Product: Halo
Company: Microsoft/Bungie
Website: http://www.xbox.com
Estimated Street Price: $49.95/£44.99
Online Manual: Xbox.Com
Review By: Byron Hinson

The Features

If you haven't heard of Halo, all I can say is where have you been? The game has been hyped up beyond belief on the PC over a year ago. Then the Xbox was announced, then finally Microsoft bought up Bungie and Halo was made console exclusive on for the Xbox. This means there won't be a PC version for at least 6-9 months. So will Halo manage to live up to the hype and will it also help to sell the Xbox for Microsoft? Read on.

• Huge weapon variety: Vanquish your enemies with a vast array of Human or Covenant weaponry ranging from the stealthy (semi-automatic pistols, alien plasma swords) to the fierce (rocket launchers and flame throwers).
• Vehicle & foot-based action: Tackle missions anyway you choose-be it storming an enemy base or taking the wheel or gunnery position of a variety of powerful vehicles. Vehicles range from stolen Covenant flyers & hovercraft to Human buggies, tanks and more.
• Indoor & outdoor combat: Fight seamlessly in Halo's ultra-realistic indoor and outdoor environments as you hunt the Covenant in dozens of single player missions and multiplayer battles.
• Intense multiplayer shoot-outs: Form a team, choose a role, and fight cooperatively with your friends, battle it out Deathmatch style via intense split screen combat or fight co-op with a friend through the single player missions.
• Incredible mission variety: Fight the Covenant in dozens of missions as you uncover the dark secrets of Halo. Among your many objectives - attack enemy outposts, raid underground labs for advanced technology, rescue fallen comrades, steal alien vehicles and weaponry and snipe enemy forces.
• Reality-bending special effects: Halo features the most advanced graphic system on the most advanced gaming platform in the world. Gunfire rips off the screen, explosions light up a living room, and environments blur the line between your couch and fantasy.
• Rich sci-fi experience: Halo transports gamers into a science fiction universe fresh out of a Hollywood movie. With a detailed twisting story-line, complex characters and cunning enemies Halo will fulfill every sci-fi enthusiasts dream.?

Installation and Settings

Despite what everyone had been saying, Halo takes about 10-15 seconds to load, the only information it puts onto the hard drive is a cache to help levels and areas load quicker and of course to save games. There had been talk that the game may take a little longer to load

up as rumors were floating around that it would run a kind of installation onto the Xbox hard drive. Once the game has loaded you are greeted with the main menu which comprises of:

Campaign: Begin a new campaign.
Load: Load up a previously saved profile.
Settings: You can change your Xbox controllers setup and character colors from here.
Demos: From here you can access a couple of playable demos along with a whole load of movies. (We could not test these in the PAL version we received as they would not load - stating that the region of the Xbox was incorrect, despite it being the correct one, the NTSC version however worked fine)

The only things you can obviously tweak in the game are the controller settings/player colors and what difficulty you want to play on. I'd recommend that you start on one of the higher difficultly levels to get the most play out the game possible, oh and there are different endings on EVERY one of the various difficulty levels.

Gameplay & Controls

I must admit that I had been skeptical about how Halo would play. Why? Well I'm a very big 1st Person Shooter fan yet I have to say that I have gotten very bored of the same old gameplay coming out time after time. (With the exception of Return To Castle Wolfenstein). Then there is the Xbox controller to consider, consoles don't tend to be the easiest way to play 1st person shooters which most of us gaming fans play via the mouse on a PC.

So how did I feel the gameplay went? Well it has to be said that Halo has one of the best "introduction to controls" sequences I have played on most console games (or PC games for that matter), once you begin the campaign the game begins with a great intro sequence which is all done via the in-game engine. Once the intro has finished and your character is released from his cryo tube to help the fight against the alien menace one of the other friendly characters from the game begins to lead you through the controls. These range from using the top left directional pad to move around to using the bottom right directional pad to look around, there are a load of other controls such as duck, reload etc. It only took a short amount of time to learn how to use the controller at its best, and I can say right now that the controls are excellent and easy to use.

You play most of Halo in first person mode similar to Quake on the PC or Red Faction on the Playstation 2. With Halo this means lots and lots of enemies coming at you at one time, which reminded me of the good old days of Doom on the PC. During the game you can pick up all kinds of weapons ranging from plain old pistols to alien weapons that can fire shards of glass at your enemies. The weapon firing is controller with the top right index finger button on the controller, the left one fires grenades, and it really is great fun throwing them about I can tell you.

In Halo you can only carry two weapons at a time, during the game you tend to make up your own mind about which weapons you like to carry around with you at all times. Picking up a new weapon is easy, all you have to do is walk over it and then hold down the X button on the controller and it then replaces the weapon you were holding in your hand at the time, it is a very simple system that works really well.

During the game you get to ride different vehicles from the fab warthog jeep to flying ships. This is where Halo distinguishes itself from other first person shooters, the way you switch to driving vehicles is done so well it is easy to drive them. They are basically controlled in the same way that you control your character in the first person part of halo, one stick for acceleration/reverse the other for the direction.

So are there downsides to the all great all action gameplay? Yeah sure there are, the fighting can get a little repetitive and there is not enough variety in the alien menace. But none of these detract from the fact that Halo is some of the best fun I have had in a first person shooter since Half Life.

Multiplayer

There are a couple of different types of multiplayer games in Halo. They are cooperative and split screen games. I've been playing split screen two player games since the console arrived and they are really good fun, the level designs are well done and the frame rate is always high with little or no slow down during play. There are powerups in the split screen deathmatch games such as camouflage and better shields to keep yourself protected from the enemies.

The multiplayer side of the game is superb, the only thing it lacks in the chance to compete against bots, as there is no option to include any computer controlled bots in the multiplayer games at all.

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