Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo: Combat Evolved Major campaign spoilers, including the Flood and the ending. Discusses the original game, not the new Campaign Evolved remake. All right, let’s start with the original Halo. Combat Evolved came out on Xbox in 2001, and there is so much in this game that’s still worth talking about. The opening gets you into trouble pretty quickly. The Pillar of Autumn is under attack, Chief gets woken up, and Captain Keyes needs Cortana taken somewhere the Covenant can’t get their hands on her. You’re trying to get off the ship with her, and the place you escape to turns out to be an enormous artificial ring. That’s such a good way to begin. You’ve survived the ship, but you haven’t solved very much. There are other survivors to find. The Covenant are there too. And you’re standing on something that nobody around you fully understands. Then you step out onto the ring and get a proper look at it. There are cliffs and trees and water, and the whole thing curves up into the sky. Even before you learn what Halo is for, the setting gives you a reason to want to keep going. The game keeps changing the kind of spaces you’re fighting through. You have the ship’s corridors, open ground, a nighttime assault, a beach landing, enormous interior structures. The Silent Cartographer gives you that island to move around, with fighting on the surface and a facility underneath it. There’s so much to that one mission that you could easily give it a post of its own. And the weapons are doing very different jobs. Carrying only two means you have to leave things behind. You might want the shotgun, but do you want it more than whatever you’re carrying? Is that other weapon nearly empty anyway? What are you likely to run into next? The shield gives you a chance to recover if you can get out of the line of fire, but your health underneath it still matters. A bad encounter can leave you looking for a health pack even after the shield comes back. That changes how safe you actually are going into the next fight. The enemies keep those fights interesting too. An Elite can force you to take a situation seriously very quickly. Grunts can become a problem in numbers. Jackals make you think about how to get around their shields. Hunters take up space and demand attention. Put different groups together and you have more to consider than just which thing is closest to you. Then the game gets to 343 Guilty Spark, and everything changes. The approach to the facility is already uncomfortable. You find signs that something has gone very wrong before you understand what it is. The recording Chief watches gives you part of the answer, and then the Flood is there in front of you. That’s such a strong change of direction. You’ve spent all this time learning how to fight the Covenant, and now you’ve got enemies moving and attacking in a completely different way. Bodies and rooms that would have meant one thing earlier in the campaign mean something else now. A place you were exploring becomes somewhere you want to get out of. And Guilty Spark’s explanation of Halo turns out to be missing something Chief very badly needs to know. Cortana has to stop the activation because the ring’s purpose is far more destructive than Chief has been led to believe. From there, destroying it becomes the way out. The final trip through the Pillar of Autumn brings you back to where the game began, with the ship in a very different condition. Then there’s the Warthog escape. You have this huge disaster happening around you and a vehicle that still needs to be driven through it. It’s a great way to use something the game has already taught you, with far less room left for mistakes. There’s plenty more to cover beyond the campaign. The original game has split-screen and system-link multiplayer, and that side of Halo deserves its own attention. But the campaign alone gives us exploration, vehicle fights, close-quarters combat, horror, and a whole lot of Chief and Cortana trying to keep a terrible situation from getting even worse. I want the walkthroughs for this one to keep those different parts in mind. Straight mission routes, help with the harder fights, where Anniversary changes the collectibles, and clear labels for which version somebody is actually playing. Because there are several ways to experience the first Halo now. The original deserves to be understood on its own before we start mixing it up with the remasters and remake.