When it comes to first person shooters, I consider myself hot shit. I played Counter-Strike and Call of Duty competitively for years. I’ve finished pretty much every COD game on veteran. I’ve smashed through Doom 1 and 2 on ultra violent (Plutonia Experiment is still a work in progress), and finished Quake on nightmare. I’ve even defeated Dusk on Ciero Miedo, although episode 3 was definitely a struggle.
So when it came time to play Halo 1 for our podcast, I immediately slammed it onto legendary, and got ready to frag. I had a little experience with the game already, having played random couch co-op with friends over the years, but this would be my first time playing the game from start to finish. Just how hard could it be? I was playing with a mouse and keyboard, and I knew Halo was a far slower shooter than many I’d already experienced. I thought I’d breeze through, with no troubles in the world.
Oh, how foolish I was.
It was after about an hour of repeatedly dying in a hangar on Truth and Reconciliation that I screamed one final time and shut the game off. Nothing that I was doing was working, and was already tallying up a list of mental complaints for the show. The weapons were too inaccurate, the Elites did too much damage and I moved way too slowly. I was mad and frustrated, and thought it was all the games fault.
But, the next day, I tried again. This time, instead of playing the game like Call of Duty or Quake, I instead started to experiment. And I discovered that Halo 1 is a fair game, if a tough one - I just needed a complete change of mindset in order to overcome its challenges.
To begin with a gross oversimplification, the FPS games that I played prior to Halo could be roughly divided into two categories.
Games where your ability to aim and quickly acquire targets is important - This includes games like Call of Duty, Counter-Strike and most hitscan based shooters. You tend to be extremely vulnerable, but your enemies are equally vulnerable and die in one or two hits.
Games where your positioning and ability to avoid damage is important - This includes games like Doom, Quake and Dusk. While Dusk (and to a lesser extent, Quake) still require aiming, your ability to avoid damage through smart movement contributes far more to your success than hitting fast headshots.
While this doesn’t cover all FPS skills, and some games require both of these in equal amounts (Tribes II comes to mind), Halo occupies a niche all of its own. Halo, instead, is a tactical shooter. A tactical shooter is one in which your ability to create and execute miniature plans, and best use the tools at your disposal is the most important thing by far. Let's return now to that hangar bay in Truth and Reconciliation, to better understand why I was struggling so hard.
The Scene: I currently have a plasma rifle and an assault rifle. I’d ditched the sniper that you start the mission with because I ran out of ammo, and wasn’t expecting to find any more as the mission progressed (whoops). To my front is a wave of enemies, and to my back another wave. The platform above me has several jackals, sniping me with their plasma pistols. I need to kill everything (or mostly everything) on the ground level to continue the mission.
I can’t simply out-aim the covenant. For starters, the assault rifle is a hunk of useless metal. It's only effective at extremely close ranges, and even then its aiming reticle is about the size of a small moon. The plasma rifle is better, able to take out grunts at medium ranges, but is rarely powerful enough to take down an Elite. It drops their shields relatively quickly, but your gun will overheat before you can actually kill them. And that's to say nothing of the jackals, with shields held high, who will shrug off your attempts to kill them in a frontal assault.
I can’t evade the covenant’s fire with clever movement, either. Masterchief in Halo 1 moves at a turgid pace. Moving from one piece of cover to another is an exercise fraught with danger - whenever I do it without losing my shield I considered myself lucky. It would be less of a problem if the enemy’s fire was dodgeable, but most of the time it's simply not. An Elite with a plasma rifle will gun you down in seconds, and if you’re not paying attention you can easily be blasted with a charged plasma shot from a jackal, instantly dropping your shield.
So, what is it that I can do?
Well, the first step would have been not dropping the sniper rifle like an idiot. Weapon Selection is absolutely critical in mastering Halo. You can only have two weapons at a time, and each one has its own set of strengths and weaknesses (except the magnum, which is always excellent). Having the right weapon for the right situation makes encounters far easier. It's something that gets a lot harder to manage when the Flood get added to the mix and you need to keep changing up your weapons to stay ahead.
But I didn’t really want to repeat the mission from the start in order to get a sniper rifle. When you first ascend to the Covenant craft, there’s a difficult defence section where you get attacked by waves of enemies in close quarters that would have been a pain to repeat. With weapon selection out of the picture (at least for the moment), we go to step two: grenades. Halo showers you with a constant stream of fragmentation and sticky grenades. Sticky grenades are particularly useful, able to immediately kill any Elites you can nail with one. Fragmentation grenades are less effective, but still improve your general damage output.
