First up: the Halo series and it's inexplicable success.
Now don't get me wrong, Halo is a fun game to play. It's got good action, a story just barely good enough to keep me interested and some of the funniest enemy dialog this side of Portal. But it is not, by any means, the Messiah of Gaming. I mean people swear by this game! So here is my laundry list of reasons Halo is mediocre.
#1 - The Story There are only so many ways to make an FPS different. They all fight the same, they all have the same linear progression, and they all have the same difficulty scaling with the occasional boss fight thrown in to shake things up. Even graphics can't be counted on these days, because if a game doesn't look ridiculously bloody fantastic, like you took a video of the Painted Desert and puts monsters with guns in it, then people will dismiss it as 'ugly' and it will be swept under the proverbial rug. So now that I've covered why the story is so important in an action game, let me get on to the meat of my argument.
Halo has the definitive sci-fi shooter story, and by definitive I mean tired. I mean how many times will a space marine save the world from vicious aliens/Nazis/Communists? Let me run through the Halo storyline, as it has been established so far.
“Humans explore solar system. Vicious aliens attack humans. Humans almost die. Humans make space marines (sorry, Spartans) to save them. Spartan marines save humanity. Spartan marines all die, except for one. Vicious aliens attack again. Last space marine (with spunky female sidekick) save humanity.”
Any of this seem familiar? Let’s see, this story has been used by DOOM, all the Quakes, all the Unreals, and countless other games before. Will I spoil anything if I tell you that the Big Man Spartan dies at then end in a cinematic designed to tug heartstrings? I’m sorry, but I don’t care that Master Chief (by the way, why does a marine have a navy rank? Does this make any sense to you?) dies, I couldn’t connect with him and his macho dialog during the game so why should I care that he died? Seriously, he only occasionally decides to grace our hovels with his deep, manly voice and then all he says are craptastic one-liners like “I’m going to give the Covenant back their bomb.” This is hardly an Oscar worthy performance.
Let me give an example of an FPS with a good story: Half-Life. Now I know that one was linear and progressive too, but didn’t I already say that all FPS’ do that? Half-Life was good because it had a different story. The humans build a dimensional portal, and start harvesting aliens from the alternate dimension. Naturally, the aliens don’t like this and warp in to kill all the humans. Perhaps a bit of an overreaction, but that’s beside the point. The point is that the humans were the aggressors. The aliens didn’t just say ‘Hey, let’s go wipe an entire species from existence today,’ they were attacked by the humans and retaliated. Compare this to Halo, where the poor little humans are painted as the underdog victims throughout the trilogy.
Now let’s move on to the action, which is where an FPS cashes in despite the howlings of story-driven purists like me who are willing to sacrifice graphics, and even some gameplay for a good story. There are just more people who play Counter-Strike than Fallout (and I mean 1 and 2).
Halo fights well. I will admit that. The separate shield and health allows for some realism while not having you spending half your time running back through the level trying to remember where that medkit was stashed, and not having to switch to grenades makes them far more useful. But the fights are repetitive. All you do is find a place to hide and, depending on which iteration of the game you are playing, either A) snipe with pistol or B) Snipe with BR or maul with dual wielding plasma pistol/anything. If you are playing on Legendary, shooting with your gun becomes pointless because you deal about 50 times more damage sneaking up behind someone and hitting them repeatedly. This tactic even works on the brutes and hunters, some of the bigger enemies in the game. When the most efficient tactic in an FPS is to not shoot, something is wrong.
Now I know that section sounded like grasping at straws and nit-picking, and I will freely admit that is was. As I said, Halo fights well and there is very little wrong to be found with its combat. But I think I did a pretty good job of it, now on to the big one!
Ah multiplayer, the saving grace of a game with a crappy story. Many a mediocre game has been saved by solid multiplayer, and Halo is no exception. Except that its multiplayer isn’t anything special. It doesn’t suck, it’s not horrible, but it’s really nothing to write home about. You have your regular set of modes, deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and king of the hill. Oddball is a fun little oddity that I haven’t seen elsewhere, and Juggernaut is also amusing to play but that mode was later perfected by Unreal Tournament 2004. Halo’s good action really comes into play in the multiplayer because that’s all it is; one big frag-fest. But this can be found in any other game that has come out since DOOM. The game starts, and then you run around killing each other in a variety of ways until one of several arbitrary win conditions is fulfilled and the game ends. Then you change the map and start again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Now you could say that this is the social aspect of the game, a good place to game with friends, and I would say that you are right except that the Xbox live community can be politely described as lively, and realistically described as a bunch of whining dickholes. For any multiplayer game, what separates the good from the bad is the community, and the Xbox live community is decidedly in the latter category. Sure you say, it’s not all bad, but that’s like saying not all lawyers are bad. 90% of them give the rest a bad name.
So in conclusion, the Halo series is fine. OK. Decent. Mediocre. In actuality if you haven’t played the game already you probably never will but I’ll say this anyway: if you like FPS’ and don’t care about the story, go ahead and play it. You’ll have some fun skipping cutscenes and killing aliens. But overall I can’t recommend the game to anyone who cares about more than the gunplay.
Also, and this is a minor note, what was up with all the Biblical references? Seriously, people damn near crucified the Chronicles of Narnia for being Biblical, but there is no mention of it with regards to Halo. Master Chief = Jesus, there’s the Ark that the Covenant are searching for, the Flood that the Ark is designed to protect humanity from, the game basically reads like the unholy love child of several different bible stories. Has no one else noticed this?

Let the flaming begin.