Honestly, I am pretty disappointed and expected better. I heard Halo often mentioned as this great game that started a very good series of games, but what I found is, even for its time, a very frustrating experience with some questionable, and some downright bad design choices.
Overall, the remaster is okay, it's not groundbreaking in terms of fidelity and quality, but it's good enoughHonestly, I am pretty disappointed and expected better. I heard Halo often mentioned as this great game that started a very good series of games, but what I found is, even for its time, a very frustrating experience with some questionable, and some downright bad design choices.
Overall, the remaster is okay, it's not groundbreaking in terms of fidelity and quality, but it's good enough for a remaster / anniversary edition. No crashes, some short freezes in some places, no other issues, with perhaps one exception - in some places, the geometry appears changed from the original, but it actually is not and the hitboxes are from the original version - makes it a bit confusing in some places.
In terms of sound, it's a bit of a mixed bag - sound design is overall decent, some sounds are better than original, some worse - especially the Warthog sounds much better in the original. Music is very good though, I loved it start to finish, although it did get silent at times and it was pretty noticeable.
Now, onto the gameplay itself, which should be largely unchanged from the original - I liked it for the first 60-70% of the game. It felt well balanced, there is a variety of guns, etc. all of which with the exception of the needler thing feel good to use, albeit the human weapons are a bit too inaccurate for my liking. I had a lot of fun. Then you get a new opponent, largely composed off of swarms of small enemies, stuff starts infinitely respawning at times, and the game becomes a slog, where you stand in a hallway and shoot stuff for 5 minutes straight, then move around the corner, rinse, and repeat.
Honestly, it feels like artificial padding, because the devs definitely knew how to balance properly, as evidenced by the previous parts of the game. It got so annoying I just gave up in the last section of the last level. It just felt like a chore, I powered through the previous two stages not having fun anymore, and this last level sealed the deal and I just stopped and I don't really feel like taking a break will help anything, because it's not fun. I'd rather re-experience the first couple levels again than actually finish the game...
There are absolutely ways to do huge quantities of enemies well, first three Serious Sam games come to mind - but they have a lot of what Halo does not have, a lot of wide open spaces, quick and precise movement, lot of weapons good at taking on large quantities of enemies - with large area of effect damage, or high rate of fire, and most importantly - perfect, or near perfect accuracy, meaning you don't randomly waste huge quantities of ammo just because the game RNG decided to f-you. And lastly, these games also know that "a lot of enemies" != "infinitely respawning enemies" and that there still has to be a limit, otherwise the combat will eventually overstay its welcome, even if it is good.
And for those who will argue "it's an old game" - it's still about a decade newer than first FPS games, and there were games before it that already made the same mistakes and were already criticized for them which I am sure the devs knew about, and again, I will point to the very well balanced first (more than) half of the game.
The story is forgettable, it's nothing special - the lore of Halo, I love, but the story is a B-grade scifi action flick at best, marred by some badly placed cringe jokes for its teenage audience, but not too many, fortunately - the new Halo: Infinite is infinitely worse offender in regards to this.
I love the grunts though, they are great.… Expand