Halo: Season 2

The war between the Covenant and the United Nations Space Command is continuing to escalate. Frontier colonies continue to fall, whilst both sides are desperate to track down the mysterious artifact known as "Halo." The Covenant's advance soon brings Reach, the largest planet in the outer colonies, within range, sparking the biggest battle of the war so far.

Halo is a military science fiction franchise about people and aliens shooting one another, understandable as its primary instalments have all been first-person shooter video games. But as it has gone on, the series has built up a loyal following for its surprisingly deep background material (partially worked out by "proper SF author" Greg Bear) and extended cast of characters, despite them being mostly relegated to cut-scenes and secondary media.

A Halo TV series therefore isn't quite as batty an idea as it sounds, as the universe contains enough interesting ideas to be fleshed out in a dramatic format. Unfortunately, the first season of the show proved divisive, at best. Elements of the lore and setting were jumbled up and delivered in an odd order, established canon characters were either nowhere to be seen, showed up in different roles or were killed off in short order, and Master Chief spent most of the season without his helmet on (Chief, like Judge Dredd, is never seen in the games without his helmet). Some fans were livid, whilst more casual viewers found the show watchable but underwhelming.

This second season, like a lot of recent second seasons for adapted shows with iffy openings (see also Foundation and Time, Wheel of), is an improvement, but again, a qualified one. The show is more focused this year with the search for Halo being a driving force in many episodes, at least for Master Chief. Early episodes complicate this with internal UNSC politics and internal shenanigans with those space pirates nobody really cares about, but the writers are at least determined to bring all the storylines together mid-season on Reach for a massive showdown with the Covenant. This war episode is mostly impressive, but it does strain the limits of even this show's generous budget. The second half of the season unfortunately engages in some wheel spinning and makes the crucial error of thinking the audience gives even 10% as much of a toss about Soren's family than the writers do. Things do pull back together to deliver a very satisfying finale which finally, after seventeen episodes, does catch us up to where we really should have been in Episode 1 of Season 1. Better late than never, I guess?

The cast deliver good performances, with Pablo Schreiber doing a good growly Master Chief (although he somehow spends even less time in Season 2 with his helmet on than in Season 1), Kate Kennedy making Kai-125 both a sympathetic character and a badass, and Natascha McElhone's walking moral vacuum of Dr. Halsey being delightfully conniving in every scene she's in. Kwan (Yerin Ha) and Makee (Charlie Murphy) are still here, but are much better-served than the scripts they had in Season 1, and the finale finally makes us realise why Kwan is important and it nicely ties into the established Halo backstory. Bokeem Woodbine continues to have more fun than anybody else in the cast as Soren-066 (since Burn Gorman sadly left the show in Season 1), although even he seems to get bored of his "family kidnapping" plot after the interminable-feeling number of episodes it takes up. Particularly welcome are newcomers Joseph Morgan as Colonel Ackerson and Cristina Rolo as Talia Perez, who both add some surprisingly good scenes to the show, the former as an apparent new antagonist and the latter as an ordinary UNSC soldier dragged into Master Chief's orbit.

It does feel like maybe Season 2 has had a little bit of a budget trim: there's a lot of re-use of the same sets (one hallway on Reach becomes incredibly familiar) and there's very few of the all-Covenant CGI scenes we had in the first season. The action is mostly good, with the highlight being a one-on-one duel in the finale and several parts of the fall of Reach, but some of the effects are definitely iffy, like muzzle flares looking like they were made in MS Paint and copy-pasted over the guns. Obviously and correctly Hollywood is being ultra careful with weapons on sets these days, but it feels like the vfx for that could have been a lot better (especially as after-added muzzle flares is something people have been doing for decades at this point).

