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As an early Wolf3d, Doom and Quake FPS PC gamer I always kind of sneered at Halo as one of those console gamer things that were beneath a man of culture like myself.
Sounds like I missed out.
Eh. In many ways I think Halo is overrated, and The LIbrary might be one of the worst FPS levels I have ever played in my entire life. That said, I think JeSuisCharlie accurately characterizes it's strengths. I actually haven't played a Halo game since I couch cooped Halo 3 when it came out. I meant to replay them recently, and then my XBox 360 died as soon as I took it out of storage. Alas.
I could probably spring for the Master Chief Collection on Steam whenever it's on one of it's frequent sales.
Halo had little competition in the "horror game" genre, and the flood is a great horror game enemy. However I believe it was a bad FPS enemy.
I personally hated the flood as an enemy in the halo games. The game basically conditions you to fight the covenant and then does a switcheroo where all the standard tactics and tools backfire when used against the flood.
Covenant weapons that are stronger against energy shields and weaker against flesh. The hardest enemies had energy shields.
The radar was suddenly useless because it was flooded with signals.
Most enemies would engage at distance and if you had worse ranged weapons you needed to close the distance and flank them. The flood just bum rushed you, the right move was always to just immediately start beck peddling.
The flood would resurrect dead bodies. Which works as a jump scare the first few times and then just requires you to bash bodies laying around so you don't get ambushed from behind while backpedaling.
The covenant enemies in the game were perfection though. They'd support each other with covering fire, engage you at their optimal distances. The elites would use cover to regenerate their energy shields forcing you to get close to break their cover or use well timed grenades to finish them off. If you didn't kill off their support units first they'd tear you apart while the elites recovered.
Ammo for any given weapon was often limited enough that long engagements would force you to switch weapons. You start the engagement with a good long range weapon, and then close distance and use a secondary short range weapon and melee attacks to cleanup.
Most covenant weapons were not hit scan, so there was some ability to dodge. But the needler would send a horrifying swarm of tracking needles after you that made finding cover very urgent.
Wasn't that the point, though? To differentiate them, and force the player to go through a bit of panic when what they've been trained to do the entire game suddenly doesn't work? Seems in line with how that situation should feel in the moment from an in-game perspective.
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Yeah, that was another thing that annoyed me about Halo, is the enemy AI went the wrong direction.
Since it keeps getting compared to Half-Life, I'll keep going. Half-Life introduces fairly dumb enemies, and then introduces smarter ones. You get to warm up on relatively dumb xeno-fauna, and then they throw marines at you, which talk, coordinate, dodge grenades, flush you out, flank you, etc. Now I know people have dissected how that worked and a lot of it was scripted to create the illusion of intelligent enemies. But it was still a really good illusion.
By contrast, Halo starts you off with really good enemy AI in the form of elites, and then halfway through the game swaps them out for retards that bum rush right at you. A sin doubly compounded by the fact that the game checkpoint saves, and you are consistently stuck in really annoying locked arenas fighting off boring hoards of flood. I positively loathed it.
For whatever reason, and I haven't played it recently enough to have a strong impression of why, Halo 2 and Halo 3 didn't seem as bad in this regard, even during the sections that were heavier on flood. Maybe the encounters were designed smarter, or at least less annoyingly. Maybe they changed the game mechanics to make it less annoying somehow. I think I remember Halo's health mechanic got dropped between games replaced almost entirely by shields? Whatever the reasons, after the flood appear in Halo 1, it's a far worse game for it.
I have a similar impression, and I think it's probably just that god-awful library level in Halo 1, which Bungie learned enough from not to repeat.
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If you like Halo even only a little bit, it's a shockingly good deal considering how much game you get for (often much) less than the price of one.
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