3/5 ★ – pixelsaturn's review of Halo: Combat Evolved.

What is there left to say about Halo Combat Evolved, really? Revered as the one that changed it all, to some the best FPS ever made still, to this day. And while it deserves that title completely, and levels like The Silent Cartographer are some of this medium's best... I gotta say... Revisiting it recently, I kinda had a bad time with a lot of it. I won't go as far as to say it's "dated", I think 90% of it holds up astoundingly well. I have a bit of a nostalgic soft spot for this game as it's the first game I ever completed... But, yeah. Man. Fuck, some of this game sucks. Like, what the fuck is the structure of this game? I read somewhere that Bungie ran out of time and budget near the end of this game's development, so the second half of the game is just the first half in reverse with a few tweaks. No idea how true that actually is, but, it definitely makes a lot of sense if it is true. What the fuck is The Library mission all about? Why is it so god damn long? Why is the difficulty all over the place in that one level? It took me a solid hour to get through this section on fucking EASY. Not that I'm incredibly skilled or anything, I'm not, but it got to a point where I started noticing that my frustration with it wasn't caused by how I was playing. It was the boring, drawn out, HORRENDOUSLY paced gameplay that was making me want to delete the thing. For all the nostalgia, the great level design in the front half and the iconic-ness of it all... Halo Combat Evolved really made me want to stop playing quite a few times. Music still slaps tho.