For those wanting an accurate retelling of the video games, Season 2 is better, but marginally. Seeing the fall of Reach, the iconic backstory moment of the franchise, later fleshed out for a prequel novel and game, is cool, but the absence of the many of the characters and events from both the Fall of Reach novel and the Halo: Reach video game may be frustrating. Some elements that don't show up until much later in the storyline turn up surprisingly early here, which feeds into the feeling that the TV writers don't seem to want the story to unfold as naturally as it did in the games, instead feeding in deep cuts from the lore when the people who really care will be annoyed by the show's deviation from the source material, whilst newcomers will likely be bewildered or not notice/care. Including an Arbiter, but not the Arbiter (the co-protagonist of Halo 2 and one of the franchise's most popular characters after Master Chief), but not making that clearer, is a good example of the writers tapping the game material but in an unnecessarily obtuse way.

Still, making a nine-hour TV show based on corridor shooting and occasionally driving a Warthog (or is it a Puma?) was clearly never going to work, so changes were necessary in the transfer of medium. It'll be up to each viewer to determine if this level of change works for them, and if they're unfamiliar with the games, whether the show works as a stand-alone experience.

For this non-hardcore Halo fan (casual appreciator might be a better descriptor), the sophomore season of Halo (***½) is better than its first, and moves up from "worth watching if there's nothing else on" to "solid sci-fi pulp action." It feels like a lot of potential from the source material is being left on the table here, but the show is at least moving in the right direction. Halo is available to watch worldwide right now on Paramount+.

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The battle for the future of video gaming heats up with Sony set to acquire Bungie

Sony has announced plans to buy Bungie, Inc., the video game developer which created the Halo series and now develops the Destiny series. The move is part of an escalating series of buy-outs as Microsoft and Sony compete to get the most exclusive titles on their consoles, the Xbox and PlayStation respectively.

Bungie was founded in 1991 and developed a series of successful video game franchises in the 1990s, including early first-person shooter series Marathon and strategy series Myth, as well as third-person action game Oni. In the late 1990s they began development of a highly ambitious, cutting-edge first-person shooter for PC called Halo. Microsoft thought the project was so promising that they bought Bungie in 2000 and repurposed Halo as a launch title and "killer app" for their new Xbox video game console. Bungie worked on the Halo series for the next several years, developing Halo 2 (2004) and Halo 3 (2007), both massive-sellers.

Bungie announced a split from Microsoft in late 2007, with Microsoft retaining the Halo IP. Bungie developed two additional Halo games for Microsoft after the split, constituting Halo 3: ODST (2009) and Halo: Reach (2010). Bungie pivoted to a new video game franchise they were developing, which resulted in the multiplayer-focused Destiny (2014) and Destiny 2 (2017). Both were immensely successful.

The acquisition will not impact on the ongoing release cycle for Destiny 2, with future expansions and new content being available on Xbox, PC and PlayStation. However, it is possible that Destiny 3, if it is ever made, will be a PlayStation-exclusive, as will any new IP to emerge from the studio. It also makes a possible future re-collaboration between Bungie and Microsoft on the Halo franchise unlikely, if not impossible. Sony will also be leveraging their muscle in the television and film production space to develop Destiny tie-in projects. Sony have also expressed admiration for the back-end networking technology used by Bungie in the Destiny games, which they may wish to incorporate into other Sony franchises.

This deal has been in the offing for months, and it is unlikely that it was a direct response to Microsoft's recent acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, instead more likely being inspired by Microsoft's acquisition of Zenimax Media and their Bethesda-branded studios in 2020 for $7.5 billion.

Microsoft's recent buying spree has seen them gain control of massive console-shifting franchises including Call of Duty, Diablo, The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout, as well as the well-respected Doom, Wolfenstein, StarCraft, WarCraft, Overwatch, Guitar Hero, Skylanders and Crash Bandicoot series.

