Hands-on: Halo

Microsoft officials dropped by the GameSpot offices with a nearly completed version of Halo, Bungie Studios' highly intelligent first-person shooter. While the game has always shown a lot of promise, shaky showings of the game back at E3 put the quality of the final product in question. Now, as the game nears completion in preparation for the Xbox's North American launch, Halo appears to be delivering on a lot of that promise.

The game starts out with a brief but fulfilling tutorial level that drops your character, Master Chief, right into the action as Covenant forces invade your ship and begin taking on your crew. It's up to you to escape with the ship's AI, which is saved conveniently onto a credit card-sized device. The AI will communicate with you throughout the game, filling you in on plot points as well as providing some occasional direction. The game's plot will also be conveyed via cutscenes, all of which will use the game engine. Once you've escaped the dying ship, you'll end up landing on the ring-shaped planet called Halo. Of course, the Covenant forces want that AI pretty badly, so they're hot on your tail. Because many of the escaping human forces have also landed on Halo, you're now caught in the middle of a gigantic land-based conflict between the Earth forces, the Covenant, and a mysterious native species that Microsoft officials alluded to but wouldn't show us.

Aside from the single-player campaign, Halo features a variety of multiplayer options. The entire single-player game can be played cooperatively by two players. This mode handles death in an interesting way. If one player dies, the remaining player can either retreat or finish the current battle, and the dead player will respawn. If both players die, however, they return to the last checkpoint and have to try again. The game will support up to 16 players over four Xbox units hooked up to a LAN. You can play four-player matches with each player having his or her own Xbox, or any number of different configurations with up to four Xbox units with up to four players each. The game features lots of the standard multiplayer modes commonly found in first-person shooters, such as deathmatch, king of the hill, and capture the flag. Different settings can be tweaked for each game, such as which weapons will be present in the levels, time limits, and the like.

Console-based first-person shooters have a history of sketchy or compromised control schemes that usually make us scream out for the mouse and keyboard support found in PC shooters. While Halo will contain no support for the classic PC control scheme, we've found that the game doesn't really need it. The left analog stick moves your character around, while the right stick is used to look around. The right trigger fires your weapon, while the left trigger is used to toss grenades. Face buttons are for actions like reloading, changing weapons (you can hold only two weapons at any given time), jumping, using objects, and toggling your flashlight. Pushing in the left control stick makes you duck. While this isn't anything revolutionary--most PS2 first-person shooters use an extremely similar control scheme--the Xbox controller feels very well suited for this type of game. The tight feel of the analog sticks makes precision aiming extremely easy. Additionally, the game makes good use of the controller's built-in rumble feature to enhance weapons fire, taking damage, and so on.

Graphically, Halo has a very nice look to it. The game makes nice use of various effects, from bump-mapping to real-time lighting and reflections. While the game does have a bit of optimization left to be done before it ships, the single-player game runs at or close to 30 frames per second. The split-screen modes currently take a bit of a performance hit and deliver lower frame rates, but hopefully the remaining optimizations will be able to put those up around the same number as the single-player. The audio portion of Halo is really coming along nicely. The sounds of weapons firing--particularly your assault rifle--are really excellent and pack a real deep, bass-heavy punch, especially when playing on a nice home theater setup. Your computer-controlled comrades are constantly chattering, keeping you posted on their actions, from attacking to retreating. Enemies will also communicate in a similar way, perhaps tipping you off to their actions.

As Halo's long development cycle nears its home stretch, it's slowly cementing its place as the flagship title for Microsoft's upcoming console. Provided the team can work out the few remaining issues in time for launch, Halo looks like it could live up to the hype that began when the game was first announced.