Halo: Combat Evolved

aka: Blam!, Guangyun: Zui Hou Yizhan, Halo: El Combate ha Evolucionado, Halo: Kampf um die Zukunft, Monkey Nuts
Moby ID: 5368
Xbox Specs
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Description official descriptions

Humanity is in the midst of a long war against an alien alliance called the Covenant which has been wiping out colony after colony. Your hero is Master Chief, who is given no name beyond his rank in the game itself. He is stationed on the Pillar of Autumn, a ship which, per protocol makes a jump in a random direction to retreat to avoid revealing the location of Earth. They find themselves at the titular Halo, a planet-sized ring of mysterious origin, and function with the Covenant on their heels. Master Chief must repel the Covenant assault and discover the secrets of Halo with the assistance of the female AI Cortana who lives in his suit and gives missions.

Halo: Combat Evolved is a sci-fi first-person shooter with considerable driving elements. Features include friendly NPCs who fight alongside the Chief, squad-based AI where enemies groups work together to flank you under the direction of a leader unit and can be demoralized by his death. They also use cover, set ambushes, etc.

Only two weapons may be carried at a time: one active and one on backup. There are five human weapons and three Covenant with distinct art styles for the two groups. Human weapons look basically like real guns and fire projectiles. Covenant are sleek and purple and fire energy. For the most part, weapons are not just left around the environment and must be procured from fallen enemies though there are supply points.

Your life is armor and health as in most games of the genre, however, rather than armor being an item that is picked up, it is a force field which quickly recharges itself after several seconds without taking damage, which emphasizes finding cover.

One of the most significant features is vehicles. You can drive a variety of vehicles in both single-player and multiplayer, some of which have additional seats for passengers or gunners which can be used by AI characters. Vehicles also come in distinct human and Covenant varieties with their design philosophies. Human vehicles roll around the ground on wheels and covenant vehicles hover or fly.

Halo also has a significant multiplayer component with basic deathmatch (called slayer here), capture the flag with the unusual addition that the flag takes your weapon spot while you are holding it, so shooting your way in and out of the base on your own is not an option, territories, and some options unique to the game, such as oddball, where you must hold onto a skull for the longest time, race where you score points by getting to checkpoints and juggernaut, where one super-powered player must get points by killing the others and the other players try to kill him to steal his powers. There is also a game editor which allows you to set custom rules for all the basic game types. All the playable weapons and vehicles from the campaign mode are available in the multiplayer maps with the ability for members of the same team to share the game's distinctive Warthog vehicle, which is essentially a small truck with a mounted gun on the back.

Spellings

  • γƒ˜γ‚€γƒ­γƒΌ - Japanese spelling
  • ε…‰ζ™•οΌšζˆ˜ζ–—θΏ›εŒ– - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • ζœ€εΎŒδΈ€ζˆ° - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Credits (Xbox version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 91% (based on 112 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 417 ratings with 26 reviews)

Try not to pay any attention to detail, and it's a fairly decent game.

The Good
Halo probably has one of the most easily recognizable characters in the Master Chief. Show any gamer a picture of the Chief and ask who he is and they will say "that's Master Chief from the Halo games", whether they have played it or not. Another of halo's stand out characters is Cortana, the Pillar of autumns sparky, well humoured and very likeable AI. I think it forms a very good 'your brawn and my brain' partnership.

A particular delight for me was the Covenant weapons. They were pretty well designed and unique in that no two weapons were very alike, and with there own advantages. The needler fired needles that would explode if you got enough rounds into an enemy, the carbine with with handles a bit like a scope less sniper rifle and the plasma rifle were all stand out favorites for me.

The vehicles the covenant use were also particularly well done. For me, the two best were the ghost which is a fast hovering bike like number with a plasma machine gun on the nose and the wraith, a neat combination of a hover tank and a mortar.

