Master Chief in all his shiny cut-scene glory.

The story in Halo is solid and after a long wait we PC owners finally get to experience that story on the format the game was originally intended for. It has been a long and troubled process with Halo originally being slated as a Tribes 2 killer game bringing a better flavour of tactical science fiction shooter action to the PC. When Bungie was bought by Microsoft, focus shifted and this became the premiere launch title on the Xbox. Now thanks to the work of Gearbox Software we get the game on the PC. So was it worth this long hiatus?

A hot landing zone marks the start of
one of the most fun missions in the game.

Gameplay wise it is a tactical shooter. You, frequently with squadmates, engage small groups of the enemy in order to gain an objective. When stated clinically like that it seems fairly dull, however the game is far from it. With reasonably helpful friendly AI and a limited selection of weapons you can carry, only two at any time, you are constantly placed in the situation of not quite having the arsenal you need and having to improvise a lot. This is a good thing because it rewards the player for using weapons creatively and you learn to anticipate what you will be fighting and optimise your weapon loadout for that. The weapons themselves all have specialisations that suit them for particular foes. The Plasma Pistol for instance is a fairly weak Covenant weapon but can be overcharged - the resulting bolt instantly disables an energy shield allowing you to finish off the now stunned and unprotected foe. Needlers fire homing needles that if you pump enough into a target react to each other and explode - put enough in and the resulting explosion can knock out surrounding enemies. The human pistol, rocket launcher and sniper rifle all feature scopes allowing you to scan the terrain ahead. The human assault rifle has not only a wicked rate of fire but a compass as well helping with navigation. All the weapons can be used as a melee weapon and it is very satisfying to riddle an Elite Covenant soldier, deplete his shields and then club him to death with the butt of a gun.

Why? Well because the nice friendly skies people
drop in this shiny Warthog for you and friends to use.

Energy shields also affect the nature of the combat. Most of the harder enemies come with shielding which has to be depleted first, requiring a sustained volley of fire. If you don't finish the enemy off they will retreat, recharge and come back at you almost as hard to kill as you began. This works in reverse as well as you have your own energy shield - something that saves your life on many occasions by soaking up enough fire to let you close and finish an enemy before taking damage directly. It also allows you to continue fighting fiercely when in other shooters, because of the sliver of health you have, you might have to back off. Hit and run tactics become the order of the day where you dash in, kill a few enemy then find cover for long enough to let your shields recharge. Something else that changes combat is the quick and easy use of grenades. By default the secondary mouse button is bound to throw grenades and we would suggest that you never change this. Grenades are plentiful in the single player game and a life saver. Human fragmenation grenades explode quickly allowing you to rapidly disperse a tight clump of covenant grunts - although they are wasted against shielded Elite units.

Warthoging across the universe!
Only going forward because we can't find reverse!

However the most fun has to be with the Covenant plasma grenades. Y'see these grenades don't just bounce but are semi-intelligent and stick to enemies. Indeed stick one to any Elite unit and shields or not they will die in around three seconds when the grenade goes off. Playing 'pin the grenade' is a lot of fun helped no end by the enraged roar of the Elite unit who knows he is shortly to die. Amusingly grunt units often exclaim 'Not again!' when this happens. Better yet the Covenant drop screeds of these grenades when they die allowing you to use them regularly. Just exercise some care because bounce back can cause them to stick to you which is very bad and because dropped grenades will explode when a second explosion goes off near them. This chain reaction effect occasionally gets so bad that you can be killed when grenades near you go off, or worse yet when grenades flung by an explosion subsequently go off.

Sneaking up on a Grunt, notice they are looking the other way?
You can create diversions to distract them and then sneak up on 'em.

There are several other nice touches that make this core combat a joy. Marines and grunts regularly comment on their situation. Killing off Elite units or large numbers of Grunts quickly causes mass panic on their part complete with desperate 'They are everywhere!' cries. Bodies rag doll when they die and subsequent explosions fling these bodies about. Indeed in the later stages of the game when highly volatile enemies begin to appear it becomes quite common to have multiple explosions flinging the dead willy nilly around the room. Vehicles spice matters up with the Warthog being a favourite followed closely by the pure pain the Scorpion Tank can dish out. These take a little getting used to due to the different mouse control driving scheme they use but they make a welcome break from the long stretches of on foot combat that the rest of the game entails. As a tip we suggest boning up on the Warthog driving - you will need it for the end game sequence.

