My Thoughts on Halo: The Master Chief Collection [PC Version]

A pearl of a story inside the usual FPS shell

Another game carried over from my potato PC days, I decided to give Halo: Combat Evolved a try when I was a teenager. This was a time when the concept of an exo-suit augmenting one’s natural abilities appealed to me and my PC was much too weak to run Crysis. Much like a bunch of other games at the time, Halo: CE, too, started stuttering somewhere down the line and I had to abandon it.

I got a chance to play it again and clear my backlog in the form of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and so I did. There’s not much to say about the gameplay itself. It’s a run-of-the-mill FPS with the usual ingredients – enemies and bosses, guns and rifles. Occasionally the perspective shifts to third-person when you’re driving vehicles, but other than that the view is completely restricted around the visor of your suit with the HUD elements courtesy of the suit’s AI. Although, the outer space shooting levels in a couple of games were those rare, welcome changes that made me feel like I was playing some other game entirely. Those were gulps of fresh air between plain old shooting.

Since this is a far-future, extra-terrestrial story; everything is a bit unique and quaint. Weapons, vehicles, enemies, planets, the maps themselves – there’s ample room for creative liberty and it’s been utilised quite effectively when it comes to design and visuals. But where the series really shines is its story.

A linear business, for the most part

It’s sometime in the 26^th century and the humans are fighting an alien race called the Covenants, who have their own gods and beliefs. Because of this they are looking for their sacred artifacts on Earth and it is the job of the Master Chief and his team of brave Marines to stop the Covenant. Although this is really a boiled down explanation of the plot, this is actually where the series has its foundations. From there on, it’s a roller coaster ride. It has its highs and lows; midway through Halo: CE the series changes to a zombie-shooting game and continues to visit that genre from time to time; certain characters appear out of nowhere just to serve as plot progressors; there are alliances, betrayals, the whole cosmic package. But overall, it’s quite enjoyable, and does not get boring which is the most important, in my opinion.

Personally, I don’t feel that Halo: CE and Halo 2’s stories had much impact on me. It was with Halo 3 and Halo: ODST that the series really started to grow on me. Especially ODST; even though it is just a tangential story, sort of an offspring of the principal plot, the way it shoots off from the slip-space rupture incident in Halo 2 adds more weight and dimension to the whole Halo universe. It feels much better to have experienced ODST, to know what was happening elsewhere while Master Chief was going about his business, instead of if Halo was just a series of linear, one-dimensional narratives.

Branching it out

Halo: Reach further buffed out the lore. Another entry without our titular Master Chief in the lead, Reach is not so much an offspring as it is a grandparent. It can best be described as a prologue/prequel, and while it doesn’t show “where it all began”, it does chronicle events that happened before the main series. Since we hear mentions of something called Reach in the opening cutscene of Halo: CE, Halo: Reach at least scratches that itch of knowing what actually happened there, and at the same time serving as the origin story of one of the main characters.

By the time I finished all the campaigns in The Master Chief Collection, I had become so invested in the story that I was really sad about Halo: Guardians, the fifth main entry, not being available on PC. Even though online research revealed that popular opinion was not really positive about the campaign of Guardians, I still don’t want to miss out on its story.

"Keep driving, for Pete's sake!"

Now that we’ve talked so much about the positives, let’s give the negatives a chance, too. And the single most glaring negative thing about the Collection is the vehicle driving AI. Now, I know AI is not easy to program, and as a developer I am ready to overlook some flaws, but as a player this mechanism with all its flaws made me rethink my decision to take the machine gun turret instead of the driver’s seat on every single occasion.

In an area full of enemy aliens, where plasma beams are coming from every direction, I always preferred being driven around in a Warthog by a fellow Marine while I fried the aliens with the vehicle’s machine gun turret. After the first couple of times, though, I began wondering if it was the right choice. On several occasions, the decisions of my driver were...questionable, to say the least. He’d keep going in circles, or he’d drive in the wrong direction, or worst of all, he’d drive to the enemy camps and stop the vehicle dead in the middle, and by the time I figured something out we would all be blown to smithereens. At other times, our vehicle would get stuck in some crevice or something, and it was really frustrating dismounting from the turret, taking the wheel, driving the Warthog out into the open, then taking the turret back only to get stuck again somewhere.

Even until Halo 4 I didn’t notice any significant improvement in the AI. I really hope some work was done on this in Halo: Guardians, as it is one of the most fun things in the game to blow stuff up from the back of a moving vehicle.

One thing that I can’t quite decide is my incompetence or just the game’s collision boxes acting weird, is when I would try to dodge enemy fire by moving backwards. Almost always I would get stuck somewhere and my Master Chief would refuse to budge. I don’t know if anyone else has had this issue. Every time I moved backwards there would be some obstacle or some concrete block, something blocking my way which I didn’t expect to be there. This just might have been a miscalculation on my part, but I don’t think I am so ignorant as to get it wrong on so many occasions. Well, I’ll never know. Just wanted to get it out there.

Have I been here before?

I started out on the Heroic difficulty, which is analogous to the Hard difficulty level, and by the 3^rd or 4^th map I had switched to Normal. I’ll admit this was, in a small part, due to the sheer number of enemies and the very small room for error, but the major reason for this admission of defeat at the hands of Heroic difficulty was because of the level of repetition in one of the stages. Man, it seemed to stretch on and on, to the point of absurdity! For the longest time it followed the pattern of corridor - circular room – corridor – bridge full of enemies – corridor - circular room, ad infinitum.

I never found out if the stage was just stretched out procedurally because of the difficulty, or the original level itself was like that. I didn’t have the slightest desires to replay that map on Normal mode. Either way, such a design didn’t sit well with me at all. I’m guessing and hoping that it was the former reason but still, simply lengthening the level and increasing the number of enemies for the sake of difficulty is quite monotonous unless it is accompanied by some variations in the level design. Every time I opened a door, I hoped I wouldn’t be thrown into another room or bridge. By the 4^th time this happened, the level and the game itself, was feeling so tedious that I had to lower the difficulty to Normal to enjoy the rest of the campaign. Since I didn’t face such mindless repetition after that, it might just be the Heroic difficulty that made the first few stages of Halo: CE so monotonous for me.

I also feel that the pacing of the story could have been better in the first 2 games. Though I cleared the two games in quick succession, I still wasn’t able to piece together and correlate a few events with Halo 3 and ODST, and had to refer to wikis for a quick synopsis.

Started for outer space, stayed for the story

Anyways, a few shortcomings notwithstanding, Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a good compilation for those looking for a solid 50+ hours of outer space campaign. As far as single player mode is concerned, I’d advise ignoring the kinks in the gameplay here and there and focusing on the story instead. It’s written out well enough and managed to have me not only looking forward to Halo: Infinite but also wanting to complete all Halo comics and graphic novels to gain more insight into Halo lore before Infinite reaches us.