izigame.me

TLDR: Despite its age of over two decades, the game mechanics still hold up while the narrative and level design are starting to show their age.


PROS:

✅Excellent remaster
✅Iconic music
✅Great sound design
✅Gameplay that stands the test of time

CONS:

➖Voice and animations can be a bit dated
➖Archaic story structure
➖Repetitive level design
➖Backtracking
➖The Library might be the worst level ever made
➖Some really rough checkpoints

Content (Game world/Narrative/Length) –

Game World: Halo Combat Evolved (H1) takes place immediately after the events of Halo: Reach, or if you are playing in the order of release, then this would be the first game. The game world takes place entirely on the Halo ring, which for the point of comparison, appears to be just a normal planet with various environments, though I did always think it was neat how you see the halo ring in the background, it really gives the appearance of how big a halo ring is.
Anyways, I need to call out how basic, redundant, and repetitive the levels are. Oftentimes you go through the same looking hallways, bridges, and paths over and over ad nauseam. Obviously it's tough to think how impressed my smooth brain may have been back in the early 2000s as I was wow’d by the levels, but in 2024, this does not age well.
Narrative: The narrative is just okay. I like it as a foundational part of the Halo universe, but it's really not great as a narrative tool that tells a story.
First I’ll talk about what I liked: An epic sci-fi adventure feeling, in space, on an unexplored structure, and the build up to the Flood is just amazing.
What I didn’t like is the unbalance between narrative elements and levels - oftentimes you will go 15 minutes before there’s even a quip about what to do.
Length: With dozens of deaths each level due to playing on Heroic, I finished the game in about 11 hours.

Gameplay (Controls/Mechanics/Difficulty) –

Controls: I played on KBM, cause it's a first person shooter, duh you have to! I found some of the controls didn’t translate too well, like the vehicle abilities and binding things to the mouse button took some testing. Aside from that, the game plays well on a KBM, found it pretty nuts the stuff I can do with a KBM vs when playing with the OG Xbox controller.
Mechanics: The tagline for Halo 1 was/is “Combat Evolved,” and I believe Bungie set an excellent precedent in what is possible with a FPS game. When playing Halo, I have always felt like a MLG Pro at times, and while I attended my fair share of Halo 2 PVP tournaments back in the day, I’m happy to still recapture that feeling in single player even today. Bobbing and weaving between cover as you toss grenades while loading your gun, then jumping into an Elites face, shotgunning them and a quick melee for an instant-kill still feels so visceral, even in 2024. Combat has truly evolved due to Halo.
Now for the not so great parts - The Assault Rifle is more like an SMG. I have always hated the lack of mid-range weapons in Halo aside from the sniper. You either have super close or super far, there is no middle ground. The only real option for a mid-range weapon ironically is the pistol because it has a scope and is somehow powerful as heck. In fact, I’d say the weapon balance is the worst part. Half of the weapons in Halo 1 feel useless. I’ve always hated Needlers. Plasma Pistols charge up doesn’t track in H1 The Energy Swords are not even usable, despite enemies getting them. Melee doesn’t have a built-in small dash to make it easier to land. Some of the Flood are ridiculous when they have rocket launchers meaning constant death over and over.
Admittedly, many of these grips are just QoL fixes that happened in Halo 2 and onwards, but I feel like they are so integral to the gameplay now, that it can be hard to play without them.
Difficulty: I am a masochist so I played on Heroic difficulty like I did in my teenage years, because of course my reflexes wouldn’t deteriorate in my late 30s….Yeah, I found this game hard and spawns to be brutal at times.

Graphics (Quality/UI/Performance) –

Quality: This is a very well done remaster. The graphical quality is vastly improved. I love how you can also hit the tab key to instantly change between remaster graphics and original graphics. Its crazy seeing how improved this is on the fly.
UI: The UI is, eh, ok. At times it really looks like a mobile game in that it's just comically large. Most of the guns, at least the human guns, have HUD indicators showing remaining ammo, but the Covenant ones do not, so you're stuck with having to look at the onscreen ammo counter anyways, just a small redundancy.
Performance: No issues playing on my desktop PC. Game loads super fast.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | installed on SSD

Audio (Sound Effects/Music) –

Sound Effects: The sound is well done, especially the remaster. There are a ton of tiny background ambient noises like gun sounds and footsteps. What's even more is remember that tab feature I mentioned above where you can swap between the original and remaster graphics? Well the sound carries over too, so there is a big difference in the original vs. remasters sound effects.
Music: Classic and epic, the foundational music that defined Halo is here. I just wish that there was more music in the campaign. It's not uncommon to go half a level in complete silence while the music only plays for the narrative parts.

Replay Factor (Longevity) –

Pretty good, not great. There are a ton of achievements, and LASO if you’re that crazy. The only reason I didn’t rate this higher is because multiplayer is pretty dead.

Final Verdict –

I think that it's lost some of its luster, but Halo 1 is still a good game, even if only for its single player component, though it is definitely starting to show its age. Even with an incredibly well done remaster, you can’t remaster the bad level design or old narrative structure without just remaking the entire game at that point. So yeah, it has some definite flaws, as would any game from 20 years ago, but I think it's still good enough.

Recommend?


Yes

You can find my curator page here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Synik_GR