PCs or Macs. Unreal Tournament and Battlefield 1942 both come to mind, and I’m sure there are many others. American Army and Castle Wittgenstein: Enemy Territory are both free multiplayers that are high quality. But I found myself more and more playing the Halo demo’s single capture-the-flag map rather than any of these others.

Halo is made by Bungie and has the look and feel of the old Half-Life game. The most distinctive shared trait, to my mind, is that if you are inactive for awhile your alter ego’s hands fiddle with the weapon–tighten the screws on the pistol or double-check the scope on the sniper rifle or just impatiently slap the grip on the pump-action shotgun. It looks decent and the environments are somewhat interesting, but there are better graphics in many of the new games.

What Halo does in a way that no one else does is gravity, momentum, and bounce. You simply haven’t lived until you surprise the warthog (jeep) that is about to run you down by switching from a pistol to a rocket launcher and watching it tumble end over end over your head from the blast. Even getting shot down is entertaining since the point of view switches from first-person to third- and you get to see yourself fly into the air.

Apparently the Xbox version is different, but on multiplayer using the Mac, multiplayer Halo is entirely lacking in any blood or gore. Much of the single-player game is the same way. Occasionally you notice a flash of purple when you shoot an alien, but that is it. The main reason one shouldn’t let one’s children play multiplayer (aside from the usual point that they are better off doing something else) is that you can often run into the use of abominable language on the part of the other players (you can often avoid it if you try in the full game; the demo is infested with bozos).

[The single-player game, however, suddenly turns into a horror out of the alien movies mid way through the adventure and becomes a great deal more gory. Fair warning. But the multiplayer stays sanitized throughout.]

By the way, if you download the demo and find you can only play with a few players before getting overwhelmed with lag, for what its worth, I stopped having any problems when I started using the full game. I could play with the maximum sixteen players, something that was impossible for me on the demo.

Halo works as a cross between a sci-fi game like Starsiege Tribes and a contemporary military game. In the singleplayer game your alterego is a bioengineered cyborg in full body armor (which explains why you survive while your fellow marines tend to die off). Thus, in the multiplayer, everyone has full armor (eliminating the crude character culture present in Unreal Tournament and Quake Arena) and force fields. But many of your weapons (machine gun, shotgun, rocket launcher) and vehicles (jeep and tank) are recognizable. Knowing that your character is more or less a superhero helps make the multiplayer more understandable. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand why many of the weapons seem so lacking in the power to kill. It takes more than a clip of ammo from a machine gun to get through the shield of an enemy and actually do real damage. The problem is simple: everyone is a superhero in multiplayer. You are all playing some version of the unique Halo protagonist.

It turns out that other weapons are actually more valuable when they are used right. The rocket launcher is obvious, but once you learn that the pistol has a 2x telescopic sight and that the game tracks whether or not you aim for the head, all sorts of new possibilities are opened up for you. In fact, grabbing a big weapon often leaves you overconfident and vulnerable, especially if you are taken by surprise.

On Xbox you can play an alien in multiplayer, I have heard, but that option is not available on the computer. I don’t miss that since you do get to use the alien weaponry. It is lying around the various maps. What makes this stuff interesting is that some of the projectiles (energy or exploding needles) track their target. Personally, I love the needler. It requires no great skill in aiming and, if you get the whole clip embedded in your opponant, it is the equivalent of a direct grenade hit. It works great on vehicles unless they are speeding away.

There are several different games, though the only ones I find interesting at this point are capture the flag and team slayer. I simply have no taste for every-man-for-himself games. In general, capture the flag is easier to play since dying can serve the interests of the team. Slayer is won by sheer number of kills which means, if you don’t inflict more than you suffer you’re dragging down your team.

The vehicles in halo are a great deal of fun. If you jump in the gun or driver’s seat you your viewpoint switches to third-person, giving you a great deal more entertainment. Weirdly, in the multiplayer the vehicles do not take damage. When you shoot them you only shoot the player. This allows you to take the vehicles but it leaves you with a rather strange vulnerability even when you are driving a full fledged tank. Instead of being armored you simply make a bigger target. The alien vehicles are much more fun since that allows you to use antigravity. Ther is both a single flyer and a hovercraft that your ride like a motorcycle. It is like fighting with stormtroopers on the Ewok planet.

Granted, none of this is as healthy as paintball. But you couldn’t dive bomb from a Banshee in paintball either. Halo is a great deal of fun for anyone who likes computer games. My iMac sometimes freezes and has to be restarted, but for the most part it has no problems playing the game. I have no idea what the PC requirements are.

2 thoughts on “Halo my friend Halo: game review

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *