Halo in my perception has changed the way I play first-person shooters. It changed the way I look at games because it had a story line that was amazing. It was the beginning of a big franchise. It starts with the ship called the Pillar of Autumn getting out of a random slip space jump in order to lose the enemy fleet called the Covenant, but where already there. They see an unknown structure of huge magnitude. It is a ring like planet that the Covenant call Halo.
After it goes to the scene where player gets thawed out of cryo chamber being awoken in a middle of the ship being invaded by the covenant. You play as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117. He is one of the few surviving super soldiers of the SPARTAN-II project and one of the main characters. The start of the game your wake being already being attacked by the covenant and have to get to the bridge without a weapon. This scene seems more cinematic since you cant really do anything else and you can see all these fights and explosions as you get to the bridge, but you can control your character.
Once you get to the bridge you meet two more main characters. Captain Jacob Keyes tells you to take this smart A.I. (artificial intelligence) and protect it at all cost because the Covenant could learn everything about us, battle plans, even the location of the human home world Earth. The smart A.I. is the other main character named Cortana. Cortana resides in a neural implant connected to his battle armor, codenamed MJOLNIR Mark V and talks to you in your head for most of the game. Captain Keyes orders to evacuate the ship and manually takes the Pillar of Autumn on a crash course towards Halo.
There are all kinds of levels that have there own feel to it one is a night time sniper mission to get aboard the Covenant flag ship and save Captain Keyes and another where you fight enemies even the Covenant are afraid of. The first time I did this mission I was so scared. It was the scene where you had to find Captain Keyes and missing squad only to find he is gone and captured again and the squad was killed by something worse than the Covenant. You find this helmet with a video recording device in it and the cut scene shows what happened to them. They where attacked by a species called the Flood. They where sealed in the deepest parts of halo but the Covenant accidentally let them loose.
I want to go back and talk about the scene where the video shows you what happened to the Captain Keyes and his squad. I believe that this scene was inspired by the scene in the movie Aliens. That scene is almost the same exact scene as Aliens. They even had the same stereo type sarge that has the cigar. Dont believe me?
This is the Aliens scene (sorry couldn't get the real audio could only find a music vid) and this is the
Halo flood scene. The difference the scene in Halo built up more of a suspense and a scary feeling to it not to mention after the tape is over you have to fight the flood alone. The Aliens scene had more action.
After you fight the flood on that level you meat 343 Guilty Spark recruits the Master Chief in retrieving the index, a device that will activate Halo and prevent the Flood from spreading beyond the facility. After you get the index and put it at Halo's main console nothing happen because Cortana that was in the console took the index and stop the process. Cortana tells you that it does stop the flood by killing its food source witch is all sentient lifeforms. Covenant, Human, whatever the Flood eats everything. Halo destroys all Life in the Galaxy Radius to starve the Flood.
So now your fighting the Covenant, the Flood, and 343 Guilty Spark and his sentinels. You make a plan to overload the Pillar of Autumn's engines to blow up the ship and destroy Halo but you needed the codes to to it. You had to get the codes from Captain Keyes. He is back at the Covenant flag ship only this time the Flood was attacking it as well. By the time you get to him he was turned into one of the Flood. A sad ending to one of the main characters. So now your on the last level and put the codes in to overload the engines but 343 Guilty Spark stops it and you have to manually go to the engine room and blow it up. Then you have 2 minutes to escape on a fighter ship by riding a warthog all the way there.
This game has Epic written all over it! It has drama, action, suspense, horror, and heroics. Master Chief I a huge Icon now in the gaming world.
My next blog I'm going to review Halo Reach as a tribute.
