400.0 hours played
Written 16 days ago
Halo may just be the peak of the FPS genre. It stands tall and uncontested. It manages to stay relevant after more than 2 decades (and counting) due to its excellent timeless qualities:
+ an epic story that talks about intergalactic war and ancient lifeforms. This must be where Mass Effect took its inspiration from.
+ an epic soundtrack that impeccably puts you in the right mood, whether you're absorbing the atmosphere with "walk in the woods", or driving through explosions left and right with Halo's iconic main theme. Halo uses its soundtrack sparingly, which increases its impact and creates memorable moments. The pure absence of any music also works very well in certain missions.
+ epic combat with the covenant. The enemy AI was revolutionary for its day and remains so to this day. Enemies will go in and out of cover to regenerate their shield and outflank you. Every encounter is a game of cat and mouse, where you have to think about strategy in all aspect: Where will you attack? What weapons are available, how much ammo is there? Which enemies do you take out first? Are there objects that you can move? etc.
+ physics. precise grenade/rocket jumps allow you to reach places you didn't think were possible. Learning glitches provide you with a whole new way of playing Halo. more on that later. The popularity of Halo means that there's huge amounts of resources that teach you such tricks.
+ two amazing game modes that almost change the whole genre of the game:
1. LASO, Legendary All Skulls On, is a difficulty that's so high, that you're not really engaging the enemy head-on anymore. Rather it becomes almost a stealth game, where you go from cover to cover and backstabbing enemies as needed, praying that you don't get discovered, because the little shield that you have don't even regenerate on LASO. Where you do need to engage, it becomes a war of attrition, as there is 4x less ammo than normal, while the enemies have something like 4x more shields. So you will learn to conserve ammo and use every bullet as efficiently as possible.
2. Legendary 3h Speedrun. Technically not a game mode, but an achievement for completing a whole Halo game in under 3 hours on Legendary. When going for this, the game again changes completely, and now becomes some kind of precision platformer, where you learn to do precise grenade jumps, and move in precise locations to despawn enemies. I mean, practising and executing some of these tricks really made me feel like Master Chief. Possibly the most iconic one is in Halo 4 where you jetpack onto the ship, infiltrate, blow up the engine, then jetpack back to your vehicle, and you do all that before the ship has even finished its scripted animation sequence, where it's supposed to park on a hill and let you transport upwards. Another is in Halo 2 where you throw 3 grenades in a precise way, then jump on the gondola. This spawns in the enemies, who immediately get blown up, as you watch and sail away to the next section.
And Halo has coop, so you can experience all of the above with a friend, though I need to say, if you play LASO or Legendary with 2 or more players, it becomes significantly easier, and the above doesn't really apply anymore. Note also Halo 1 and 2 only support 2 player coop.
I only have 2 criticisms:
- some of my achievements got bugged and I can't unlock them, possibly because the anti-cheat software wasn't operational on my Steam Deck.
- changing your Xbox username costs €10 after the first time. absolutely ridiculous pricing. should be free.
But that doesn't detract from the fact that Halo is a true behemoth in the FPS genre. And it's also very cheap. One of the few games that's worth it even at full price. Let alone on sale. You can easily get hundreds of hours of playtime from it.