Sony potentially getting the keys to future new Bungie IPs is small fry in comparison, but it might be a sign of Sony gearing up to buy other companies. If Sony wants to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft's acquisitions, an obvious target will be Take Two Interactive, the publisher and, via their Rockstar family of studios, developers of the giga-hit Grand Theft Auto series. Take Two is probably at the upper level of realistic targets, given that Sony's financial resources are somewhat more limited than Microsoft's, and Sony making the in-development Grand Theft Auto VI a PlayStation exclusive would draw in a lot of wavering fans who might be tempted to jump ship to Xbox (Grand Theft Auto V is the biggest-selling video game of the last decade). Of course, it might be that Microsoft are already targeting Take Two. Take Two themselves recently acquired mobile games giant Zynga for $12 billion, possibly a sign that they will not be interested in takeover offers, or possibly to bolster their price for any such offers.

It'll be interesting to see what the next move in the space will be.

Halo 3

The war between humanity and the Covenant has taken an unexpected turn. Civil war has erupted within the Covenant, with the Elites turning on their former masters after discovering their plan to activate the Halo Array, wiping out all sentient life within the Milky Way galaxy. Forming an alliance of convenience with the humans, the Elites plan to find the Ark - the mysterious, ancient megastructure where the Halos were built - and disable the Array once and for all, as well as mitigating the threat of the Flood. Master Chief and the Arbiter, enemies of old, put their differences aside to bring salvation to the galaxy.

Halo 3 is less a sequel to Halo 2 than its direction continuation. Halo 2's development process was infamously torturous and Bungie had to push it out of the door before it was fully ready, leading to criticism of the game for being effectively incomplete on release. Halo 3 came out three years later on the more powerful X-Box 360 platform, allowing for a graphically more impressive game.

Thirteen years on from release, Halo 3 has finally made the transition to PC via The Master Chief Collection and it's a bit of a mixed bag. Being designed for more powerful hardware means the game consists of much larger environments and areas than the first two games, making it more fun to play with more sprawling combat areas. The game mixes up vehicle and in-person combat with more skill than the prior games and there's some stronger weapon design.

However, whilst both Halo and Halo 2 have been significant revised and updated over the years, Halo 3 has not, so whilst it looked far better than Halo 2 on release, it actually looks significantly worse than Halo 2: Anniversary, the version of the game that ships with The Master Chief Collection. This means there's a bit of an unexpected downgrade for people playing the series in order. Character models and textures are significantly less impressive than Halo 2, and the sudden dearth of fantastically-rendered CG movies in favour of far more clumsy, in-engine cut scenes is jarring.

Once you adjust to that, there's much to enjoy here with some solid redesign of enemies - the bullet-spongey Brutes from the second game have been improved and giving them their own, far more interesting weapons arsenal is a good move - and a storyline that twists and turns through several interesting spins. The re-focusing of the game on the Flood as the main enemy at the halfway point recalls the weaker moments of the first game and it can never quite get over that issue. Fighting intelligent enemies who know when to seek cover, use grenades and flank is is simply always going to be far more fun than fighting a bunch of Half-Life rejects who shuffle towards you in a straight line, veritably begging for you to shoot them. Level design also feels a bit stretched at the end of the game (including a nightmarish re-use of the infamous infinite identical rooms from the original game, thought fortunately very briefly, and a re-use of the same design for the final mission of the game).

A lot of these problems seem to be down to Halo 3 not really being supposed to exist. It was really the last act of Halo 2, but to make it work as a full game - albeit a 7-hour one that feels a little stingy after the 10 hours of the first two games - it's had a lot of filler added to it. Some of this filler is entertaining, but there are a few moments when you may find you grinding your teeth and wanting them to either come up with something more interesting or cut to the chase.

Halo 3 (***½) is an enjoyable first-person shooter which cannot match its forebear for its tighter design and stronger storytelling chops, and does resort to a few disappointing design decisions to drag its modest length out a bit longer. Still, it provides a solid conclusion to the original Halo trilogy. The game is available now on X-Box One and PC as part of The Master Chief Collection, which also includes remastered versions of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, and more moderately graphically-updated versions of Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach and Halo 4. A new Halo game, Halo Infinity, is due for release in 2021 on PC and X-Box Series X.

