Axel Foley said:
H3 is a decent shooter but no where near the Second Coming status it is given by its blind fanboy following.
Sums it up quite well. In fact I'd even take it a step further to label Halo as being almost perfectly average, except as Yahtzee said, for it's own degree of pretentiousness. So, before I go further, thank you Yahtzee for being one of the few reviewers to place this game where it belongs.
Let's put down a simple scale to show what an fps is about.
G.O.R.E was a terrible fps. Graphics, story, audio, and "characters" were absolutely uninspired. Graphics could only be compared to an uglier Quake 2, the story was basically some corporation vs. an organized crime mod, and everything else followed a similar level of "drag and drop from cliche island." In particular, characterization and voice acting were so utterly unoriginal they made me want to hurt someone. This is from someone who LIKES the underdog.
Halo is an average fps. Humanity is getting its ass kicked and in danger of outright extinction at the hands of some technologically superior alien race. It seems that almost every science fiction storyline ever created is required to have this feature so let us move on. In order to battle the alien menace they create some kind of super-soldier (again, hardly original) but even that isn't enough so they have to go and uncover the super-relic-left-by-ancient-extinct-race to end the war (again not original). Some more stuff likely happened after that, but frankly, even the world's greatest ending can't carry the entire story. The weapons are to a letter standard fare, even weapons like the needler have featured extensively in existing sci-fi universes (unlike PainKiller). The levels seem to account for every major "requisite" theme that every new game simply must have; from generic desert environment to ancient foresty thing without much truly original (unlike... ok, almost every game is guilty of this sin). The levels flow well and are fun to play in multiplayer, but quite frankly, the same goes for Unreal Tournament and even Quake. Graphics were good, if overly bright, but not to the point where I felt like I was viewing a work of art (unlike Crysis see below). Halo's major edge - and for many, it *is* a big edge, is that it is dead easy to pick up and play, making it ideal for group gatherings, but this isn't enough to make up for the mediocrity of the rest of the game.
Half-Life 2 is a superb fps. Much as I'd like to sit here and say the story was original, it wasn't. What the story is, is standard cyber-punk fare. The time spent in City 17 is especially gritty in atmosphere, and really has many great moments. In particular, when you are called out of the crowd near the beginning, without a weapon, and taken off to a detainment room, your mind is either a) panicking, or b) racing MacGyver style to figure a way out of your current predicament. Like with the pop can incident where you'd like nothing more to slug the arrogant jerk who demands you pick it up for him but hold your anger to avoid blowing your cover, you are immersed. You are experiencing something new. More then any other reason, these experiences are what made Half-Life 1 great, and are what make Half-Life 2 great. And it is the quality and wealth of these moments that make it a superior single-player experience, and all around, a better game then Halo.
Crysis is not a perfect fps, but it is currently my favorite. The storyline was not original, but it was certainly fun enough. Difficulty allowed for the Koreans to actually speak Korean (if set high enough), and cloaking only to appear an inch from a guys face, grab him, and throw him into a group of his fellows never got old. It's true that the suit was a gimmick, I don't deny that. But it was a deep enough gimmick to allow for new and interesting strategies. Like Half-Life, this game also had many awesomely innovative moments. What makes it all the more fun is that many of these moments are not scripted out - for example, the first time you experiment with suit powers to pick up one soldier and throw him into another. In addition, the boss battle set atop a besieged aircraft carrier in the rain can only be described as totally freaking awesome. Before you ask, yes, the graphics look so bloody good it made me shed a tear.
More then anything else, I find it incomprehensible that so average a game as Halo would have such an idiotic level of fan worship. I can find no other way to describe it. They almost had to shut college down for the day - "Halo release day" was like some bloody unofficial holiday. Half of me expected overjoyed students to start hugging one another and start singing about universal love and happiness while the middle east would just bury the hatchet and go play Halo matches together instead.
