Topic: Pure Xbox Game Club - On Indefinite Hiatus

@KilloWertz Remember last year when you played through Halo CE and you didn't like it? Most people here seem to share your opinion.

Including me, of course. The game was most likely awesome at the time but the level design sure hasn't aged well at all. I even played through the game on Legendary, which was an absolute pain.

Last thing I did was to enter the Library (wish me luck!!). The introdution to the flood was a nice change of pace altough I got lost quite a few times.

If anyone is up for a heroic run through all of Halo CE let me know! I quite fancy it.

If we could grab a trio of us (unsure of that's possible as never tried) it could be even better

I am available most nights after 10:30pm uk time. @ me if you fancy it.

@LtSarge Yep, for better or for worse I remember it vividly.

It's definitely a product of it's time. Back then we didn't know any better, so if I had actually played it back then, my opinion likely would have been the opposite. I believe if the series had launched with the very same game today it wouldn't be the phenomenon it was for a long time. Games like Halo 1 get ripped apart today.

I'm not saying people shouldn't still enjoy it if they can, but the level design is so horrible that it would have been dead in the water. There are still good parts to the game, but the level design and a few other things kill it all. The suggestion above of doing it in co-op, if possible, would be the only way I could see enjoying it at all.

It is amazing how much of a jump there was from Halo: CE to Halo 2. Just judging them today, you go from one of the worst classic FPS games to one of the best FPS games ever made still to this day. The Master Chief Collection version is mildly cheating in the comparisons, but even without the fancy upgrades Halo 2 would still be great.

I have completed the Library and altough fairly long (but not more than the previous levels as I got lost) it is probably my favourite so far... I find the flood much more interesting to fight than the covenant and the shotgun is easily my favourite weapon to use.

@KilloWertz it's a game of its time. Compare Halo CE anything prior in a similar space, such as goldeneye and you can see shy it was held in high regard. Even Bungies previous 'Marathon' series looks so ancient in comparison.

A lot of the levels are copy and paste to a degree. I ran assault on the control room yesterday and the same similar room with maybe a barricade dotted in a different place was frustrating. The levels are clearly padded out in the second half of the game which drags the experience down.

Nostalgia plays a lot with games. I can't get onboard with all the Halo fans who rave about the og experience. It was great, still playable today but it's difficult to motivate a playthrough knowing the samey play areas. Halo Reach for me had the best mix of variety within a cohesive story and wider open areas to fight in.

One thing I will say about Halo as a series, the adequate amount of levels and 4 difficulty options lead to a lot of replayability. I enjoy CE in part due to the nostalgia but can see it weaknesses too.

I have finished the game. Overall I enjoyed it but definitely not as much as Gears of War (but its age has something do do with that).
I don't like the covenant weapons therefore fighting them is a pain as I get low on ammunition. That is the reason I much prefer to fight the flood.
Story wise it did not grabbed me as a lot of times it was done during gameplay and that is something that does not work for me as I cannot focus on more than one thing at the time.
Finally the last mission is a pain, first because of the section where you need to throw granades ar vents with any sign if you're are doing it right or not and second and easily worst thing in the game (and close to the top in worst section in gaming ever) there is the obstacles course with a countdown in the terrible controlling car...

As I heard many say halo 2 is a big improvement in level design I will at least give it a go before moving on to other pastures.

@Balta666 “there is the obstacles course with a countdown in the terrible controlling car...”

THAT was the bit I was hinting at above. Though if I remember correctly the timer is actually super easy, it just SEEMS like there is more time pressure than there is. Or perhaps that was because I was OK-ish with the floaty warthog controls

All I can say is that the controls to move the Warthog is annoying in Halo Combat Evolved XD
I'm in Attack on the Control Room level, at least the Scorpion's controls are decent. Plus you can get 4 Marines with you.
What I find annoying about Halo CE other than Warthog controls is when sometimes Marines stay seated in the Warthog while Master Chief has to go solo. If they would move w you I would feel more secure as to where I am going. Still, when the game prompts them to battle they battle, so I can't entirely feel frustrated by a simple game mechanic.
I play it on an Xbox 360 Slim, not sure if it enhances the graphics or if it doesn't, but the game is pretty cool overall. I've never played a Halo game but so far its been pretty fun. I appreciate that there are plenty of checkpoints — better than Medal of Honor in PS1 where if you die, you have to start over again. Looking forward to trying out Halo 2 and 3; and while Red Dead Redemption is still my favorite, Halo is def on my top games.

@themightyant yeah, I failed either that timimg or killed in action because i got stuck in the environments several times...

Ok, it is Crazy how the first two levels in halo 2 are so much better than anything in combat evolved!!
Storytelling, setting and gameplay...

