Halo: CE Twenty Years Later

I’ve been going through the Halo franchise on PC via the Master Chief Collection and I’m surprised at how well Halo CE still plays. Sure, it has updated graphics and now can run at 60fps, but the core mechanics and game-play loop are the same. Those are so solid that with the updates it plays better than a lot of shooters I’ve sat through.

There aren’t many quality-of-life features present in it, especially given the period it was produced in, but the gun-play and grenades are all it really needs. The later levels do have problems with visual homogeneity and there are few enemy types, both typical of earlier generation games, but the fast-paced, clean combat out-weighs those issues by an order of magnitude.

It still plays so well that I’ve got a bit of second-hand embarrassment for many of the shooters released since. Bungie did an absolutely fantastic job.