Three years since the first screenshots published in a magazine, Halo has finally landed on PC and despite some technical difficulties, it was worth the wait.
This title brings a level of immersion rarely achieved in video games. The blend of dramatic music, amazing graphics and incredible amount of details is near perfect.
Just as in Half-Life, the opening scenes seamlessly work as a tutorial to handling the game, but as soon as the initial exercises are over, it becomes appearant that this is not just another shooting gallery.
In fact, the sense of immersion I felt with this game is high enough to forgive the nagging reminders that the experience could have been much closer to an interactive 3D movie.
The game IS a shooting gallery. There is actually not much to do other than kill aliens and find your way in numerous, repetitive corridors. The game turns a boring shooting range into an experience in survival by allowing to carry only two weapons at a time, forcing the player to constantly plan for the next time his current weapons run out of ammo and scavenge the battle field for supplies.
There is not much interactivity, with aliens and marines alike, but the level of artificial intelligence enhance the feeling of figthing side by side with squads of teammates. On the marines side, characters have little problem following, they run for cover when necessary and even call for backup. On the alien side, the sense of intelligence is even more challenging with one notable exception – aliens seem to have a fascination with grenades coming their way. Although they scream ‘grenade !’ when they see one next to them, they invariably stay around long enough to be blown up to pieces.
The level of details is exceptional. You just have to see shells bursting from your gun and rolling down an alien hallway, or the light from your gun illuminate a dark corner, or even a semi transparent cloaked alien coming out of nowhere. Unfortunately, this level of details comes at a price. Although the game runs smoothly with full details on a decent configuration (P4 2.4 GHz, 1 Gb of RAM with a GeForce fx 5900), it comes to a screetching halt in indoor scenes. I have still to understand why four walls and a few doors takes longer to render than an open landscape with trees, waterfalls, rocks and dozens of aliens.
The story is pretty much linear, but it contains enough twists and turns to make it interesting to follow and actually wonder where this is all going and care about the plot. This is rare enough in current games to be worth mentionning.
Actually, Halo for PC can be considered as what Unreal II might have been. The level of graphism between the two games is similar. The type of story (race to recover an ancient alien artifact/weapon) is nearly identical. The only difference is that Halo actually succeeds in bringing the player inside its world.
That and driving a Warthog…