Halo: Combat Evolved
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
- γγ€γγΌ - Japanese spelling
- ε ζοΌζζθΏε - Simplified Chinese spelling
- ζεΎδΈζ° - Traditional Chinese spelling
Groups +
- Console Generation Exclusives: Xbox
- Games made into books
- Games made into comics
- Games made into movies
- Games made into TV series
- Halo series
- Launch title: Xbox (North America)
- Middleware: Bink Video
- Setting: Space station / Spaceship
- Technology: amBX
- Xbox Best of Classics releases
- Xbox Best of Platinum Hits releases
- Xbox Classics releases
- Xbox Platinum Hits releases
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Credits (Xbox version)
185 People (107 developers, 78 thanks) · View all
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 91% (based on 112 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 418 ratings with 26 reviews)
The Good
- Ability to change difficulty mid-game. I couldn't get past a certain point in the final level, and I changed the difficulty setting right there.
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The game runs on a whole variety of graphic cards and drivers. I had a computer that was pure crap, and it could run Halo. I used to believe in love, but these days, I tend to believe in Microsoft's ability to make games that run smoothly on Windows instead.
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Great Gamepad support. My Gamepad from the days of "Monster Truck Madness 2" works perfectly here. Any Gamepad with two triggers, two shoulder buttons, and dual-analog layout should work.
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Every weapon is memorable. As you play, you'll become familiar with each weapon's strengths and weaknesses. Since you are only allowed to carry two guns with you, you are constantly choosing the best weapons to pick up, based on the task at hand.
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Flying a Banshee.
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Driving a Jeep.
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Driving a Jeep across the river.
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Flipping a Jeep.
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You can flip a Banshee too.
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Watching Master Chief get inside a vehicle, switching to 3rd-person view.
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Watching Master Chief get out of a vehicle, switching back to 1st-person view.
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Not letting your teammates down. The sniper rifle can zoom in 10x so it's kinda hard to miss. So you won't let your teammates down.
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Sticking a plasma grenade to a powerful enemy.
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Shooting a rocket launcher at a vehicle far away, and seeing it explode.
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The pistol. Yeah the pistol. My roommate once said that "the pistol is actually a sniper rifle". You can zoom in like crazy and shoot stuff up with that pistol. That's a fine pistol. That's a pistol to write home about.
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Watching, and hearing, your shield recharge.
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Watching an enemy's shield being attacked (by you).
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Picking up a med kit when your health is red (low). The screen will kind of light up a little, it's like being touched by an angel.
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Turning on a flashlight in a dark corridor. The flashlight is so sweet, I don't wanna leave the dark areas.
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Watching Master Chief reload his guns. I never get tired of that.
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Listening to the subtle sound effect when you pick up a plasma grenade.
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Walking around and noticing something on the ground that kinda looks like a plasma grenade, walking there, and confirming that it is indeed a plasma grenade.
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Concise and powerful text notifications. These are shown in the top left corner (same position as another Microsoft classic, Age of Empires 2). You pick up grenades, text shows up. You pick up ammo, text shows up. You walk near a weapon, text shows up. The most amazing one is that whenever you reach a checkpoint, it says "Checkpoint... Done." It's an amazing feeling to see this after a long and challenging fight.
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The environment is comprised of mountains, grass fields, trees, rivers, smooth-edged buildings, and the beautiful night sky. I was never an outdoor person. Wild is the wind, who cares. Halo showed me the beauty of the wilderness. Ever since playing Halo, I became OBSESSED with the great outdoors. I would spend everyday walking through forests and plains (didn't have to work at the time), looking for places that resemble the Halo levels. And I found a LOT of these places. I found places that looked almost exactly like the environment in Halo. Halo showed me that, when you're walking, something special happens. You see different things around you. As I was moving ahead, I saw brief glimpses of beauty. I saw this in the game. I saw this in real life.
