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I wonder what the punishment is for throwing a genade and sticking it to your CO...

Run, Grunty, run. That crispy piece of blackened bacon chasing you is actually your Commander.

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Halo CE:Anniversary Review

Halo Anniversary, I want to love you. I really do.

But you make it so difficult sometimes. Halo's a classic game, with classic gameplay, a classic look, etc. It's very difficult to remake a classic without offending some folks. Unfortunately, I'm one of those offended fans. Let me break things down into a few sections, so this isn't just a bunch of text vomited onto the screen.

Graphics!

Halo has a unique visual style that's (mostly) consistent from game to game. It favors color over brown, brilliance over gray. Its design philosophy from the beginning has been "make it look functional, yet cool." That's the philosophy Bungie had, anyway. 343 Industries took that mantra and chucked it out the door. Everything in Anniversary is rehashed to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible, or just plain cool. The problem is, they made a great many things non-functional... More on this later. Any models that aren't brand new are just re-used from older Halo games. Some examples:

-The Flood models. Oh my God, the Flood models... I was actually looking forward to the level "343 Guilty Spark" so I could see how 343 Industries handled them. Turns out all they did was re-use the Halo 3 models and textures. Not even particularly well... If you look at an Elite Combat Form in Anniversary, the first thing you'll notice is that the armor is white. This is because the model is an almost direct port, with no color information for the model to use. Color information tells the game what color the armor is supposed to be. Think of it as an invisible checkbox for the program to use. When no "checkboxes" are checked, the engine defaults to white. This is actually phenominal laziness, and it's downright offensive...

-The Assault Rifle, and other weapons. I was very happy to see they weren't just re-using the Halo: Reach assault rifle in HCE:A. But then when I looked closer, it turned out they re-used the AR model from Halo 3. Why? Reeks of laziness, to me. As time went on, it became painfully obvious that every weapon was just an old model ported in.

-NPCs. The Marines are mostly the Reach human trooper models, with minor tweaks. Why is this a big deal? Because the Reach troopers are UNSC Army, not Marines. The Elites are almost all Reach models ported in and rigged to the original Halo 1 skeletons. This results in ... strangely scrunched up Elites. See, the Reach Elites are actually taller than their Halo 1 counterparts. 343 could have made fresh models that were faithful to the original Halo Elites, but that'd be too much work, I guess. The Grunts are Reach models, with absolutely no exceptions that I've seen.

-Vehicles! I love vehicles. Halo 1 was partially revolutionary for how well vehicle combat seamlessly interwove with on-foot combat. So that was neat. Problem is, they re-used models from Reach. Why's this an issue? The Scorpion tank model still has the slot for the machine gun turret. But Halo 1 did not have an MG turret. How much work could it possibly have taken to pop the model into an editor, stick a new surface to cover the turret slot, edit the texture, and call it a day? Even the Covenant Wraith has a turret slot. The Banshee model is the Reach model, which was a bad idea. If they had to re-use a model, they should have used the Halo 3 model. The Reach model has moving flaps and other control surfaces. However, while the ported model has the flaps, they're totally static. They don't move. The Halo 3 model doesn't have those flaps, and is true to the Halo 1 Banshee's look.

These assets being re-used made me sigh and shake my head. But even new assets were poorly done. And poorly animated.

-The Halo ring. Why'd it need a redesign? Now every pre-existing depiction of the Halo ring is wrong. Actually, y'know what, I'm just going to refuse to accept this new Halo design. It's non-canon, as far as I'm concerned. Too many unnecessary external fiddly bits.

-Captain Keyes. This guy's model, ugh... He has a baby face.

-Sergeant Johnson. He looks like he's made of clay...

-Master Chief himself. His armor is mostly faithful, but has a bit of that "NEEDS TO BE 20% COOLER" 343 mentality tossed in. Some panels on his armor have ... no real purpose. And his gauntlets have the three dots on them like the Halo 3 armor does. Halo Reach didn't even have those silly dots.

