⋙ I discovered Halo: Combat Evolved at an age that wasn’t exactly early. There was this guy I was kind of friends with back then, a fan of a wildly mixed bunch of videogames, all of them stored on a pendrive with no more than 4 GB of space. It was 2010–11, and at the time a piece of tech like that was pretty expensive for a freshman high-schooler. If I remember correctly, the version of H:CE I tried was a typical rip of the era, missing the soundtrack and with reduced graphical fidelity.
Even so, something more specific bothered me about Halo: in my pubescent brain, it was a slow, plodding run-and-gun—or rather, get-the-fuck-away-from-sight-and-gun. The primary equivalent of a shooter subgenre I never liked much: cover shooters. I was a child of DooM, Postal 2, and Unreal Tournament; if I wasn’t going 300 kilometers per hour dungeon-crawling through paper hordes, or the equivalent of anti-heroes with gear similar to mine, memorizing spaces and constant respawns, it felt petty to me. Kind of like Brutal Doom fans when they try the original.
To my surprise, now that I’ve finished it as a proper start to this 2026, I was quite wrong.
⋙ Well, it’s not entirely like that either: you do have to take cover as the difficulty ramps up, and I suppose at the higher settings it’s necessary, but the exploration of Halo’s green-purple world—so supernatural and yet so simulator-like—is pretty hectic, honestly. That’s where a lot of its push and pull lies. In doing reconnaissance at a stupidly slow, diegetically relaxed pace through a hostile space. And I don’t say this only because of the barrage of enemies and brawls everywhere that keep growing more intense, but because the environment itself, even in supposedly human or equivalent structures, is built for nothing other than war.
⋙ Many times you’ll have to take the initiative if you want to survive the absolute chaos on display, growing hand in hand with the number of factions being introduced. Catching your breath is a luxury you have to force a bit against the game, a bit before the Flood make their appearance. This culminates in the slow and grinding “The Library” section, which for many will sound like the Devil singing Gospel, but which, in my view, is more a turn toward that kind of repetitive design than a specifically problematic task.
⋙ And I insist: the “natural” is the key concept here. Beyond the more Earth-like landscape and the preservation of evocative sci-fi aesthetics, you can only carry two weapons, from an arsenal shared with the enemy. Everyone is fighting to see who survives—explosive Flood sacks that wreak havoc if mishandled, Elites throwing sticky grenades. Suddenly, what could be a routine experience gets crushed by your impatience or by the total chaos caused by a chain reaction. It’s a sloppy old-school deathmatch between random kids, disguised as a corridor experience… on top of vehicle controls that are absolute shit, let’s be honest. Sublime.
⋙ If there’s one thing I didn’t expect at all, and that no one prepared me for, it’s the mocking tone of the writing, which helps elevate the space opera in its simplicity rather than pushing it into annoying territory. It offers just the right amount of exposition, letting Cortana’s playful behavior and Master Chief’s stoicism (hehe, MC) handle the comedy at the right tempo. Of course, this hasn’t been contaminated in any way by today’s narrative “marvelization,” so it lets its punchlines land without, as we say in my country, “smelling itself.”
⋙ I haven’t read about the development of Combat Evolved, but I am ABSOLUTELY SURE that Bungie was especially confident in what they established as their gameplay foundation, because wow, they really like regurgitating what they had you do hours earlier to make you go through it again—“but it’s not the same.” And sometimes you do feel it, no matter how much it reinforces the sense of place.
CHARTREUSE
(⭕ AESTHETICS / ⭕⭕⭕ INTEGRITY / ⭕⭕ DENSITY)
MEMENTO: the “remastered” graphics of the Master Chief Collection are absolute SHIT. If there’s one thing I can’t stand in remakes, it’s a lack of care with lighting—especially when a good chunk of the game relies on darkness and fog with a flashlight. And not showing me the credits? Videogames died for three seconds…