@Balta666 I gota say I prefer Halo 2 to Halo 1. At least story wise. It's definitely very slightly more nuanced with the Arbiter character.

I think ODST has an interesting story too but you don't play as a super powered Spartan and the difficulty reflects this. I thought Reach was actually quite an engaging game and I think Halo Infinite is probably the most "fun" game at least to my tastes but even that falters for me when it pushes you through the linear parts of it.

@themcnoisy @RDDMarston do you both want to be added to the tag list for this thread or you just popping by for some Halo chat?

(Apologies, I might have already asked you in the past MC Noisy!)

Honestly i'm surprised, and interested, how much (relative) heat Halo is getting. It's been a few years since I played it, and I have rose tinted glasses, but I still remember a classic with a great story. Though the level design is now dated it was mind blowing at the time. And looked at now it definitely lacks some QoL features.

I always liked Halo 2, even when it was getting some grief at launch, but the story isn't as well written imho and the ending cliff-hanger was just annoying and left a bad taste at the time

Still think Halo 3 is the peak of everything for me, i've lost count of how many times I've played it. Reach tops it in many other ways but not in all, and while it's probably objectively the better game I don't prefer it to 3, but it is a close second.

ODST was an interesting side story with good mechanics and some great set pieces but not much more to me, pacing didn't quite click.

Halo 4 and 5 felt like a huge backwards step in many ways and annoyingly didn't finish their stories and then even more annoyingly didn't properly continue them in the next outing, similar with Infinite which was a little disappointing for me. It had great gunplay, LOVED the grapple but a weak storyline made worse with bad storytelling and repetitive environments and no/few good/memorable set pieces. Plus it lost too much going open-world as such it's the only Halo I haven't played more than once.

3 > Reach >> 1/CE = 2 >> ODST >> 5 > Infinite > 4 (Campaigns rated with rose tinted glasses based more on release) but all good games.

Damn it you've all made me want to play this series again!

@themightyant I will admit that I don't have the rose tinted glasses as I only played through the series from beginning to end during the pandemic. Having only completed Halo 3 and had a brief soiree with the PC version of Halo CE before that.

There are things I like about the series but I do think it becomes more relatable in later entries. I appreciate how iconic it can be at times but I think the era of the PS2/early PS3 shooters is a weird one. They're kind of not old enough for the weird gameplay choices and level design to be forgiven as a relic of their time and not new enough to benefit from the QoL of modern games.

Of course that's just my opinion. Having had only a GameCube for that gen and subsequently a Wii (I got a PS3 a few years later and had a 360 for a while before that before it RROD'd) I am quite unforgiving when I go back and play the "greats" that I missed out on like the 3D GTA games, Halo, Gears or War, God of War, Bioshock etc. That said there are a bunch of games from that era that I played late that I absolutely love like MGS series from 2 onwards (already loved the first one on ps1) and the Uncharted games from the following generation. Swings and roundabouts I suppose!

@ralphdibny Ok cool

Figured I'd post this here since you guys played Redfall last month and I have some thoughts about the game.

So I just finished Redfall after roughly 18 hours of playtime. It was overall a fairly enjoyable experience, but there definitely were aspects that brought down the experience by a lot. The reviews have mostly focused on the technical issues the game had at launch. But if you play the game today, you won't notice many issues like that. During my entire playthrough, I had some consistent issues like not being able to set a waypoint by clicking once but instead twice, the amount of ammo shown was constantly off and frames would drop whenever I'd kill a special type of enemy to just name a few. I also had a few crashes. But throughout the 18 hours I played, I didn't encounter any major technical issues. In fact, that aspect isn't even the primary issue with the game. There are more major flaws with the game, which are:

• The gameplay loop is repetitive and limited
• The progression system is poor and unrewarding
• The game is relentless in terms of difficulty with no noticeable changes if you lower it

So I'd like to go through these three points one by one. For starters, the gameplay loop is really repetitive. Granted, they do a good job of introducing a lot of new stuff in the beginning. You start off with your standard handgun, then find your typical weapons like assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and even flare guns. Then the game introduces two unique weapon types, which are stake guns and UV beams. The former is effective against the vampires in the game, while the latter is mostly used for killing the stationary enemies that spew a red poison mist across certain areas. The problem is that these weapons are introduced immediately and you don't unlock any new weapons for the remainder of your playthrough.

Moreover, you can only hold and switch between three weapons at once. I mostly used a shotgun, assault rifle and sniper rifle throughout the game. But I wanted to use the stake guns and UV beams fairly often as well. So I had to constantly go into the menu and switch out my loadout, which was such a pain. Considering the developer wanted to copy Far Cry, they completely omitted the series' weapon wheel.

