Rarely do I play first person shooter games (FPS) in the past. Only recently do I try to enjoy them. I think it’s about recently 2 years I started trying FPS games. Very casually. Games likes this helps me tickle my reaction senses. I am very bad at this game genre. Left alone trying hard mode.
Halo Master Chief Collection has a set of Halo games. A few of them I see available in the XBox gamepass (PC) that I subscribed to: Halo Reach, Halo Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3. There are more that are listed in there not mentioned here but seem to be greyed out. So, I assumed only these are available to play for me.
A quick search on the internet seems to suggest each of this game is about 10 hours long. Interesting. They seem to be pretty short. Hopefully easy. I thought. Also, playing FPS games, even though it’s just the campaigns is not my cup of tea. So, if there is difficulty selection, probably I’d only choose second one out of three or four choices. So, normal it is.
I don’t play PvP much. So, FPS games that’s PvP in nature is probably not for me. Unless they have campaign/story that I can follow. This Halo collection seems perfect.
Friends suggested that if I would want to play the game in order of story, I should play with the order I mentioned above. I should start with Halo Reach, then Halo Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 later. This order is not the same as how the game were released.
I planned to play only one at of them at this time. Since it’s about 10 hours each, it will probably take me a week to finish one. Assuming each day I play 3 hours and at Normal difficulty level I’d perform worse than average. (Managing my own expectation!) So off I went starting Halo Reach last week.
The story seems to flow pretty well and I actually finished the game in 3 days. That was about 8 hours. I felt it was pretty short. That, of course, also already included so many failure (getting killed) in the game. Really many. So, I guess this game is really short.
It didn’t take a week so I decided to pick up the next one Halo Combat Evolved – which I thought would also take about the same amount of time – and started it the next day. The story does really match and continue what was left from Halo Reach. I guess Halo Reach is really the prequel of Halo series.
Halo Combat Evolved was released in 2001. Wow. And the game seems remastered before. In-game it offers a way for you to switch to classic textures. You can press [Tab] to switch it to older render. (I prefer new one.) Halo Reach (the first game I played here) was released in 2010. The graphic is of course much newer and pretty impressive actually. Compared to Halo Combat Evolved, Halo Reach has better graphic yet I prefer the control and gameplay in Halo Combat Evolved. Somehow it feels more fluid to me.
Although I enjoyed these two games, I was a bit overwhelmed with the Normal difficulty in Halo Combat Evolved. Especially the Library mission (not going to spoil it here). It feels a bit way too difficult to handle for a first-timer like me. In Normal difficulty. So I played that mission with pretty much tons of swearing (by heart). Fun.
Overall, they are fun games. I am looking forward to continue with Halo 2 and 3. It’ll be a while until they are on the top of my game backlog. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, visit my Twitch page for list of games I’m planning to play soon. Have a great day.