The Masterman's blog

Halo: Combat Evolved. Xbox. Rated M.

Even though this game is 9 or 10 years old, I'm still gonna do a review on it cause it still seems popular. Also I'll probably end up doing reviews for much older games than this anyway. So then let's begin!

Halo is a giant ring world located somewhere in space. It's basically the ultimate weapon. It has the power to wipe out all life in the universe. And alien alliance made up of the (In Human Terms) Grunts, Jackals, Hunters, Elites, Brutes, some kind of bug thing, and one more thing that I can't remember the name of. It's like a jackal and I think it's only in Halo reach. Only the Grunts, Elites, Jackals, and Hunters are in the 1st Halo. Anyway, they call themselves "The Covenant" and are led by three aliens called Prophets. They believe that they have a holy cause wiping out all other life in the universe. And guess what. Humans are life.

The game starts with a giant human space ship coming under attack from the Covenant. The Captain of the ship, Captain Jacob Keyes, sees Halo and orders all personel to evacute to Halo. The view swaps to the cargo hold where a large tube thing opens up. Out comes Spartan 117. Otherwise known as the Master Chief or the dude you play as. The last known human super soldier from awhile ago. The guys kinda an obnoxious green with black patches everywhere. He basically looks like an armored Power Ranger and sounds a bit like Duke Nukem (though probably not intentionally) The game first four or five levels of the game go basically like this. Escape! Survive! Save Capt. Keyes! Mind the map room! Shoot the hell out of any aliens you see! Although a bit more strategy I suppose. Not much though. In fifth or six level you go looking for some missing marines who of course, are dead. And around them are another alien race called the Flood. They look like little alien heads with tentacles coming out of them that run around on the floor. The best part about them, they take over dead bodies. So the next few levels are basically. Save Humans! Kill everything else! Oh my god a machine that talks! It wants to destroy everything using Halo! And we just gave it the key to do that.....whoops.

So at this point just about everything is dead. Most of the humans, covenant, and there's still lots and lots of Flood and machines that the other machine called 343 Guilty Spark is controlling. The machines are fighting the flood. I guess both were locked up on Halo for some reason and Halo was just a weapon to destroy the Flood if it ever got loose. Halo was built by a super intelligent race called the Forerunners that just magically disappeared. They're the ones that built Halo and a bunch of other super advanced stuff.

So all this brings us to the end of the story, last level. The ship that you were originally on ended up crashing on Halo. Your mission is basically to make that explode which should destroy the whole damn ring. And so, you enter the self destruct code, and then 343 disabales it and starts laughing. So now, you have to manually though a grenade or shoot a Rocket Launcher shot into 4 different vent things in the ship that supposedly makes it explode. So everything starts going boom! And you have to drive out of the whole thing driving a four wheeler with a turrents mounted on it called a Warthog. In under 5 minutes I think. And so it begins. Away you go just running over all the Flood and Covenant that are trying to also escape. You make it to a ship thing and hop on and get out of there just in time. As the only human survivor. Besides Seargent Johnson anyway. (You'll find out what happens to him if you beat the game on Legendary Difficulty.) Every thing goes boom and you fly off into space.

The game was well ahead of it's time for it's 2001 release date. And to this day is still a fun shooter. The different weapons you can use and the vehicles you drive can make it a fun game. Character wise. It basically sucks. You have your main character who almost never talks, and an annoying AI in your head called Cortana. Keyes died, everyone else died except for Johnson who really wasn't that bad. 343 was just a machine that ended up being very crazy and that's about it for characters. The story is interesting, but it doesn't really drive you to finish it. A lot of places, you can predict what's gonna happen. Also it requires very little strategy or skill to beat it on Normal difficulty. I think the first time I beat it, I was 9 or 10 years old. Thought the game was awesome at the time not nearly as awesome now that I've played other games. Over all this game deserves a 7/10 for it's gameplay and multiplayer basically. It's character development and storyline is a bit lacking but it's a solid game over all.