Never mind, Cortana
I’m very disappointed in Bungie right now. I’m a fan of good first-person shooters, and I’ve recently been trying to finish the Macintosh port of Halo; well, this week I gave up and deleted it from my hard drive. There’s no point in spending rare personal time on a game that I’m not enjoying, and I really wasn’t enjoying this one anymore.
Perhaps it has something to with the fact that in the midst of the game development, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft, and the game changed in mid-stream from a Mac/PC title to an XBox disc, amidst the legal and logistical upheaval of moving. But I’m astonished at the poor quality I experienced, and amazed that this game has received the glowing reviews that it has. Perhaps it’s the multiplayer that’s so good – I didn’t have the opportunity to try.
Level design – stinks. The designers cut and pasted the same rooms, bridges, and tunnels over and over and over and over again. And again. And look, again. I just can’t adequately express the tedium that sets in when one realizes that one’s entered “The Generator Room” for the two-dozenth time.
Weaponry – stinks. The human weapons all have to be used at point-blank range if they are to do any damage or not be dodged. The alien weapons all have to be emptied into a target before they kill anything. And, in a rare shooter where the weapons are all different enough that they’d each have a use, Bungie went for the realism of only allowing you to carry two at a time.
Aliens – Well, there are the types you can’t hit because they have shields. There are the types you can’t hit because they move quickly. There are the types that when you hit they turn into lots of little Type 1s. And the type that when you hit them, they fall down and after a set time, no matter how much ammo you fill them with, they will get up and must be killed again. (This was creepy the first few times… then it became more tedium.) I found myself wishing for a Trek-type vaporizing phaser.
Vehicles – There’s the human one that’s hard to steer and has no weapons unless you have a friend nearby to work them for you; then there are the alien types, with weapons that work fine against you, but when hijacked become hyper-inaccurate and do the average damage of a garden hose. The human tank is nice, but you don’t see it much.
Anyway, I’m done. I’ll go back to World of Warcraft or maybe Jedi Knight II.
Tags: videogames
The middle levels are pretty damn repetitive. That may actually be a narrative plus for that one seemingly endless Flood-heavy level which serves to demonstrate the futility of fighting them but that doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating.
Much of the rest of the experience has to do with the interface and from what little I’ve seen of the computer ports of Halo, the Xbox experience is far better. The multiplayer is pretty good, and it has a better story than typical for a FPS (read as: vaguely coherent).
A couple of brief responses here. Number one is that the lasting popularity of Halo has EVERYTHING to do with multiplayer. On its own it was a (for the time) good FPS, but there’s amazing replay value in the multiplayer, value that kept people playing it for three years until the sequel came out. That’s pretty amazing.
Next, while I take no real objection to your complaints about level design, I thought that the interplay of weaponry and aliens (especially with the two-weapon limit) was quite well done. Certain things had exploitable weaknesses. For example, the aliens with shields were vulnerable to the alien energy weapons: one hit would knock the shield down, at which point you could take them. I almost always had the Plasma Rifle handy for those situations. The Sniper rifle was great if you figured out and could exploit a pattern. Heck, with planning, that was the best weapon in the game for the open areas. The Needler was problematic, but if you could use the time-delay effectively you could do quite well with it. There are more examples, but you get the idea.
This is not to say you should play it, especially if you weren’t having fun, but I do think there was a decent game there.
My vote is to go back to WoW. 🙂
The weapons really aren’t that bad, and I don’t mind the two-weapon limit really either. I’m more annoyed about the amount of punishment the enemy can soak up than the actual weapon design. Because of the aliens’ sturdiness, the weapons all feel like popguns after a while. And the necessity to kill each individual Flood member twice starts off cool and gets old.
I usually carry the Shotgun for dealing with the Flood and the Plasma Rifle for the Covenant, switching to other weapons if they seem specifically useful at any given time 🙂
Honestly, I think the level design thing is my chief bugaboo. More interesting, varied levels with more compellingly mysterious alien design probably would have forgiven everything else in my book.