Halo 2: Anniversary

AD 2552. The Master Chief has destroyed Halo and saved the galaxy from annihilation. Unfortunately, the Covenant have located Earth and launched an assault on the planet. As Master Chief helps in the defence, far across the galaxy, the Covenant commander who led the mission to Halo has been disgraced and dishonoured. However, he is offered the chance to regain his honour by becoming an Arbiter and leading a new mission...to a second Halo installation.

The original Halo was a frustrating first-person shooter: excellent outdoor environments and solid combat let down by stodgy pacing and exceptionally poor level design. The game has not aged well and, after my experiences earlier this year with a solid but not particularly exciting Halo: Reach, made me wonder if this was one franchise that is not for me.

Halo 2, fortunately, is a hugely superior game to its forebear. It has a great deal of mission variety, as the game follows Master Chief fighting Covenant forces in New Mombasa and the Arbiter fighting the Flood on a second Halo. The game's combat has been dramatically improved, with an elimination of the original game's endlessly copy-pasted rooms and replacing them with more dynamic combat areas. You can now dual-wield weapons (at the cost of not being able to easily melee or use grenades), allowing some excellent weapon combo tactics (using a weapon that's good against shields in one hand versus one good against armour in the other, or combining human and Covenant weapons together). There's a greater variety in enemy unit types, and more missions where allies help you out.

This is backed up by a much more involved storyline, taking in the Covenant's religious beliefs, their internal politics (including ostracising one member race and a resulting civil conflict) and the interaction between the Covenant, humanity and the Flood.

The Flood also return and are also improved beyond their Halo: Combat Evolved appearance, with them being far less annoying and more entertaining to fight. Giving the Flood a voice and intelligence to reason with is a bit of a misstep though, removing much of their formerly implacable, unreasoning menace (the same problem with the Borg in Star Trek).

Missions alternate (more or less) between Master Chief and the Arbiter and this gives rise to a reasonable amount of variety in gameplay. Keith David is particularly noteworthy of praise for his performance as the Arbiter and helps the player get invested in his story.

There are considerable improvements over the original Halo that make this sequel far more worthy, although a few weaknesses remain. Vehicle handling remains problematic (Banshees getting caught on scenery and flipped around is irritating), and friendly AI is decidedly weak. On several missions the friendly AI just switched off, leaving my allies standing around completely oblivious as they were gunned down by enemies. The new enemy types are mostly challenging, but the Brutes are annoying, being just massive sponges which take an immense amount of firepower to bring down and are not very fun to fight.

Also bewildering is the game's ending. Infamously, Bungie had to terminate Halo 2's development for time reasons, leaving the game not so much on a cliffhanger as just interrupted mid-flow. The Arbiter's story arc does get a satisfying conclusion but Master Chief's does not and his story is left bewilderingly hanging. Obviously this isn't so much a problem now when you can proceed immediately into Halo 3, but I can only imagine the rage that took place when the game originally came out fifteen years ago.

Otherwise, Halo 2 (****) is an enjoyable, well-judged first-person shooter with a good balance between action and storytelling. The game is available now on X-Box One and PC as part of The Master Chief Collection, which also includes a remastered version of Halo: Combat Evolved and graphically-updated versions of Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach and Halo 4.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

AD 2552. The Pillar of Autumn, a United Nations Space Command capital ship, is fleeing the fall of the human colony world of Reach to the Covenant, a hostile alliance of alien races. The Pillar has tracked Covenant intelligence leading to a remote star system. Upon arrival they find a massive ring, ten thousand kilometres across, with a habitable biosphere. Crippled in combat, the Pillar sets down on the object and it's up to the only specially-trained Spartan soldier on board, the Master Chief, to discern the origins of Halo and why the Covenant hold it in such reverence.

Halo: Combat Evolved was originally released in 2001 as the signature game of the original Microsoft X-Box game console, as well as the first game in the expansive Halo franchise, which has expanded to seven main-series games, three major spin-offs and numerous novels and comic books, as well as an upcoming TV series. It's always been an interesting anomaly that such an enormously popular franchise has expanded from such mixed beginnings.

