Halo

I'd firstly like to explain some of my ratings. Overall rating is only not 10 because of the single player and graphics are marked 10 because I am judging the game "for the time".

I purchased Halo: Combat Evolved a few months after it came out for PC. I naturally went straight to the single player - whacked it on a medium difficulty level of difficulty and started playing. It wasn't overly hard to complete the game and the storyline did not particularly entice me. This is however before I discovered the excessively good multiplayer capabilities they had built into Combat Evolved. I was very surprised at the other reviews for this product considering that this game changed the whole genre of FPS (First Person Shooters) into something quite different. There is no instance that I can remember before Halo where multiplayer maps were capable of supporting a huge landscape and 16+ players in the game. This is, of course, where the addiction factor kicks in - you could engage in intense combat situations using tactics and strategy to attack the enemy in several different game types such as CTF (Capture The Flag) or team slayer. The level of communication needed between players was only something I had seen on RPGs (Role Playing Games) online - a lot of the time you might need to frantically type something to your fellow players in order to save the day.

Graphically, Halo was a very impressive game for the time. I remember first playing Halo on my Radeon 9500 which managed to give Halo medium-high graphics capabilities. The first thing that struck me in single player were the intriguingly designed textures - there was a lot of detail put into the levels (multiplayer and single player) to give interesting advantages to both teams (multiplayer) and to provide lots of prop objects and interesting scenery (single player). Looking up into the sky you could see what the world would look like - a piece of land curving up from the horizon and heading vertically upwards. Being on the inside of a world that looked like a ring didn't seem to me like a very easy thing to program into the graphics so that grabbed my attention specifically.

Overall I spent about a year of playing this game every day when the multiplayer network was at its prime. I was pleased to see recently when I returned to it that there was still an active community - although not quite equipped with the enthusiasm that the network had a few years ago - putting up a good fight. I'd recommend this to anyone whether they are particularly into gaming or not try the single player once but don't get too excited about it.

There is nothing special about Halo. Though it has a storyline and amazing graphics, there is nothing else that stands out about the game. You could take a simlar game like CounterStrike and it would be the same game play.

Many people seem to like the Halo PC game, so I tried the single player in school, on my friend's computer for a couple of hours. Is it good? I say it is fairly good. This is obviously targeted to light gamers who play once a week with friends, and it can be good without constant practice etc. I would say the price is worth it. Even though I may not enjoy it, many do. It's more of fun action shooting game, rather than focus aiming for head games, like Counterstrike. Pretty fun.