fires his assault rifle at a pack of enemy Grunts. Ammunition, health, and motion sensor displays are visible in the corners of the screen.|alt=First-person view of the gameplay. In the lower-right corner of the screen, the player's weapon is shown as the player fires on small aliens in a lush outdoor environment. Indicators around the periphery of the screen display health and ammo count.
Halo: Combat Evolved is a
first-person shooter game in which players primarily experience gameplay in a 3D environment from a
first-person view. The player can move around and look up, down, left, or right. The player is often aided by
United Nations Space Command (UNSC) Marines, and the crew of the ship, who offer ground support, such as following the player and mimicking their tactics, and manning gun turrets or
riding shotgun while the player is driving a vehicle. Marine AI and crew member AI are differentiated by their uniforms but also act distinctly; marines engage aggressively while crew members often cower or fire while retreating to cover. If the player kills too many of these friendly forces, they will attack the player in retaliation. Players fight enemies on foot with a combination of weapons, grenades, or melee attacks. Weapons have different traits and excel in different scenarios; for example, the assault rifle has a high-capacity magazine but is less effective against energy shields. Players can hold only two weapons at once, forcing tactical decisions about which weapons to carry. Fragmentation grenades bounces and detonate quickly, whereas the plasma grenade adheres to targets before exploding.
Halo departs from traditional first-person shooter conventions by not forcing the player to holster their firearm before deploying
grenades or melee-range
blunt instruments; instead, both attacks can be utilized while a gun is still equipped, supplementing small-arms fire.
Multiplayer A
split screen mode allows two players to cooperatively play through
Halos campaign. The game includes five competitive
multiplayer modes, which all can be customized, for between two and 16 players; up to four players may play split-screen on one Xbox, and further players can join using a
System Link feature that allows up to four Xbox consoles to be connected together into a
local area network.
Halo lacks
artificially intelligent game bots, and was released before the launch of the
Xbox Live online multiplayer service;
LAN parties are needed to reach the game's 16-player limit, a setup that was a first for a console game but was often deemed impractical by critics. Aside from this limitation,
Halos multiplayer components were generally well received, and it is widely considered one of the best multiplayer games of all time. Although the Xbox version of
Halo lacks official support for online multiplayer play, third-party
packet tunneling software provide unofficial ways around this limitation. The
Windows and
Macintosh ports of
Halo support online matches involving up to 16 players and include multiplayer maps, not in the original Xbox release. However, co-operative play was removed from the ports because it would have required large amounts of recoding to implement. In April 2014, it was announced that
GameSpy's servers and matchmaking, on which
Halo PC relied, would be shut down by May 31 of the same year. A team of fans and Bungie employees announced they would produce a patch for the game to keep its multiplayer servers online. The patch was released on May 16, 2014. == Synopsis ==