Gameplay
As a first-person shooter, the gameplay of Halo: Combat Evolved is fundamentally similar to that of its peers, focusing on combat in a 3D environment that is viewed almost entirely from a character's eye view. The player can move around and look up, down, left, or right. The game features vehicles, ranging from armored jeeps and tanks to alien hovercraft and aircraft, many of which can be controlled by the player. The game switches to a third-person perspective during vehicle use for pilots and mounted gun operators; passengers maintain a first-person view. The game's heads-up display includes a "motion tracker" that registers moving allies, moving or firing enemies, and vehicles, in a certain radius of the player.
The player character is equipped with an energy shield which nullifies damage from weapons fire and forceful impacts. The shield's charge appears as a blue bar in the corner of the game's heads-up display, and it automatically recharges if no damage is sustained for a brief period. When the shield is fully depleted, the player is highly vulnerable, and further damage reduces the hit points of a secondary health meter. When this health meter reaches zero, the character dies and the game reloads from a saved checkpoint. Health can be replenished through the collection of health packs scattered around the game's levels, but the game's introduction of a regenerating shield mechanic represented a departure from FPS games of the time.
Halo's arsenal consists of weapons from science fiction. The game has been praised for giving each weapon a unique purpose, thus making each useful in different scenarios. For example, plasma weapons need time to cool if fired too rapidly, but cannot be reloaded and must be discarded upon depletion of their batteries, whereas conventional firearms cannot overheat, but require reloading and ammunition. In contrast to the large weapon inventories of contemporary FPS games, Halo players may carry only two weapons at once, calling for strategy when managing firearms.
Halo departs from traditional FPS conventions by not forcing the player character to holster its firearm before deploying grenades or melee-range blunt instruments; instead, both attacks can be utilized while a gun is still equipped, supplanting or supplementing small-arms fire. All weapons may be used to bludgeon enemies, which allows the Master Chief to silently kill opponents without alerting other nearby enemies. The Chief can also carry up to eight grenades at a time: up to four fragmentation and four plasma grenades each. Like the game's other weapons, the two types of grenades differ; the fragmentation grenade bounces and detonates quickly, whereas the plasma grenade adheres to targets before exploding, sometimes with blackly comic results.
Read more about this topic: Halo CE