The Bad
The repetitiveness. Halo:CE has flaws, and the single major flaw is its repetitiveness. And it is manifested in two ways. First off, and most significantly, is the repetitiveness of the level design, which is a bit like trying to tell the difference between Porches, 90% of the time you have to look very hard to be able to tell the difference between two indoor sections. It is so bad, that there are three different types if interiors that i can distinctly recall. Pillar of Autumn, covenant ship and Halo. Now, for me, that is not a good thing. Granted, the most of the game pretty much takes place on two of them, but you can't help go around each interior level thinking "errr, hav'nt i already been through here". I certainly did. The interiors are also note worthy because it's mostly corridor's. Only one or two rooms anywhere, and the rooms or corridor's never contain much, if anything. All they ever contain is wall displays or tables. No consoles, tools, not many chairs. Its all very bare. The second way the repetitiveness creeks in is the combat, in that it is mostly run and gun. More run and gun. And more run and gun. The only time your not running and gunning is when your not, is when your blowing up the Pillar of Autumn's engines. And that's IT. Combine it with the generic level design mentioned above, you become more acutely aware of both.

On a similar vein to the level design is that of the design when it come to the UNSC weapons and vehicles. Once again, they suffer from a lack of imagination. OK, the assault rifle has an electronic ammo counter on it, there is no particularly sci-fi-ish weapons in the UNSC armory, with is weird when you consider that the game takes place in 150 years time and your fighting with what is, pretty much, weaponry that woud'nt look out of place in current times. This is made stranger when you consider the effort Bungie put into the design of the Covenant weapons. It's the exact same with the the UNSC vehicles, its as if some one at Bungie said to there boss "boss, i've designed the Covenant stuff, but i can't be asked to do the UNSC stuff" and the boss replied "that's OK, don't bother, it's not like it matters, or anyone would notice" and at the last minute, cobbled together a couple of vehicles based on current vehicles. Just sheer laziness to me. And speaking of weapons, one of the little irritations that made it into most of the halo games is the severe lack of substantial amounts of ammo. It's alway's kill a few enemies, run out of ammo, switch to secondary weapon, kill a few more aliens, run out of ammo, run around looking for a new weapon whilst being shot at, find one, kill them, move on, rinse and repeat. Wait till your up against the hunter pair, you'll know then what it's like.

Halo does'nt get many points for story either. OK, were not exactly swamped in similar stories, but it is far from original or creative. I mean come on, religious aliens hell bent on wiping us out, and you single handily stop them. I could think of a few games in which 1) aliens want to wipe us out, 2) there using religion as an excuse to be crappy to humans and 3) you save the day all on your lonesome. Even outside of gaming, it's not very original. And to add insult to story telling injury, the characters don't, save for Cortana, shine to stand out. The Master Chief does'nt say enough to really stand out, Sergeant Johnson and Foehammer are just plain cliched and Captain Keyes is'nt around enough to make much of an impact. For me, Cortana is the ONLY stand out character.

I think i'll end this section off with a minor niggle. Objectives. Maybe it's just me, but going through the game, and the main trilogy for that matter, i got the feeling, that whilst your overall objective was pretty clear, some of the time is spent on objectives that either have no major point, get's switched to something else or scrapped all together. Could just be me.

The Bottom Line
If this came out now (2010), instead of in 2001, i would say not to expect a sequel. It does'nt have that much variety, some lazy design work and does'nt blow you away. But in spite of that, you can still have a bit of fun playing it. For me, Halo is a like a Arnold Schwarzenegger film. It's got a shallow plot, chances are Schwarzenegger's dialogue is being very mono syllable or dones'nt say much and is doing a cardboard character performance, but as long as you don't expect much from it, you can kind of enjoy it.

Xbox · by Starbuck the Third (22608) · 2010

Good but very, very over-rated.

