The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
Although Halo is a very linear game, Bungie did a good job of disguising this fact. You spend a fair bit of time outdoors in large landscapes, helping hide the fact that your path has been relatively pre-determined. So although you're moving from Point A to Point B, it never really feels like you're doing just that.
The enemies in Halo exhibit relatively good AI maneuvers, including running away when outgunned, and doing some very nice dodging when attacked. There are a wide variety of enemies as well as weapons. However, you can only carry two weapons at any time, so you're constantly making weapon changes to match the current or expected battle. Each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses, leading to further thinking about what to carry into the next battle. You can also carry a selection of grenades, which work really well in rooms crowded with aliens.
Bungie's world also includes vehicles, which play a key role in the story and your success. There are dune-buggy-like trucks, which help cover great amounts of territory quickly; there are surface-scooting armed hovercraft, and finally, there are Banshees (my favorite), which are full-blown fighter ships that give you freedom of movement in three dimensions. Some of the outdoor levels are so large that vehicles are required just to cut down on your travel time!
If you played Marathon, some of Halo's features will seem familiar -- there are save points, so you can't just do the save-die-restore cycle whenever you wish; you have to make a certain amount of progress to get rewarded with a save. Thankfully, unlike Marathon, you do not have to physically find a save terminal; the game just auto-saves checkpoints every so often. One downside to this feature is that you can't easily go back and play a previously completed mission, or demo the program by picking one particularly intense firefight location that you've saved.
Overall, Halo hooked me more than I thought it would; much like Half Life on the PC, it was the story that really held my interest. The game's not perfect; some sections are repetitive, and there are a couple spots where I had to re-do things quite a few times as the checkpoints seemed just a bit too far apart. But other than that, the game quite easily sucked up my free time over the last week or two -- in some ways, I'm glad I'm done!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040120005556590