The Last Game of its Kind.
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They won't make games like this anymore.
Before there was Shepard. there was The Chief.
Before there was Anderson, there was The Arbiter.
Before there was EDI, there was Cortana.
And before we began shaking hands with the aliens, we shot them in the face. Shocking, I know.
Halo CE along with Half-Life 2 made me fall in love with recreational PC gaming beyond SimCity 3000.
My friend Mike introduced me to both after I traded my 500 Mhz Pentium for a 900mhz with onboard graphics.
Sadly Mike had to quit gaming for good. But I have fond memories of us going onto Halo servers and handing the server admins their ashes on a tray with a fork. As much as they don't want to admit.
This brings me to write a review for this game with a reverence that's almost... religious.
Halo got me through some hard times, I was still playing Halo in 2003, after my dad died and my girfriend dumped me, and it felt like I didn't have a single friend in the world.
This too, shall pass. and even now, I feel the same way. But the loneliness will pass.
I can safely credit Halo CE as being the game that convinced me to be a PC gamer, despite its availability on Xbox at the time.
That being said, this is probably the last Halo product I'll be buying. After preordering three games from other IPs, and getting scammed on each one, my faith in the games industry as at an all-time low. While I still think companies like GOG and Valve are capable storefronts, every dev who promised me regular story updates and a pony simply did not make it. And it's no wonder.
This is the last Halo game we will see free of the bull-pucky that currently plagues games like -Infinite-, --D2- and -Marathon-.
Every level painstakingly created with new up-to-date graphics, and, the ability to switch between the two on the fly at the push of a button. Every cutscene now recreated with better character models. The weapons have been remodeled, and, can be reskinned with in-game skins that should tickle all your nerdy 'tisms.
Multiplayer, even private play has been preserved in case you wish to build your own maps so if you want to re-create the "Beaver Creek Shotties and Stickies No-Shields Massacre" all over, you can.
This isn't just a review... it's a love letter, not written out of feverish lust and obsession, or with nostalgia goggles, but with the sobering realization that the next "Halo" (and I mean that in a metaphorical way), may not come from MS. it might be from an indie developer trying to recapture the magic of Halo, by delivering us an experience MS might not be willing to because it's "too expensive to produce."
Every gamer should pick up Halo, once.
I never thought I'd ever pick up a military shooter game like this. And, to be fair, no FPS in that genre is like this. Even CoD/CoD:AW and Battlefield 2049 and even Planetside 2, can't come close. Mass Effect got close enough, but Mass Effect honestly is another gold standard by any other name.
This game didn't just evolve game combat. it broke molds, forged paths and blazed trails.
Althought I feel it would be naive of me to say they can do it again, because everytime I turn around, I see features either cut, or the experience gradually made worse over time. That's not some directive from MS, that's just the games industry in its current state. Rip features away and cut down staff to make people who don't care about games happy.
If that statement makes you mad, like big mad? it should.