The Good
"Combat Evolved" describes things very well. The combat in HALO is indeed a step up from most FPS' and is challenging and fun (until The Flood shows up, see below).Enemies will duck and dive for cover, engage you in a variety of ways and generally put up a good fight. What may even be more amazing is that your own team is not entirely useless. It may be one of the actually ground-breaking features of Halo that your own team actually put up a good fight and help you out by making themselves useful. No standing around looking curiously at the primed grenade at their feet or running into your line of fire (well at least not too much). They actually engage and kill the enemy effectively! On the other hand, maybe this say more about the incredibly sad state of Ai in gaming than it say about the AI in Halo.

The vehicles are also very well done. It's immensely fun driving around in the Warthog with a gunner while fighting aliens or laying down the pain from a Banshee fighter. The Warthog, fun as it is, has somewhat odd driving characteristics though; it skids like Bambi on ice even when you drive on dry concrete.

Halo also has my favourite type of cut-scene: the in-game engine cut-scene. Not only that, they're also reasonably well directed with a certain flair that gives them a movie-like quality. No talking heads here.

One positive thing that actually surprised me was Master Chief himself. I had expected a DOOM-style mute hero but it turns out master Chief talks and actually has a personality. Granted, he doesn't have the "charm" and "charisma" of Duke Nukem but he's no Gordon Freeman-style mute either. I really don't care much for the personality-free protagonist style of Half-life and DOOM. It works in DOOM because there's really no-one around for your character to talk to but when there are people talking and addressing you and your character just says nothing it just gets a bit weird.

The Covenant is an interesting collection of alien races with unique traits. I almost feel bad every time I shoot a grunt. With their runt, short appearance, high pitched voices and the clumsy way they carry their weapons, especially when panicking, they have a very child-like appearance to them. In some ways the grunts are more disturbing than The Flood. Unfortunately we get to know almost nothing about the Covenant and its alien races other than "they want to kill all humans".

It's also a plus that there are no boss-fights, just increasingly difficult battles.

The Bad
The combat that was so fun against the Covenant goes right out the Window the moment The Flood rears its ugly head. What we have here is classic DOOM style enemies that has absolutely no combat awareness and who thinks that the old cavalry charge is the pinnacle of attack tactics. The only way by which the flood challenges the player is by sheer numbers. While we're on the topic of The Flood , that old standard-issue parasitic alien life-form that has been the staple of Sci-Fi since the 50's, they're just not very menacing or scary. I have a hard time picturing it as such a monumental threat to sentient life that such extreme measures that we are presented with are necessary. I mean, the basic form, which looks like a mildly mutated jellyfish, can probably be killed with a peashooter. System Shock 2 did this much better and The Flood pales in comparison to The Many.

The Flood also brings to light some lazy writing and plot holes (spoiler warning). How come The Flood is isolated on Halo? How did it survive for 100000(!) years without food? If the Forerunners managed to contain it why not just wipe out the last remaining colony instead of this monitor AI and containment protocol nonsense? Or did they keep them in some kind of storage for future use? Master Chief solves this problem elegantly by just destroying Halo but as we'll see in the sequels there are other colonies (collections?) of The Flood on other Halo-type installations. Really? Seriously, what the hell where they thinking? "Lets contain this extremely dangerous life-form in select installations across the galaxy and if the shit hits the fan lets just wipe out all OTHER life". Great plan guys, you really thought that one through.

When we are on the subject of the Forerunners we should not forget the impressive yet incredibly dull level architecture. Sure, the alien architecture is grand and immensely large (why so large? Where they 20 feet tall?) but it is also incredibly dull and boring. You'll be fighting through an endless line of dull, gray dimly lit rooms (that comes in very limited variety) all connected with the same type of zigzag corridor. While the symmetric design might make sense and be "realistic" it's also very, very boring. Quite a few times I just had to stop playing and go do something else for a while because I couldn't stand seeing yet another clone of room-design X. The interior room design also makes it very hard to keep track of where you are and where you are going. This is especially true in the part where you have to follow Guilty Spark. Most of the time I had no idea where that crazy AI was and I just followed the path where the monsters where since game-logic dictates that that is probably where I should be going. The Covenant levels are a bit better (they have colors!) but they suffer from even more and longer identical corridors that you have to fight your way through. Also, why does all aliens in all games design their ships and installations so that it is so very complicated to move from point A to point B, even when A and B are physically close? Halo suffers from this although at least it's nowhere near as bad as the stupidity that is Xen in Half-Life. They do make solid stuff though, the aliens. These installations has stood without maintenance for 100000 years and most of it works without a hitch. Amazing.