To say that Halo turned me into an athletic person is an understatement. Halo changed the way I look at the world. Halo taught me how to walk. Before Halo, my life was sort of in a top-down view, I don't know. After Halo, my life is a life in first-person. The way it should be.
The Bad
Everything bad about this game has been wiped out with a single plasma grenade. You carry four grenades, so, yeah. YEAH.
People sometimes say "it's so beautiful, it hurts". I think I know what this means now. Now that I do have to work, all day long, often into the night, I will probably never relive the outdoor life that Halo inspired me to live. But hey, it's the memory that matters, right?
The Bottom Line
Using a Gamepad is much more fun than using a mouse. It's designed for the console controller, and the PC port didn't change that design.
Ignore the "easy" difficulty, the "hard" difficulty and the "legendary" difficulty. Those aren't fun. The Normal difficulty is where it's at.
It gets kind of scary too, so you may not wanna play it if you live alone. Enemies sneak up behind you and suddenly appear inside of buildings.
Windows · by Pagen HD (146) · 2013
The Good
Where to start. This game transformed everything known in the Fps genre. Everything was beautiful.
Graphics were brilliant. Fantastic cutscenes, brilliant designs of enemys and top graphics. Overall. Music was brilliant, each song matched each part of the game and never disappointed.
Sound effects were lovely, walking through the grass was brilliant. You could hear and see the effects. Lovely. Gameplay was also top notch, anyone who has played this and claim it sucks, try it multiplayer and legendary, even co-op. You will soon change your mind. This game did what over Fps shooters couldn't, stood out. Even the 2 weapon system limits worked. Everything was mindblowing. Bungie haven't made many games, but the ones they did kicked ass!
The Bad
Rushed. Halo 2 will fix that, I'm sure.
The Bottom Line
Any Xbox or Pc owners, get this. You will not be disappointed.
Xbox · by Exeox (38) · 2004
One of the best Co-op experiences I've ever had!
The Good
The game is beautiful .... the texturing is top notch, the animations fluid, and the vehicle physics are amazingly cool. that said ... it was when I sat down with a friend to play 2 player Co-Op ....joy of joy!! Being a PC FPS gamer ... I was wary of the control scheme, but although not 'better' then the standard WASD setup, I had absolutely no problems with the controller.
Immersion factor is outstanding ... as the game lets you experience the events without the overemphasis on cut-scenes that many games take today.
The Bad
Some levels schemes seem a tad repetitive looks wise. I think some people confuse the fact that you actually revisit locations with using the same textures again, but .... never mind.
Some slow down occasionally ... but usually for good reason, and it never caused a real problem in the game.
The Bottom Line
The game is not very long, but it's a FPS .... so 10-15 hours is fine. Play on a harder difficulty level and you immediately feel the difference. Legendary is out right impossible, and I give many kudos to gamers that can make it through on that level. On the easier levels ... power gamers can easily do a sunset to sunrise marathon...
That said ... I've played through this game multiple times now and have even tinkered with the multiply.
Now, Halo's multiplayer aspect can't come close to PC gaming, but it is fun. Although, the best fun I've had in MP is playing with Rockets and Grenades and their ability to make various vehicles defy the laws of gravity.
When the Dreamcast launched, Soul Calibur was good enough to warrant the purchase of the console ... even if I never bought another game. I hold Halo in the same regard.
Highly recommended!
Xbox · by Pvax (2) · 2002
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
- 2002β Best Xbox Action Game of the Year
- 2002β Best Console Multiplayer Game of the Year
- 2002 β #2 Best Xbox Game of the Year (Readers' Vote)
- Computer Gaming World
- March 2004 (Issue #236) β Year's Biggest Letdown
- Electronic Gaming Monthly
- April 2002 - Game of the Year
- GameSpy
- 2001 β Xbox Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
- 2001 β Xbox Action/Adventure Game of the Year
- 2003 β #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) β #18 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
- The Strong National Museum of Play
- 2017 β 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 +
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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).
Identifiers +
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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.