Working for a gamestore brings upon quite a few privileges, namely the free store copies of particular 'hot' titles. Recently I got the Halo press Beta and so here is my 'review' so to speak.
Not ever having played Halo on the X-box I wasn't sure what to expect, most ports are half-arsed cash-ins and are ridiculously bad, so my expectations were leaning more towards that.
Anyway, I popped in the game expecting to be amazed at it's brilliance on my new FX 5900 but I was deeply underwhelmed. Sure the game is years old, it's dated, but quite simply it just doesn't look good. And while I'm talking about the graphical aspects of the game I have to say that the FPS were horrid, even at 800x600 whereinwhich the game looked like tetris. Oh, and FSAA is not allowed. Ok, so it's a Beta, but it's a PRESS Beta, it's supposed to make GameStore owners and Magazine writers go "Oooh!," and "Ahhhh!".
So basically the graphics were sub-par.
Now the gameplay, woo, ok so the controls are fine, in fact they're quite solid (but it doesn't really matter at 10 FPS). What bugged me the most was the enemies, they were some of the most poorly designed alien/monster things I have ever seen! You've got your blue Covenant people who are ok, but then you've got a red one, oooh! Because he's red it must mean he's much stronger than da blue one!
And those short-guys fall under the same plight "I'm red and short and tougher than my yellow counterpart!".
Plus there are far too many enemies everywhere and they are too easy to take down, no strafing or hiding behind walls necessary.
The 'scripting' was quite nice though, I very much enjoyed how parts of the ship would blow up and how the good guys would be participating in gunfights down hallways.
The hero of the game whom naturally is the person you play as seems terribly cliched (from what I played). Hardened armour wearing military personel that has a voice to rival the guy who does the narration on most film trailers. I'm guessing that at some point in the game he'll remove his helmet melodramatically and it'll be a woman, or an alien, or he'll have some terrible scar from when he fought in 'Nam. You see, the helmet makes him a mysterious bad ass.
Audio, something that hardly ever gets mentioned in review or first impressions, is standard in this game. The music is what annoyed me, the track would just end and then start up again for no apparent reason (this wasn't a technical fault, it was scripted intentionally). There are also times when a tragic violin/bass note is struck and carries on for ages, it's the kinda music note you'd expect to hear when you die in the game. Sound effects weren't impressive enough to make you want to pump up the volume and feel the subwoofer shake the ground when you fire your machine-gun (heck, even Quake 3 does that!).
Unfortunately I am not impressed with this game at all, and though I will not say it outright sucks I will say it is not good. However when the final version (non beta) is released I'll ammend this post or thread with a concise report.
In the meantime, I'll stick to waiting for PC born FPS games like Call of Duty, Jedi Academy, Half-Life 2 and DooM3.