The Covenant is also a bit anonymous. Who are they? How did their religious worship of the Forerunners start? What are the specific of the different races? All we get is a few sentences in the manual and that's it and the only way you'll ever interact with them is in combat. The Kilrathi they aren't.

One final thing. Why can't Master Chief run?

The Bottom Line
If you take it for what it is, a very well-made FPS with a decent but also engaging story, you won't be disappointed. While not as revolutionary and ground-breaking as some might want you to think it's still a good game and if you can muster up the courage to stand the dull and repeated architecture you'll probably enjoy it.

Windows · by Lars Hansson (4) · 2010

Repetitive and shallow FPS that can't hold a candle to the classics of the genre

The Good
Halo has three stand-out features: enemy AI, teammates, and controllable vehicles.

Much has been said about the AI of the Covenant. Indeed, after Half-Life's marines, Halo's Covenant have perhaps the most advanced and interesting behavior patterns I've seen in an FPS. Although after a while they begin repeating themselves, it was a nice feeling at first to deal with organized groups of enemies that actually employed some tactics. Stronger aliens would elegantly side-step, take cover, and generally behave in a smart, believable way. Smaller ones would block your attacks with shields or try to compensate strength with quantity. Perhaps the most memorable enemies are the Grunts, who get easily demoralized, running away at the sight of a defeated Covenant leader.

The marines will actually help you in this game, fighting on your side. It is a somewhat welcome change from the usual "lone hero saves the world" philosophy. Don't get too excited, though: the AI of your teammates is just functional, far from being revolutionary. But at least those allies are not completely useless, they won't throw bombs at you or get killed at the first opportunity.

I absolutely agree with the other reviewer here on MobyGames: praising the character AI in Halo only reveals the general weak state of AI routines in games. Halo did what every first-person shooter should have done. That is not to say that the AI in this game is amazing. After a short time, you'll learn to predict enemy patterns, their AI being less of an obstacle than their high endurance.

The best feature of Halo are the vehicles. That could be the saving grace of the game for those who have the patience to endure the rest of its gameplay. Vehicle segments are the only ones that feel genuinely exciting. While driving the Warthog is just moderately fun, things change when you get hold of cool alien technology. Hovering or flying around while shooting at poor unsuspecting Grunts or destroying the same vehicle controlled by a fearsome Elite warrior is very fun. Vehicle levels are usually large, and the choice of strategies is quite vast. Getting our of a damaged vehicle and quickly occupying another one before an enemy gets there certainly belongs to the most entertaining moments Halo has to offer.

What else? The weapons work reasonably well. There is just enough variety and balance to try out different stuff - though in the end, I found that aliens take a while to kill no matter what you are using. Naturally, rocket launchers and alike shred them to pieces instantly, but the other weapons inflict more or less the same damage. The feeling of using human and alien technology at once is quite rewarding, though. The two-weapon system, which forces you to choose instead of just grabbing whatever is available, is a good idea. I also liked the implementation of grenades: they were easy to find, easy to use, and caused considerable damage that made me choose them over other approaches from time to time. Melee attacks also work well, and were actually more useful than they usually are in this type of games.

The Bad
Halo is, at best, an average FPS with fundamental, unforgivable weaknesses. The level design is among the worst I have ever seen in a FPS. Indoor locations of Halo consist of identically-looking rooms and corridors that were put together without any care or attention to detail. Most of them were designed with such crudeness that I almost couldn't believe they made it into the final product. Outdoor locations are slightly better, but only because they are outdoors. Natural components are more interesting than the plain, yawn-inducing materials they chose for the indoor locations.

