14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
HALO
Date of Review: Nov 16, 2001
The Bottom Line: This game was made for the Xbox and it uses every aspect that the Xbox has to offer a deffinite franchiser for the Xbox.
First of all let me just say that I can not compare this game to other Xbox games because I only have 1 other one and that is Madden but anyways here is my opinion.
First of all you will notice that the game is set up in the since of a first person shooter much like Quake or Half-Life but once you get an extra controller and a friend you will soon discover that this is one of the only first person shooters that allows you to play with a friend and when you are playing with a friend you get to use more of the options like driving vehicles and having somebody watch your back which is really helpful.
The game is gorgeous though you can tell that the developers of Halo spent a lot of time on this game and want to show of their skills using the new technology they now have at their fingertips. And trust me they did just that player models are rendered beutifuly and the surroundings are all rendered in real time. Which makes this game even more emmersive sometimes you get so caught up in this game that you don't realize how long you have actually played it.
The hard-drive that is built into the Xbox also plays a big role on how fast this game loads up and how good the graphics look the load times are very fast and considering the sheer imensity of the levels tells you that the hard-drive is being used or else loading a level of such size would take minutes everytime the game had to load up another area of the level and that just wouldn't work it would sort of kill the atmosphere. Now the question comes into your mind how much of the hard-drive is being used all I can say is not a lot, the amount of hard-disk space being used is comparable to the size of the cookies you must download in order for a site to be shown properly on your screen, and if you think about that for a minute then think about all the web pages you open every day now think to yourself that each one of those sites contain thousands of cookies.
The developers for Halo are already thinking about a plan to make this game even larger than it is by adding new levels to a web site and from that web site can be downloaded onto your Xbox. So as of right now this game is only getting better.
Control of the game is also similar to Quake but normally the mapping of a keyboard makes the commands a lot simpilar but in the case of the Xbox the remote seems to work perfectly for the game. The control is tight and responsive.
Depth and replay value however are something I will have to report on later because I haven't had a chance to play all the way through but I can tell you this right now from what I have played the game is living up to the hype around it and as for the Xbox well it's doin it's job perfectly.
So far here are some of my own numbers on a scale from 1-10
Graphics-10
Sound-9.7
Control-9
Innovation-8.5 too much like Quake except the multi-player
Depth-9 (so far)
Replay-N/A