This Anniversary Edition of Halo was released in 2011 to celebrate the franchise's tenth anniversary and was re-released in 2020 as part of the Halo Master Chief Collection on PC. Remasters of this kind are always controversial, since they sometimes alter and adjust the original game's level design and aesthetic. To be frank, in the case of Halo, I was looking forwards to some changes to the game's design, which have not only aged well, but were pretty poor going even in 2001. Alas, the remaster has stuck extremely close to the original game design, replicating its flaws as well as its strengths.

On the plus side of things, Halo has some very nice environments. The first third or so of the ten-hour game features entertaining outdoors combat on islands, in valleys and on grasslands, sometimes featuring vehicles with multiple crewing points and some pretty solid friendly AI. This is easily the best part of the game and, combined with the game's robustly entertaining multiplayer mode and some very strong multiplayer maps, is where the game's reputation mostly comes from. The graphics for this part of the game have been updated nicely, particularly the vast vistas showing Halo's interior structure rising up in the distance and then up overhead. Combat is reasonably solid and the Covenant enemies are reasonably intelligent and challenging (even if the monkey-like, comedic Grunts are far more irritating than genuinely threatening, but the Elites and Jackals make up for them).

In terms of the campaign mode, this enjoyable part of the game is sadly brief. After the opening levels you have to descend into the bowels of Halo and the game never really recovers after this point. The subterranean levels are mind-bogglingly repetitive on a scale that, over the years, I'd come to believe I had exaggerated in my mind. Replaying the game I discovered that no only had I not exaggerated them, I'd undersold them. You spend hour after hour making your way through identical rooms to flip a switch, then backtrack through these identical open rooms to the area you just unlocked, which consists of another series of rooms identical to the ones you just passed through. When this Groundhog Day section ends you find yourself in a large, temple-like structure having to do the same thing again, this time through much bigger rooms and with approximately four trillion, considerably less intelligent and interesting enemies chasing you: the Flood. The Flood are a not-very-well-disguised (and very much less entertaining) version of the Xen aliens from Half-Life, using small creatures to "zombify" enemies and turn them against one another, and are simply tedious to fight, since they just run at you and never use the more advanced tactics and AI of the Covenant enemies.

It's always been a mystery as to why Bungie made almost two-thirds of the game so repetitive and tedious as to at times feel almost miserable. The original X-Box had severe memory limitations, but that didn't stop them making the opening third or so of the game much more varied and entertaining. I suspect time was to blame and faced with critical deadlines, they just designed two areas and copy-pasted them to make larger areas. This is not unusual in gaming, but it's interesting that Dragon Age II - a later game that had the same problem but made up for it with a reasonable well-executed main storyline with a larger cast of more interesting characters - was criticised for it when Halo seems to have been given a pass for it.

A counter-argument is, of course, that Halo's campaign is really there as practice and warm-up for the multiplayer mode, which remains robustly entertaining (although perhaps a bit pointless; Halo 3, 4 and Reach have stronger multiplayer combat). Halo's story is pretty barebones in this first game and it was really only with Halo 2 that the storyline and characters started being fleshed out in much greater detail, giving rise to the popularity of the franchise.

As it stands, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (**½) is best experienced as a historical curiosity. It's not completely unplayable and the remaster adds a nice sheen to the graphics and some cool new backdrops, but doesn't solve the original game's severe problems with level design. It's certainly not aged half as well as Half-Life, the recent Black Mesa remaster of which is much stronger.

The game is available now on X-Box One and PC as part of The Master Chief Collection, which also includes a remastered version of Halo 2 and graphically-updated versions of Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach and Halo 4.