The level of detail is disastrously low. Every room is as bland as possible. Those rooms are just rectangles, mathematical constructions without any soul. At one point, you explore an alien battle cruiser. What can you say about it? That it consists of dozens of identically-looking purple corridors. Nothing else! There are hardly any objects in the rooms, and if there are, they repeat themselves verbatim, copy-paste style, ad nauseam. Those rooms serve no purpose and are simply there, dull and tiresome.

Ignoring this as a small flaw would be, in my opinion, equivalent to forgetting what makes first-person shooters enjoyable and immersive in the first place. When I play an FPS, I want to be a part of its world. It doesn't depend on the premise that much. The premise of Halo is not bad: a mysterious planet, alien civilization, two different alien races, place of religious worship, etc. It's the execution that is horrible. Just before Halo, I played Blood II; it hardly has a better premise, but the colorful locations make it actually more entertaining than this miserable collection endless corridors.

Halo destroys a long, respectable tradition of FPS design philosophy. What we loved doing in those great FPSs of the past is no longer there. It is really amazing how "successfully" the game eliminates from its gameplay nearly everything that made shooters involving. Forget interactivity. Forget destructible environments. Forget secret areas. Forget puzzles of any kind. Forget different goals and objectives in every location. Forget humor, forget setpieces, even forget boss battles! It is as if Duke Nukem 3D got forbidden, Half-Life was released on the moon, and No One Lives Forever never saw the light of the day. Even Doom had by far more variety and depth than Halo. I can only imagine that lack of knowledge of FPS history and the game's initially console-only origins greatly contributed to its popularity. Then again, the console-exclusive GoldenEye 007, released four years earlier, beats Halo in every respect.

With the exception of vehicles, which is really the only gameplay element Halo does convincingly, the entire game consists of shooting waves upon waves of enemies. Sure, the AI is good, but how many times do you want to shoot the same mechanically appearing Covenant group? At what point does it become tedious and boring to outsmart yet another Elite and finish off yet another fleeing Grunt? By the time the Flood enters the scene, you are already bored. But the Flood finishes the deal. I wouldn't be hurt by their primitive AI if they had anything else to offer, but the poor bastards aren't even scary.

Everything else in Halo is average. The plot is a rather ordinary science fiction tale that has been done many times before. Cutscenes are competently made, but something is missing in the presentation, something that would give it more personality and appeal. You don't really feel the grandeur of a mysterious alien civilization. Emotions run low in this story, leaving you cold and indifferent. The story greatly lacks detail and therefore can't compete with good sci-fi material. For example, we learn nothing about the different races that constitute the Covenant. The whole idea of the Flood and the ways to stop it is contrived and unconvincing. The dialog is completely unremarkable as well. At its best, it's just "normal"; at its worst, it becomes corny, with occasional awkward, badly done comic relief.

The funniest (well, actually, saddest) part of it all is how Master Chief became the first video game character to make it into Madame Tussaud's museum. Think of your favorite video game characters and now think that Master Chief, of all people, got this honor! I vote to immediately replace him with Lo Wang from Shadow Warrior. At least he is funnier and has more personality.

The Bottom Line
Halo has a solid premise, controllable vehicles, and good enemy AI. But all this means little compared to its glaring flaws. Repetitive gameplay and awful level design kill this game. Halo feels like a fancy AI-testing held in amateurish 3D constructions with no appeal whatsoever, resulting in a shallow and ultimately boring experience.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2014

[ View all 26 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Xbox version of Halo: Combat Evolved appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Demo

The end of the PC demo features a 49 second infomercial-style video, narrated by Sgt. Johnson, which extolls the virtues of buying the full version. "Buy one! Heck, buy two!"

Development

Halo went through many changes during its development. As originally conceived, it was a real-time tactical game for Windows, something like a sci-fi version of Myth. The focus shifted toward direct control of one of the individual units and it became a third person shooter and work began on a Macintosh version as well. This is how the game was originally announced.

