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Indeed, heading back to Halo is enough to make you realise that all the additions to series over the last ten years - dual wielding, new vehicles, new weapons, Halo 3’s equipment, Reach’s armour abilities, and yes, even the Brutes – were necessary. Not to make better games, but to make different ones. Every tweak to the balanced combat at Halo’s core gave us new tactics to learn, and new skills to master. Halo’s combat might have been nigh perfect, but this was also its problem: without changes it had nowhere else to go.
Famously imperfect, however, is Halo’s level design. The overall structure, which sees levels reused as the Master Chief journeys to the Library and then fights his way back through the Flood-infested ring, is still effective. But the repetition within individual levels irks even more than it did then. Assault On The Control Room is an epic fight through and across the ring, but it’s also a repetitive slog through reused rooms and across repeated bridges that – despite the still exhilarating combat – quickly starts to fatigue.
But perhaps that’s the point. Halo exhibits a single-minded focus that the modern FPS, with its choreographed set-pieces and thrilling scripted sequences, largely disregards. This is a game about the arc of a perfectly thrown grenade, a game about tense games of cat-and-mouse with foes as powerful as you, a game about constant improvisation with the tools at your disposal. It’s a game that always feels tactical, and a game that – even now – has the capacity to surprise. Allegedly, Bungie resisted the subtitle, but it’s as true now as it was then. It might be older, it might look younger, but this is still Combat Evolved.
