Everything There Is To Know About the Xbox: Technology, Games, Accessories and What's At Stake

HALO, Continued

Your first steps on Halo act as a tutorial, thereby allowing you to familiarize your self with the game. And you must admit that, even for a PC game fanatic, the handling of its character is much more complicated than you might think. In less than ten minutes, you begin to juggle with the different joysticks and controller buttons, and then rather quickly you manage in concert direction, bearing, and simultaneous movements, a little like with a keyboard and mouse. Not completely as well, certainly, but the firing cross hairs also don't have the same precision.

Following these first minutes of play, Halo's second major surprise element rests in the exceptional quality of its game play. The story and the various events fall into place in a linear storyline that immerses you into the action without waiting. This scenario is played out by a remarkable artificial intelligence, as much at the level of your allies as that of your enemies. You can rely on your soldiers, without hesitating, to hold their position the time it takes to skirt around the enemy. As for the Covenants, they don't content themselves to playing the role of cannon fodder and redouble their shrewdness, going so far as to set ambushes for you near supply points...

Munitions management counts among the other strong points of the game. In essence, contrary to what is generally done in FPS, your character can only carry two weapons at a time. The humans have an arsenal of seven different weapons ranging from the grenade to the rocket launcher. But you can also pick up those belonging to the aliens that you have pulverized. There is a total of five. So you constantly have to choose between your needs for heavy weapons as much as for precision weapons. Especially since each of them is more or less effective depending on the target in front of you. At a certain point in the game, you can also use military vehicles, which adds yet another dimension to the game play.

The multi-player mode is the last key feature about Halo. If the adventure can be played in cooperative mode with two players on the same screen, four players can confront each other in Death Match or in Capture The Flag. However the absence of bots and the size of multi-player cards reserve this mode for a greater number of players. In sum, by linking four consoles with a network connection, you could play with as many as sixteen people.