In Call of Duty, grenades are a nice addition to your arsenal, but never truly necessary. In Halo, they’re absolutely critical. You need ways to take out groups of enemies, to distract enemies, causing them to scatter, and to flush Elites out of cover as their shields recharge. Getting a stick on an enemy Elite can be fight winning, as can isolating enemies with a well placed frag.
Step 3 is understanding the weapon and enemy AI systems. Plasma weapons are good against shields, hitscan weapons are good against hp. That’s easy enough to understand, but it's not enough to conquer this game. Fully powered plasma pistol shots both fully drain an Elite’s shield, and destroy a jackals shield. When shields are dropped, Elites enter a temporary state of disorientation, a moment of weakness. The magnum and sniper rifle will one hit kill an unshielded enemy with a headshot When an Elite wails and shakes their head, it means they’re going to charge and attack you. Enemy Hunters can be circled indefinitely with the right timing, as you melee them 17 times in the back.
With this information inscribed upon by brain, I could move to step 4 - Assessing enemy strength and prioritising targets. There’s a given order I started using to take out targets. If I had what I mentally called ‘elite killer weapons’ - plasma grenades, a sniper rifle, or a rocket launcher - then I would try to kill the Elites quickly and without mercy, before the fight had even begun. But with a more basic kit, I had to prioritise my targets very differently.
Grunts were the first to die - they are weak and easy to take out with any weapon, but can still do a fair bit of damage if left unchecked. Second are the jackals. Jackals are also pretty weak, but incredibly annoying with their long range plasma pistol. Their shields make actually securing kills on them really tricky. Luckily, they’re equally weak to the plasma pistol, which destroys their shield in a single hit. And with their shields gone, jackals are easy targets, becoming just as vulnerable as the grunts.
Finally, and most difficult of all, are the Elites. You may have noticed that so far about 50% of my strategic comments have been directed entirely towards these bastards - and with good reason. They shrug off damage and will kill you in literal seconds. They perform incredible acts of acrobatics to dodge grenades, and retreat into heavy cover when their shields get blown, forcing you to fight them at full strength a short while later. Fighting Elites is at the core of the challenge of playing Halo. With their comrades dead, you can finally aggressively pursue them when their shields drop, instead of being stuck in cover shooter hell for the next 10 minutes.
Step 4.5 is simple - Recognising that the assault rifle is a useless piece of garbage that you shouldn’t use except for that short segment when you first encounter the flood.
That’s most of what you need to know to play Halo successfully on Legendary. But Halo isn’t a turned based game, or a strategy game. It's still a real time, first person shooter. So we need one more stage, one more thing to bring the entire experience together.
Step 5 - Executing the plan. There’s a moment in most games where you finally grasp how to play the game. With Halo, that comes in acting with deliberation. You cannot pussyfoot about. You cannot move into the open without purpose and expect to survive. You need to become a machine, chaining your actions together smoothly and without remorse for the lives you end that day.
I learned to charge my plasma pistol before I rounded every corner. I learned to swap to my magnum the moment that blast left the weapon, to be ready to instantly follow it up with a head-shot. I learned to throw grenades and use that brief moment of confusion to advance to a different piece of cover.
One of the things I figured out was when I could run past enemies and avoid combat entirely. I eventually figured out how to best take on the Flood, which unfortunately just boiled down to sitting in a doorway with a shotgun. I learned to be completely patient while waiting in cover for my shield to fully recharge, knowing I’d need every last piece in order to survive.
When I finally beat a combat encounter, the end result was always a delicate ballet of bullets and plasma blasts and grenades. I’d be moving in and out of cover, not wasting a single moment of action, knowing that one wrong move would mean starting over. And start over I did, many times - but each and every time I had a new iteration on the plan, and I got a step closer to victory. Halo lacks the sheer frantic improvisation of Doom, but it certainly equals its intensity in executing your plan to kill the enemy.
When I chose Halo for the podcast, I didn’t expect to love it. Halo, in a lot of ways, was responsible for a massive cultural shift in how FPS games were made. We stopped getting the sprawling mazes of the build engine games in favour of simpler level design. The focus moved to cinematic moments over deep and punishing gameplay. Instead of having a wide array of weapons, we were stuck with endless titles that only gave you two at a time.
But even if I am upset with what happened to FPS games in the dark 2000s, I can’t resent Halo itself. The game is brilliant, and its gameplay definitely holds up strong to this day. I expected to beat it without any problems at all. Instead, it put me through the wringer, and forced me to learn its systems. Halo taught me a whole new set of skills and ways to think about first person shooters, and for that, I’m grateful.