What with the marines, the drop ships and the alien menace
we get a real 'Aliens' movie vibe here.

All this sounds great doesn't it? Sadly the game has excellent gameplay let down by an engine that while stable has several issues. For starters sound replay with Creative Audigy cards is badly broken in the cutscenes with these getting out of sync or cutting short sentences. It got so incoherent that we at Gameplanet ended up downloading a fan transcribed script for the cutscenes so that we knew precisely what was going on. Secondly and possibly related to the first problem the game seems to be an anemic user of a 5.1 speaker setup - sound on our test rig remained fairly centered around the front right and left speakers with some limited use of the surround speakers. A large part of this is the fact that most enemies do appear in front of you and thus make the noise there but compared to older games like System Shock 2 the sound is good but not quite to that standard. That said the sounds themselves are exactly right with the weaponry, grunts and vehicles sounding as you would expect.

The Scorpion tank sadly you only get to use for a short time.
Also you can see we have active camoflague going because
the gun is see through.

Video is also problematic. For starters the game shows it's two year old design and possibly some of the concessions that had to made squeezing it onto a console. Architecture and models are blocky relying on the animation and texturing to compensate. Worse yet room design gets re-used a lot which can result in some disorientation when you fight your way through the fifth identically constructed room. To be honest we wouldn't mind this if it weren't for the fact that this rendering requires some beastly hardware to pull off. Turning on the effects to maximum and letting the game rip at 1024x768 will bring even an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core processor and a Radeon 9700 to it's knees at times. Mostly the game maintains a nice even thirty frames a second (we left the game frame rate limited as most console ports have issues when you disable the frame rate limiting) but will fairly regularly plummet to twelve to fifteen frames a second at times. Inexplicably this doesn't occur purely in heavy combat; occasional corridor scenes or some of the more confined outdoor vistas result in the same drop. We can't help but wonder if there isn't some unoptimised piece of code lurking in there somewhere rearing it's head from to time as it is very variable where the problem shows up.

Big bada-boom! The mission is called
'Rolling Thunder' for a very practical reason...

That said with the effects turned on the game does produce some very nice scenes and effects. The cloaked elite troops with their predator style translucent camoflague are very pretty to look at as is the heavy use of bump mapping and per pixel shading used for the lighting. That is another tip too - try to keep your flashlight off as much as possible as it is a huge frame rate drain. All in all the game does look quite nice and much like Grand Theft Auto the engine's lacks would be overlooked if it played at a stable framerate. We highly recommend you consider playing the game at 800x600 without Anti-Aliasing or forced Anistropic Filtering even on new high end hardware, either that or turn the effects down a notch or two. Hopefully this game will receive a patch or two to further refine the rendering code a bit although it is entirely playable in it's current state. The game may stutter and get choppy but we experienced no crashes with it.

A downed Covenant dropship.

This brings us to the biggest drawback and the one factor that means the Xbox version is still superior to the PC version - co-operative mode. Halo on the Xbox allows you to play with a friend through the entire single player campaign allowing you to have some properly intelligent help when dealing with the alien hordes. We would have dearly loved to see this on the PC version even if it was limited to a LAN only affair. Sadly Gearbox report that they simply didn't have the time to rework the game architecture enough to permit it. This is going to hurt the games longevity because once you have finished the single player campaign aside from trying it on harder difficulties there is little else. Yes there is a multi-player mode with the usual assortment of Capture the Flag, Deathmatch and the like but in a game world crowded with such gameplay modes there is little to make Halo stand out. Aside from those who appreciate the combat mechanics multi-player is unlikely to make much of an impression. Perhaps the biggest thing that excites us about the PC version of multi-player is the thought that Red versus Blue might switch over to using the PC port for their rendering engine. In fact if you like Halo do yourself a favour and check these guys out, their spin on the Halo universe is very funny.

Covenant Elite soldiers, treat with caution.

Lack of the co-operative mode will most likely doom this game to the ten odd hours of gameplay the single player campaign takes on Normal difficulty. We want to come back to Halo with a friend and try the game on Legendary difficulty - if only to see the different ending (remember to watch the credits right through when completing the game as there is a small bonus movie at the end which changes as you ramp the difficulty level up). If that mode was provided then even with all the other issues the game has the rating would leap solidly up at least half a star. We just hope that Gearbox and Microsoft bang heads together and do the PC gamers justice by bringing this mode of the game to the PC.