I have played halo 1, 2, 3, and 4 front to back on legendary. It is one of my only accomplishments as a gamer, I have completed almost no other games. No ODST or Reach for me though, because I am unlucky.

Halo is a shooter from a pre-call of duty, pre-titanfall, pre-brink, pre-mirror’s edge era. It doesn’t have really any interesting movement mechanics, and the . The grappling hook in infinite is maybe a response to this other, better variety of FPS, but I still think it kinda comes up flat. It has basically no interesting cover mechanics. Post-doom, quake, unreal tournament, and boomer shooter, though, and those had good movement, so who fuckin knows what their deal is.

No, halo’s much slower. Halo, you have a slower walk speed, your enemy projectiles are supposed to move much slower since they’re all plasma based and you’re usually offered the opportunity to have hitscan weapons. So your movement still matters, it’s just less interesting. Most of the appeal of halo comes about as a result of this slower movement speed affording more easily made levels, with more interesting level design, and more easily made enemy AI with more interesting behaviors. Basically, where other shooters make the core gameplay as fun as possible, on the player’s side, making the player a more interesting character to control and use, Halo would rather make everything else as fun as possible, everything around that core.

Most FPS’s just have like, open spaces, and then corridors, and then big rooms, and that’s basically it, because they can’t make the level geometry super complicated without screwing up the player’s movement options, or over-complicating everything since the player can either look at enemies or look at the level design and usually not at both at the same time, which is also why they mostly always try to keep you moving towards the enemies, or why unreal tournament relies so much on you memorizing the arenas.

I think this means that when most people evaluate Halo, they’re doing so by measuring it against other shooters, and against this other philosophy, and Halo obviously ends up as pretty mid when measured against that. It also doesn’t help that Halo can be pretty hit and miss with this philosophy, since this relies more on very consistently interesting changes in level design and enemy variety to keep things spicy, and this novelty tends to wear off as the series inevitably chugs along. It also doesn’t help, the number of mid shooters which followed in Halo’s wake, or are reminiscent of halo specifically because of this lack of mechanical complexity, this minimalism, but without understanding what made Halo good, was that they made up for it with a lot more hard work poured into the rest of the game.

I don’t think it would be a major mistake to call halo mid, especially on the average, and especially as the series chugs along, and there’s really just less and less to do in order to make it interesting, both in the story and in the basic design. At the same time, the series does have some pretty high highs, and probably Halo is one of the most interestingly designed first person shooters I’ve seen, because it’s so hard to see the depth at first glance.