Environments!

This should be in "Graphics!", but whatever. It isn't. Moving right along, the environments are absolutely stunning. The new lighting engine works splendidly, dynamic shadows are particularly nice. So many new ambient lights add soul to the entire thing... It's far less clinical and drab, and alltogether adds more emotion to the areas you find yourself spilling blood in. However, there are some seams... Imagine you're in a room. This may be difficult for those of you who are used to living outdoors. Now, see where the wall meets the ground? Imagine that in that intersection, there is a 1 millimeter sliver of white light running along that entire length. That's basically a seam. And they are disappointingly abundant in Halo Anniversary's environments. Particularly the outdoor sections. Which can actually be a little frightening when you look at the intersection of a cliff face and the ground, and notice the vast nothingness of space staring at you through a 2-pixel tall slit.

Animation!

Holy f8ck. None of the characters move like they should, in cutscenes. It seems they took any random member of the team, and told him to do things on motion capture. The mocap actor for Master Chief in particular was a moron... Chief winds up making exagerrated movements. He doesn't move like a soldier in a ton of armor. He moves like an overly dramatic guy with an "I'm totally a badarse" mentality. His stances have an "I'm bored" look at times, and a "check me out I'm soooo cooool" look at others. Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 is a humble character who's experienced an amount of emotional trauma that would drive a normal human being to suicide. He knows he's carrying the fate of Humanity on his shoulders, and it shows in cutscenes for any other Halo games. His body language is weary and tense at times. But in Halo Anniversary it's just ... shameful... Cortana is stiff, and her facial animation is so bad I wound up laughing the first time she came onscreen. This should not happen. Her lipsyncing was all wrong, and her eyes frequently threatened to roll back into her holographic skull. And when they weren't doing that, they were going in opposite directions. Only slightly, but it was still obvious. Hell, facial animation from every character is off. Many, many times, there's a delay of an entire second from the moment the character's line is spoken, to the moment the mouth decides to say it. It's jarring and again made me laugh within the first few minutes of the game's first cutscene.

Audio!

This is where the game shines. Mostly. Weapon sounds are extremely punchy, and are so satisfying in their over-the-top qualities. The sniper rifle sounds like a 105mm cannon off of an M1A1 Abrams tank. The assault rifle sounds like a 30mm cannon from an AH-64 Apache helicopter. No complaints there.

And the music... Oh, Lord, that beautiful music... I love Halo's soundtracks. I was especially excited to hear that Halo 1's soundtrack would be re-recorded by Skywalker Sound. Goodness, they did not disappoint... I have listened to this new soundtrack multiple times in the past two days. I adore it.

Voice acting is as good as it was in the original game, no complaints. I think I heard a few lines that I hadn't, before... Gunluva likes.

Other things!

The terminals are great additions, and they are just fantastically well done. I am deeply enjoying them. In fact, they give me chills every once in a while... I just wish I didn't have to move through a lazily made game to get to them.

The skulls are neat, too, though I haven't used them much.

Multiplayer-wise, the maps are actually really nice, and fun to walk around in. Thumbs up, here. Though a more faithful reproduction of Halo's multiplayer would have been cool. I'm not too beat up about it, though.

Summary! (Or tl;dr, for the lazy. Or busy.)

Halo Combat Evolved: Anniversary has good intentions. However, the execution in areas other than environment and sound design is disappointingly lazy. Re-used assets abound, and anything new is designed with coolness and intricacy in mind, instead of feasability and functionality, which goes against everything found in every Bungie-made Halo game. This doesn't make me optimistic about Halo 4, which 343 Industries is currently working on. I'm glad I bought it, for the sound, pretty environments, and the new Terminals, which add a new perspective and new background story to a classic tale of discovery and exploration.

#halo #hcea #xbox 360 #gaming #review #343 industries #Bungie Studios