Halo Combat Evolved aged like fine wine

Halo CE is the best Halo game to date and you should be playing it.

Halo CE was released on November 15, 2001 for the original Xbox and garnered supreme success and changed the FPS genre forever. For and FPS game at the time, PC was the powerhouse when it comes to it's flexibility and titles in the genre. However, Halo CE's gameplay popularized and simplified the formula for the better.

To understand the simplicity of CE's gameplay, let's take a look at what the FPS genre looked like on the PC front.

Half Life (1998)

On the PC, a popularized mechanic in FPS games was the weapon wheel mechanic. This allowed the player to basically carry every weapon in the game and switch to them at a moments notice. This allowed for gameplay to be quite frantic and less strategic and allowed the player to mow down hordes of enemies with no mercy. This mechanic was seen in popular games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Unreal Tournament, and Half-Life. This bid the players well as the keyboard and mouse combo was built for multiple command functions and easy access. However, a hand-held controller could never achieve such a level of fidelity at the time. This is where Halo CE walks into center stage.

Halo CE sought to simplify the balance of your weapon holster and availability of weapons around any given area. In CE you were only permitted to hold two weapons at a time and two sets of four grenades. For a controller, this was a god-send as the two limit weapon allowed the player to switch to another weapon with ease. This ultimately changed the way weapons and enemies were presented.

Halo Combat Evolved (2001)

When weapons didn't drop from dead Covenant, they were strategically placed around the area where a mission took place. For example, in the mission 'Halo', a sniper rifle can be found at one of the drop pod crash sites. This sniper is useful as you are taking position on a massive hillside lookin down at an enemy structure. This placement allows the player to switch out one of their weapons for a more favorable sniper that is tuned to the scale of the mission.

The showcase of the enemy AI is advanced for it's time and uses the simplicity of the weapon sandbox to its advantage. There are three basic enemy types you will see throughout the entirety of the game (with more to show up later in the story). Those three are grunts, elites, and jackals. The grunts serve as cannon fodder and will rush the player and quickly surround them. In defeating grunts a crucial weapon is dropped and can be used to the player's advantage when fighting elites and jackals. This is the plasma pistol and is key to destroying enemy shields. Both the jackals and elites use their shields as their number one defense. However, the plasma pistol can one-shot these shield with a charged shot and leaves them vulnerable to headshots with your pistol or sprayed with the rifle. This class system and AI navigation is crucial in mixing up the sandbox and mechanics of Halo CE so they work in unison. It may take some getting use too as the AI is incredibly difficult because of these tactics. However, past the learning curve, it becomes second nature.

The gameplay mechanics of Halo CE were a first in the sheer amount of refinement in FPS gaming on the console. As we've obviously seen within the console gaming industry, it has stood the test of time as most FPS games adopted and adapted to this playstyle.

Sources:

• BlueSky. (2017, June 23). Halo 1 PC gameplay: The pillar of autumn (level 1 out of 10). YouTube. Retrieved April 19, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4hzkJddBqw