Halo is overrated.

Another console-to-PC port? Muy, muy idiota.

by AC - permalink

I finally got around to grabbing the last, battered copy of Call of Duty: United Offensive off the shelf from the Walmart up the street before it was packed off with the other overstock, and for no particular reason I went ahead and picked up Halo PC (also $20). So far I'm not particularly impressed. I beat United Offensive pretty much right away, not because it's so much shorter than Halo (which it is, of course), but because it's just so much faster-paced and more fun to play. Halo has been... underwhelming.

I'm not that far into it, and it's not bad. It's a decent PC shooter. Graphically it's not quite on par with, say, Quake III Arena, which, for the record, is eight years old. Gameplay reminds me of Quake IV, or a spacey, low-rent Half-Life. Art direction and design is original and looks cool, but the big outdoor environments feel artificially constricted. Nearly every metal surface seems to have a shader on it, which is good or bad, depending on how you look at it. There's supposedly a lot of bump-mapping at high detail levels, but I've yet to see any evidence of it. The game itself clearly has high production values and looks nice and polished. It's the presentation that sucks.

That's because everything about Halo PC feels like a console game, from the not-even-close default key bindings to the fact that the newly-printed retail copy I bought contained the original, unpatched version of the game. Virtually every legit review I read said the controls were translated perfectly, but really, there are a lot of issues: the x-axis mouse sensitivity drops when strafing; the FOV is severely limited, forcing my mouse speed up even higher; vehicle control is primitive and needlessly restrictive compared to newer shooters like Far Cry and Half-Life 2.

And it's not just the controls. I know this game is a notorious system hog, but seriously, I've got a Gig of RAM, a CPU rated at 3500 MHz, and a 256MB PCI-e vidcard with 16 pixel pipes, and the v-sync chugs down to 30 FPS when a fair amount of geometry has to be drawn, even with no special lighting or particle effects active. Granted, I've got everything turned up high, but at just 1280x960 and only 2xAA and 8xAF, I should get more from a three-year-old game. It's just a poor job of optimizing an existing game engine for a new platform, and that's especially disappointing coming from Gearbox, who handled the transition. These guys brought us Opposing Force and Blue Shift, expansion packs so good that they did the impossible and actually made the original Half-Life better.

I'm not saying Halo PC isn't playable. It still runs well enough -- if it runs at all. Microsoft's support database for Halo is huge. Not because they're being so thorough, but because the game has so many issues. Most of the fixes are so complicated that an average user probably couldn't even be talked through them. I personally couldn't even start the game out-of-the-box. I spent a few hours tracking down a fix before noticing the auto-update utility in Halo's program directory (no shortcut is created for it). The latest patch fixed the game for me, but if the support forums are any indication, not for a lot of other people.

So I don't know. I haven't actually decided if I'm going to keep this one or not (also $20 at Walmart: GTA San Andreas and Lego Star Wars). I'll play through another couple hours and see if it gets much better. I'm very aware that I've played virtually nothing but first-person PC shooters since about 1999, and the "problems" I'm having with the game can easily be considered "quirks" that I just need to get adjusted to. But for me, here's why Halo is disappointing: it was originally released for the Xbox in 2001 and was ported to the PC in 2003. I have a number of PC shooters that were released before or around the same time as Halo that are simply better games, at least in my opinion (Quake III, the original Half-Life series, Ghost Recon, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Call of Duty). Halo has repeatedly been put into the pantheon of all-time great shooters by the gaming media, but I'm just not getting it.