After Microsoft bought Bungie, Halo was shifted to being an Xbox exclusive. Around the same time, it became a first person game, with Bungie saying there wasn't any way to get precise aiming to work in third person. Many of the art assets changed too, with the Master Chief's armor in the game as shipped looking quite different than the original trailer. Eventually, Halo was ported back to its original platforms of Windows and Macintosh bearing no resemblance to how it started.

Ending

Beat the game in Legendary difficulty and you get an additional funny cutscene at the end.

Engineer

Halo has a strange enemy hidden in the game code called the Engineer. You can only access it using a mod chip. It's a pink, blobby thing that just sort of floats around. It's the same creature as seen in one of the earliest videos of the game, the one with the marines going into the huge building.

Gags

  • If you look closely at the shotgun shells taken out when Master Chief reloads, you'll see there are hippo heads pictured on them.
  • If you highlight the "Edit Gametypes" section in the multiplayer section of this game, you come across an image of Master Chief with text that, to the reader, seems to be schematics for each of his body parts. If you look closely, some of the text aren't schematics, but text: Text on Head/Gun: "UV Protectant Sun Visor for Protection from Elements". Text on Upper Right Leg: "Sometimes I give myself the creeps, sometimes my mind plays tricks on me" (lyrics from the Green Day song "Basket Case"). Text on Lower Right Leg: "Hydraulic Suspension Thigh Pads with cool Kevlar crap". Text on Left Leg: "Directional Locks MJOLNIR cyborg dealer parts". Text on Arm: "Action/Reload see may flexible joint system". Text on Torso: "All your base are belong to us".

Halo: Custom Edition

On May 5th, 2004, Halo: Custom Edition was released for free. It is a multiplayer only, 170MB standalone version of Halo PC which enables gamers to play user created content created with the halo editing kit. It requires the original cd and a valid key to play. Download it here.

Machinima

Halo is used to film the machinima web series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, which is currently in its fifteenth season.

Novel

As of July 2017, there are a total of twenty-one Halo tie-in novels. The first three being: Fall of Reach (prequel), The Flood (novelization of the game), and First Strike (successor).

Rating

Halo was originally rated T for Teens.

References: Marathon

  • At the center of the Halo logo, you can see the Marathon logo (Marathon being the FPS series Bungie was previously famous for). The Marathon logo can also be seen in several places throughout the game, including on the hull of the human battleship, on Captain Keye's uniform, and on several of the doors found around Halo. The character design of 343 Guilty Spark, one of the game's pivotal characters, also strongly resembles the Marathon logo.
  • The cyborg Master Chief wears a suit of Mjolnir battle armor. The hero of the Marathon series was a Mjolnir class cyborg.
  • The alien grunts sometimes scream out "They're everywhere!" in combat. The human civilians from Marathon would also scream the same thing during the alien invasion.
  • Certain weapons have similar names and appearances in both games, such as the SPNKR rocket launcher.
  • Both games have very whimsical chapter names, like "Wait! It Gets Worse!" or "Fourth Floor: Tools, Guns, Keys to Superweapon" in Halo or "Kill Your Television" or "You Think You're Badass? You're Going to Die Badass!" in Marathon.
  • Rampancy, or "When AIs go nuts and rebel against humanity", played a major part of Marathon's story. If you kill the command crew in Halo's opening level, Cortana will complain that you've gone Rampant and will sic the Marines on you.
  • The hero of the Marathon series spend most of his time taking orders from Durandal, a megalomaniacal A.I. named after a mythological sword who had few qualms about breaking a few eggs (using humans as expendable pawns) to make an omelet (liberating a slave race). The hero of Halo spends most of his time taking orders from Cortana, an A.I. named after a mythical sword who's beginning to show signs her ego is expanding, and who has few qualms about breaking a few eggs (destroying Halo and killing the marines on it) to make an omelet (saving Earth).
  • Much of the dialog of the "Grunt" characters is taken from the Human characters in the first Marathon: "Thank God it's you" was spoken by characters called "Exploding Bobs", which were sythetic Humans who would run at the player and explode. The line "They're Everywhere" was spoken by frightened Humans the player would come across.
  • The architecture in Halo is very similar to Jjaro architecture - the Jjaro were an equally ancient race in Marathon.