Halo: Reach

AD 2552. The Covenant - an alliance of alien races bound together under a fanatical religion - have launched an attack on Reach, one of the largest colonies in the United Nations Space Command. Noble Team, a special operations unit composed of specially-trained soldiers known as Spartans, are deployed to halt the Covenant gaining vital intel on alien ruins that predate both their species and humanity, and to try to prevent the fall of Reach until reinforcements arrive.

Halo: Reach was originally released in 2010 and serves as a prequel to the other games in the Halo series, taking place immediately prior to the events of the original Halo: Combat Evolved. For its PC debut, as part of the Master Chief Collection (which will eventually see the entire Halo series released on PC, mostly for the first time apart from old ports of the first two games), Reach has been spruced up with more modern graphics but in terms of mission design and plot it's been left alone.

Approaching Reach fresh, it feels like a curious halfway house between real old-skool FPS games (the 1990s era, arguably running from Wolfenstein through Half-Life 2) and later, crushingly linear console-driven FPS games like the later Call of Duty games. Each level is somewhat open, allowing you to determine how to approach each objective as you see fit, but as the game was built to fit into the hugely restrictive memory of the X-Box 360, so these areas are not particularly large. This means you have the freedom on how to advance and engage the enemy, but this freedom means generally moving across spaces generously twice the size of a football pitch at time linked by lots of corridor shooting designed to hide loading screens, all of which is pretty defunct on modern PCs which could hold the entire game in active memory if necessary. The restrictive weapons loadout of the series is still in place here, meaning you can only carry two weapons at a time and have to switch weapons frequently due to somewhat bafflingly limited ammo capacity.

This mixing-and-matching of weapons on the fly is fun, although somewhat half-hearted; several times per mission you are given a generous opportunity to stop and rearm yourself as you see fit, meaning the "desperate battle against the odds, surviving with whatever weapons you can scavenge" angle never really kicks in. Halo: Reach pulls its punches in delivering a more compelling FPS experience than the standard.

In terms of story, the game is pretty straightforward although not massively driven by exposition. The game seems to assume familiarity at all times with the previous Halo titles (and even the spin-off novels; the book Halo: The Fall of Reach sets up a lot of the events of this game), which was fine when it was launched as a prequel but more of an issue in its remixed form as the first game in the series for modern gamers new to the franchise via the Master Chief Collection. Exactly who the Covenant are, what their objectives are and the significance of both Reach and the alien tech on the planet are all left extremely vague. Mission objectives rarely vary from the FPS standard: go here, shoot this enemy, push this button, watch this cutscene. Regarding the latter point, at least Reach is not obnoxious: cutscenes are usually brief, reasonably well-acted (although always cheesy) and don't outstay their welcome.

Although restricted in size and boiling down to being variations on the standard arena-corridor-warehouse-corridor-arena structure, the level design is usually decent and the game changes things up by introducing vehicle-only levels, including a fun and diverting side-level when it turns into a space combat sim. A later mission changes the game into a helicopter combat game which is also fun, but both side-games and the main mission suffer a little from being too easy; FPS games designed for controllers have to be a little more forgiving of reaction times and responses. When ported to mouse and keyboard, they can become trivial unless redesigned to accommodate the much faster action and responses allowed. Halo: Reach hasn't, exposing the less accomplished enemy AI. Enemy units are well-designed, but "tougher" units are too bullet-spongey, soaking up ridiculous amounts of ammo to hide an inability to make them more of a threat through AI or strategy.

Despite all of these problems, I had fun with Halo: Reach (***½). It's a junk food game which is enjoyable, easy, short (the game barely cracks six hours and can be easily finished off in one sitting) and easy to digest without doing anything really memorable. Its soundtrack is distinctly above average, the graphics are solid for a ten-year-old game (even if the overreliance on static backgrounds is a bit more obvious than it was on release), the controls are responsive and there's a plethora of fun multiplayer modes. However, it is still only a slight and diverting game.

The game is available now as part of The Master Chief Collection, and over the coming months should be joined by revamped versions of Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST and Halo 4 (and probably Halo 5: Guardians, but that's likely a bit further off).