by: Michael Barnes

When I first played Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, it didn’t impress me. I was coming to the game from both the great PC shooters of the late 1990s as well as Rare’s innovative console shooters for the N64. I thought the game felt oddly weightless, empty, and boring despite great production values and a wonderful sense of scale. Ten years, four Halo sequels, and a gazillion FPS games later, I feel almost exactly the same way about the just released decennial anniversary edition curated by Bungie’s heir apparent, 343 Studios.

No doubt, Halo: Combat Evolved is one of the most important games of the past decade and certainly there are plenty of gamers who came of age playing through its much-celebrated campaign or engaging in split-screen or LAN Slayer matches. Perhaps for this crowd there’s a certain nostalgia that this HD remaster will sate and I certainly wouldn’t begrudge them their bullet-riddled trip down memory lane, but I’m walking away from this reverent, respectful repackaging with a shrug even though I was very interested in seeing how the game has held up over all of these years.

343 Studios’ technical efforts are not in vain, however. The HD makeover is fairly impressive, even if it still falls well short of current generation standards. A fun feature allows you to push Select to see the original graphics on the fly at any point during the action, which demonstrates not only the fine texture and lighting work that went into the game but also that they didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel with any of it. Sound is also touched up, and that classic Halo score remains one of gaming’s most memorable suites of music.

There are a couple of minor new features like new game-modifying skulls and terminals scattered throughout the campaign that provides insight on the events of the story through 343 Guilty Spark’s perspective while possibly dropping hints at 343’s future Halo efforts. Kinect features include voice and gesture controls as well as a Metroid Prime-like scanning function that will please the trainspotters. There is also support for stereoscopic 3D, and of course there’s a host of achievements to bring it all in line with modern incentive-based gaming.

But the new features can’t disguise the fact that this is a dated, old timey game that feels its age as much as or even more so than Half-Life or Perfect Dark. Although the campaign is refreshingly free of the muddy pretensions and horrendous writing that plague the later Halo storylines, it’s also strangely spare and not particularly interesting if you’re not just completely invested in the fiction. The concepts of the Halo, the Covenant, and the Flood remain interesting and quite cool, but the events of the game I found to be unremarkable once again.

It’s ironic that the parts that I wound up remembering the most were the frustrating or irritating ones- getting stuck in the silly maze-like design of certain levels or trying to find a switch with no guidance or waypoint markers. Lament all you want about games “leading you by the nose” with objective tracking, but I don’t miss wandering around in circles for ten minutes after every enemy in the area is dead, looking for a switch or an exit. It definitely feels as if this game marks a transition from the old fashioned id-style maze-based level design and more organic or realistically architectural layouts.