References

Some of the dialogue spoken by the marines, comes directly from the film Aliens.

Sales

  • As of 2005, Halo is the best-selling Xbox game of all time. It has sold three and a half million copies.
  • On August 31, 2003 has Halo (Xbox) won the Gold-Award from the German VUD (Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland - Entertainment Software Association Germany) for selling more then 100,000 (but less then 200,000) units in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Timeline

Many people believe that Halo takes place during a one-hundred-and-thiry-nine year gap in the Marathon timeline, in which the creators wrote "This century intentionally left blank. Seriously, nothing really happened."

Voice acting

Much of the dialogue spoken by the Covenant Elites is in fact dialogue by the human Sergeant, reversed, with some pitch alterations.

Windows and Macintosh versions

  • Gearbox took over programming of Halo PC and discovered that they can't use much of the existing networking code (for the XBox). They had to rewrite that entire section, delaying the title for PC by several months.
  • The PC version (and probably Mac, too) of Halo adds a few bonus features for the multiplayer mode, these include two weapons: a Flamethrower (which was scrapped from the game at the last minute) and a Fuel Rod Gun (the weapon that the Hunters use in the main game) as well as allowing you to use the Banshee and a rocket-launcher version of the Warthog.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2002– Best Xbox Action Game of the Year
    • 2002– Best Console Multiplayer Game of the Year
    • 2002 – #2 Best Xbox Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2004 (Issue #236) – Year's Biggest Letdown
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly
    • April 2002 - Game of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – Xbox Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
    • 2001 – Xbox Action/Adventure Game of the Year
    • 2003 – #6 PC Game of the Year
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/2008 - One of the "10 Coolest Levels" (for the level "The Silent Cartographer". It combines all fun elements from the first person shooter genre into one level.)
  • Interactive Achievement Awards (Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences)
    • 2002 - Game of the Year
    • 2002 - Console Game of the Year,
    • 2002 - Console Action/Adventure Game of the Year
    • 2002 - Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering
  • PC Powerplay (Germany)
    • Issue 03/2005 - #1 Biggest Disappointment
    • Issue 12/2006 - #9 Hype Disappointment (was no longer impressive when it was ported two years after the console version)
  • Retro Gamer
    • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #18 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
  • The Strong National Museum of Play
    • 2017 – Introduced into the World Video Game Hall of Fame
  • Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD)
    • August 31, 2003 - Gold Award
  • Walk of Game
    • 2005 - Member

Information also contributed by ~~, Ace of Sevens, Alan Chan, BurningStickMan, Kartanym, Kasey Chang, Maw, MegaMegaMan, Ray Soderlund, Sciere, Xoleras, Zack Green and Zovni

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Related Sites +

  • Beyond Fragging
    An Apple Games article about the Mac version of Halo, with commentary being provided by Project Manager Marc Tardif and MacSoft President Peter Tante (November, 2003).
  • Halo PC
    Official Site - Bungie
  • Halopedia
    A wiki covering all Halo games
  • Microsoft: Halo Website
    Official website for Halo with overview of title. Includes link to Javascript pop-up window with screenshots, movies and more details on the title (only available through above link, no separate URL for pop-up).

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by JPaterson.

Xbox 360 added by Kartanym. Windows added by kawaii. Macintosh added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: Istari, Kartanym, Unicorn Lynx, Entorphane, karttu, tarmo888, Kabushi, Pseudo_Intellectual, Zeppin, Paulus18950, Zaibatsu, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, yellowshirt, SoMuchChaotix.

Game added November 17, 2001. Last modified March 25, 2024.