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The remaster of Halo: Combat Evolved leaves much to be desired. Scratch that – it’s just bad. While the port itself is technically well-done, both the graphical and (more frustratingly) the sound design language have been mangled almost beyond recognition.
Halo: CE is one of my favorite games. I played it for many hours even when all I had was the demo level for The Silent Cartographer. Now, at last, it has been remastered and included in the Master Chief Collection on PC. And it’s a mess.
The classic Halo was a game very much from a previous era. Before the maximally efficient line of AAA games that take as few risks as possible, Halo was a game originally being developed for the Mac by the studio Bungie Software, of Marathon fame. After Bungie was bought by Microsoft, Halo was finally released a launch title for the Xbox (I still don’t know how to capitalize that correctly) with a Mac port coming later from MacSoft.
Though more subdued than their previous games, Halo still carried the sci-fi plot and horror elements familiar from the Marathon games (though with fewer computer terminals to read). At first, Halo is a straightforward shooter on a fantastic, ancient ringworld (reminiscent of Rama, actually). The introduction of the Flood part-way through the game turns the game into a horror show. You are a lone marine against a flood (heh) of enemies (actually, that kinda sounds familiar). It becomes a three-sided conflict where suddenly, the enemies you’ve been fighting the whole game no longer seem as important. It’s a fantastic setup and resolution, and I was excited to see it ported to graphics that didn’t come from 2001. I played through the campaign over the weekend after it released.
Unfortunately, the upgraded graphics are tone-deaf. I’d actually seen a video review from several years ago that covered almost exactly what I’m going to complain about now. I’d almost forgotten about it, but as I was writing this it struck me that my complaints seemed familiar. As it turns out, I came to much the same conclusions as that fellow had. In other words: everything is too bright and blood stains are no longer prominent.
The mood of the original Halo was highly dependent on lighting, and the joy of gibbing things was replaced by the joy of having electric blue blood spatters everywhere. The remaster completely guts both of these. I did not need to use my flashlight once in the remaster, where it was almost necessary in several spots in the original (the second and second-to-last levels come to mind). The video review I linked above covers most of this and how it affects the horror atmosphere, so I’ll just say that I can confirm that the lightning is a real problem and it bothered me in every level – not just the ones with the Flood. In addition, the plasma shots/grenades are also much less noticeable in the remaster and the Hunters (apparently officially called Mgalekgolo) are mostly missing their trademark orange weak spots. And, just to cap off with a nitpick, Captain Keyes is way too young in the remastered graphics.
An issue unique to this review is the sound design. While you can turn off the remastered graphics, you are forced to live with the “remastered” sound effects and music cues. The gun sound effect replacements are…fine…I guess, but I would have preferred just slightly tweaked versions of the original. I would at least have liked the option to hear the original pistol sound – given that the main audience for this game are people who grew up with it, a certain amount of nostalgia for the sound effects should be anticipated.
The bigger problem is the music. Where the music cues in Halo were infrequent, adding an smooth electronic/percussive punctuation (and one rock anthem) to pivotal scenes, the remaster adds in music cues with a overtly rock-inspired theming (this doesn’t happen often, but often enough). The one thing they didn’t need to mess with from the original was the music by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori. The infrequent music made the final runs all the more high-stakes in the original, but the remaster smooths that out by adding cues in the oddest of places – possibly to make it feel more heroic, but ending up just disassociating me from the experience. I don’t think this is just my preference for the original and me just shaking my fist at new-fangled things – I think the music of the original was intentional and well-chosen.
I’ve complained a lot here, but the game is still fun and you can still play with the original graphics through a legal channel. I do still look forward to the remaster of Halo 2, as the theming done in this one would almost certainly fit better with the graphical sensibilities of Halo 2. Now if only I didn’t have to log in to a Microsoft account to play.