Game EXP: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (PC)

 

Halo: The Master Chief Collection - Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

Release Date: November 11, 2014, November 15, 2011, November 15, 2001
Systems: Xbox One, Windows, Xbox Series X/S

Publisher: Xbox Games Studios, Microsoft Studios
Developer: Bungie*, 343 Industries, Saber Interactive

Time Spent: 16 Hours, 15 Minutes

Now that I'm playing Classic Marathon, I guess I should probably finish writing down my thoughts about playing Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition because why not have a week or two of writing about video games from a company that I've known about for almost 20 years but hadn't really* played anything by them until the last year.  I first wrote about the game in August 2023 with an introductory contextual article, followed by a First Impressions article later that week.  The first was mainly my thoughts about the series before I started, followed by our typical First Impressions after completing Mission 3: Truth and Reconciliation.  In truth, I only played Halo off and on until I finally beat it in February of this year (2024).

Well, I have to admit that I feel a little bit better about Halo: Combat Evolved Aniversary than I did when I first started, and easily after the first couple of missions.  There was a certain appeal to fighting the Covenant alongside a bunch of computer-controlled marines, but I definitely found my groove when the game was more about running through the corridors of subterranean complexes fighting off the Covenant, the Flood, and the Flood-infected Covenant.  I had issues with several other areas of the game for various reasons, so everything didn't become wonderful once you end up on your own.

During Mission 5: Assault on the Control Room, I felt that I was running through the same two hallways and central operations room for what felt like a couple of hours.  Even when I thought I recognized which way to go, I frequently found myself getting turned around and not always sure what it was that I was supposed to be doing apart from killing anything that was on the screen.  I did enjoy some of the in-between bases sections where you were driving Sheila, sorry, the Scorpion Battle Tank, and I did rely heavily on her power throughout, even to a fault.  But once you had to leave Sheila behind and enter another tower of what felt like the same room and hallway, then I became annoyed/bored/frustrated.

Mission 6: 343 Guilty Spark was where The Flood was introduced.  An organism that the Covenant feared and, from what I understood, attempted to keep locked away before Master Chief and company entered the underground facilities.  In some ways, it felt like Halo was taking an action-horror route which I would rather play than a straight-up action game.  Even the later appearance of the infected marines and Covenant reminded me a lot of the Headcrab Zombies from the Half-Life series although I couldn't find anything that pointed to this theory.  It was pretty cathartic, if not still a bit stressful unloading an entire clip from the assault rifle into a swarm of the Flood.  It did kind of make me want a straight-up horror/action-horror/survival-horror game set in the Halo universe, but that might be asking too much of whoever the hell owns the IP at this point, to ask them to divert heavily from their base of sci-fi military action shooters.

Lastly was the final mission, The Maw, which consisted of two of the more frustrating levels in the entire game.  The last half of the first second of The Maw has you doing a bit of platforming, something that has been very minimal to this point in the entire game.  The jumps aren't inherently difficult, nothing Super Mario Bros. or even Super Meat Boy level of platforming difficulty, but you do have to jump to platforms and catwalks with moderate to severe accuracy otherwise you'll over or under-jump, and then have to walk/run back through a large room that looks almost the same from virtually every angle.  If you were able to have a map overlay for platforming sections like in Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, then this area would have been a lot easier, but since accurate platform jumping had not been a necessary skill to get through the game, making these jumps while under fire from infinitely spawning enemies was a bit infuriating.  The last part of this particular section requires you to either lob grenades or shoot rockets into an exhaust pipe, so kind of like explosive basketball with limited ammo.  I died quite a few times here after exhausting my supply of grenades and rockets and was unable to find any more ammo pick ups/drops.

The second half of The Maw consisted of another Warthog-required stage that again, put you in an area that had enough roadblocks to make any steady progression in the Warthog grind to a halt.  And since this was my first time playing Halo: CE I didn't really understand how much of the 6:00 timer I would need to drive the Warthog across what felt like half the planet (really, on 2.1 km) to reach the Longsword before the entire complex exploded.  This isn't the Super Metroid timer that feels like you only just make it out from the Space Colony Ceres, which does allow for a couple of mistakes as you climb out of the vertical chamber.  Here, you really just need to gun it the entire time as much and as frequently as possible or you're going to have to replay this section again and again.  My first time through, I reached the final gauntlet where enemies are coming at you from all sides with the pick-up ship in view and the timer down to fewer than 0:05 seconds.  I hoped that I didn't need to make it to the ship, that there would be a cutaway to Master Chief jumping to the ship just in the nick of time, but no.  The timer reached zero, and the complex exploded along with Master Chief.  So no Halo 2 I guess.  Except I restarted this section, annoying back at the very beginning of the stage (no checkpoints here) which included a near minute of elevator riding and exposition dumping that you can't skip because it's not a cutscene. I did make it out after making more than a handful of mistakes but still was able to make up time on the slightly rounded straightaways.

And so I did make it, and destroyed the Halo, along with everything on it.  Except I doubt that very much even if I didn't know that there are already six games in this collection.  I feel like the Flood is going to end up being like tardigrades in their ability to survive deep space for extended periods.  Let alone I don't think that the entirety of the Covenant Armada was on the Halo when it exploded.  I will likely play Halo 2, maybe over these upcoming holiday weeks if I'm not sinking my time in either Classic Marathon, or Fallout 4, or The Elder Scrolls Online, or Dragon's Dogma, or Triangle Strategy.  Maybe I'll wait until I finish a game or two before jumping into Halo 2 because despite all of my criticisms that littered this and previous articles, I did feel like I had played a well-constructed first-person shooter.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Taste the Blood Red Wine

*I say "hadn't really" because I did play the first mission sometime before The Shramp and Gary moved down to SoCal, and I played one short match of couch multiplayer with Toddells when he was still living in SF with Chreekat.  So it wasn't my first-first-first time, just my first dedicated time.

P.S.  Now that you've reached the end of the article, I'm going to include my stats from playing the game.  I didn't seek out any of the hidden skulls or other collectibles because my focus was on beating the story, not fully exploring every corner of each level, which might be a bit of a surprise since my level completion time often took far longer than the Par time.  But that's just me.

Yes, I died 88 times.  I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's me.