It's the same issue with the enemy variety: the majority of the enemy types are introduced way too soon. They should've spread them out a bit more throughout the playthrough to make things more interesting. But yes, there are plenty of different enemies. They just become uninteresting to face off against during the second half of the game.

Moving on to the progression system, it's absolutely the worst I've seen in a game in a long time. There is a skill tree but you can't even collect enough skill points to unlock most of the stuff by playing through the game naturally. Furthermore, the stuff you do unlock don't even feel that rewarding. It doesn't feel like my character has been improved at all whenever I unlock something new.

Consequently, the abilities themselves are so unsatisfying to use. You have four characters with different skills and mine has an umbrella that acts like a shield that then explodes when it disappears, a "psychic lift" that propels you upwards and her special ability lets her call her ex-boyfriend to come in and do some damage. The umbrella is fine, but the other two feel so useless and unsatisfying. I mean, I want my abilities to pack a punch. But in my case two of my three abilities aren't even (direct) attacks and the third feels very weak to use.

This brings me to my last point, which is the difficulty level. I started on Normal and it felt pretty good at first but then I started dying over and over again. So I lowered the difficulty to Easy and there weren't any noticeable changes at all. The enemies were just as relentless as before. I probably died 40-50 times during my 18 hour playthrough. I died more in this game than I did in Returnal, which is known to be a difficult game!

So what's the issue with the difficulty? Well, the enemies deal way too much damage. On top of this, you can easily find yourself surrounded by enemies that will absolutely wreck you. Even if you upgrade your health, you can easily die in just a couple of seconds if you're unlucky. The difficulty level is just very unbalanced and for a game like this that's supposed to be fun and a good time, it completely ruins the experience.

There are so many other issues with the game, such as a bad checkpoint system and a bad waypoint system to name some more.

There are some good aspects of this game obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered playing it to the end. Even if the gameplay loop is repetitive, it's still a relatively fun looter shooter and unique gameplay mechanics like needing to use a stake in order to finish off a vampire (which is the only way to kill them) makes the gameplay more varied. The story is pretty good as well. Even if the game doesn't have cutscenes where characters move, the narrative is rather captivating and there's a lot of backstory to the characters. Not to mention that there's plenty of lore to read, in a typical Arkane fashion.

So to summarise, the technical issues that Redfall is infamous for is the furthest from its problems. Repetitive gameplay loop, unrewarding progression system and relentless difficulty level brings down the experience a lot. There's still some fun to be had here, but if you're looking for an open world shooter, you'd do better with many other titles, including Far Cry. If I had to give the game a score, which I rarely do but in this case I want to just so that I can convert my thoughts into a numeric value, I'd give it a 5/10.

@ralphdibny hi mate, no thank you but I appreciate the invitation. I play whatever game I fancy at any given time and need to get through my current installed games. Currently The House of the Dead remake, Batman Telltale game, Forza 7, Coffee talk 2 and SD Gundam Battle Alliance (almost finished with Coffe talk2 and Gundam tbf). Halo will always be installed, I just enjoy the mechanics so tend to pick it up for a couple of evenings and then revisit it a few months down the line.

The timed challenges are so tough you need to learn a route and go for it 3-4 times. Pop the cheevo grab some medals, possibly find a solitary context sensitive cheevo and then I leave it until I'm in a lull or play a bad game.

I don't care for the sense of adventure in games, im an ex sailor and have seen beautiful sunsets and been in the most idyllic of locations in the real world. Rather overcoming a particular challenge is my bag and why I game. Probably why I dislike Zelda as it does nothing for me, it's easy, lacks urgency
, the games are long and are mostly about the adventure. Halo Infinite also suffers due to its focus on the open world. The levels contained within infinite are forgettable, there doesn't seem to be a big reveal - such as with the hunters or flood in earlier games. The enemies are just, kind of there to be shot at. The level design is weak. I do like the elite target enemies though, they are a nice additional for sure.

@ralphdibny I would like to add my votes to:

Unravel
Perfect Dark

Combat evolved is a truly wonderful game.

Let me ask you guys a few questions:

1. Does anyone else feel that the magic of Halo: CE is the campaign, and that the multiplayer is... well plain unfun? I only feel this way about CE. I feel every other Halo multiplayer (including 4) is a blast.

2. What are your opinions on the CE anniversary remaster? Personally, I think it's an awesome package and that the artistic style on the new graphics are not only acceptable, but optimal. I can't remember the last time I've played through CE on the original art.

However, I have heard a significant amount of grumbling from Halo players about the remaster. The most common sentiment I hear is that Gears fans got a much better re release in Gears ultimate edition. I can't speak to Gears ultimate, but I find it hard to believe Halo CEA is outright bad in comparison.