One Life Left: Halo - The Master Chief Collection

In my last column, I talked about which games from the holiday season I liked and disliked. Now that I have gotten a few hours of playing under my belt, I will discuss one of those games in detail. Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a series of all the numerical Halo games, one through four. It includes graphically re-mastered versions of the first two games and online multiplayer for all four titles. The game was released by 343 Studios and Microsoft Studios back in November for the Xbox One.

One thing that drew me to this game was the opportunity to follow the story of Master Chief from his humble beginnings on the Pillar of Autumn all the way to his defeat of the Didact in the final installment. Playing through the re-mastered games was a very enjoyable experience. The story was the same, but the graphics upgrades made it feel like a whole new game. The plot came even more alive against the beautifully designed backdrop. With the touch of a button, players can switch back and forth between the original graphics and the new ones. This unique functionality serves as a shocking reminder of how far videogame technology has progressed in the past fifteen years.

Aside from the graphics, the developers did not change much else from the original games. I believe this was a very smart decision on their part. The Halo 2 fans wanted Midship and X-BRs back. Halo 3 fans wanted to relive Guardian and the all-powerful four shot Battle Rifle. If the developers had suddenly added something like the class system from Halo 4 into the rest of the games, it would have upset a large part of their prospective audience and cost them in sales.

The shortcomings of the Master Chief Collection lie in the multiplayer experience. On release day and for many weeks afterwards, players endured extremely long wait times to get into a matchmade game. Horror stories of thirty-minute wait times for games began to float around among players on the Internet. It soon became apparent that the Developer 343 Studios was having serious server issues. Personally, I was very disappointed with this, since the main reason I bought the game was to play the Halo 3 competitive multiplayer again. It was not long before I gave up on the multiplayer once and for all.

Overall, I enjoyed going back to the games that had formed my earliest video-gaming experience. It was nice to reminisce about the days when I would play games with my aunt, since we didn’t have a console of our own, and on the Christmas Eve that my brother and I stayed up all night playing Halo 3 online together. Besides the difficulties with the multiplayer version, which has only gotten marginally better since release, the campaign half of the game was done superbly well and deserves the highest praise. At the end of the day, I give Halo: The Master Chief Collection a 6.5 out of 10.