Initially conceived as a high-value real time strategy game for Mac computers, Bungie’s Halo franchise has gone on to become among the greatest first-person shooter franchises in gaming and an incredibly important one in that. It’s not ridiculous to state that when it wasn’t for Halo, Microsoft’s Xbox manufacturer may not have lived past its very first console. Kicking things off with all the first Xbox launch title Halo: Combat Evolved at 2001, Bungie effectively altered the games first-person shot using a match which featured an intriguing sci-fi story and putting, a charismatic hero in the Master Chief, and also of course, fluid controllers and thrilling gameplay. Over time and a half since Halo first arrived to the scene, the franchise is now synonomous with the Xbox brand and has launched many sequels and also spin-offs of varying quality.
Even though the franchise is not as hot as it once was, using Halo Wars 2 out this season and Halo 6 somewhere on the horizon, Halo isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Apparently, this means this will be a somewhat biased record, however I think you’ll find that I have justified each of my own rankings. Don’t hesitate to share your personal position of the Halo matches in the comments!
I have not been able to play with Halo Wars two yet, so I have not included it here, but I will make certain to incorporate it in once that changes. Additionally, I’m not including Spartan Strike because it’s essentially a poor variation of Spartan Assault and would rank at the bottom of the list anyhow.by link halo 2 xbox iso website
9.
Set between the events of Halo 3 and Halo 4, Spartan Assault is a top notch twin-stick shooter that was initially released on cellular platforms, but eventually made its way into Xbox One and Xbox 360. However, the jump to consoles didn’t do much to change Spartan Assault from the unremarkable, though capable twin-stick shooter that it is. This is a genre, in the end, that’s given us some extraordinary matches through time, such as Geometry Wars, Super Stardust HD, along with Resogun, along with Spartan Assault falls far short of these names.
Even the game’s internet co-op mode and overall presentation are definitely its finest attributes, but at the conclusion of the day, this really can be more of a passing curiosity for Halo fans than an experience they will want to return to. There are much better twin-stick shooters out there which are really worth your time and money and are not laded using microtransactions.
8. Halo Wars
Adding an honest-to-goodness campaign with a good narrative set prior to the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, as well as the normal assortment of multiplayer modes you’d expect to find in a RTS, Halo Wars excels at availability and can be the ideal match for those put off with more complicated RTS games located on PC. But that accessibility can also be what holds Halo Wars straight back, as it is overly simplistic to appeal to the more hardcore RTS crowd and not compelling enough to influence most Halo fans from the series’ more traditional first-person shooter experiences.
Furthermore, while I will concede that Halo Wars does an outstanding job of distributing the Halo world to a competently-made RTS, I’ve never been a enormous fan of this genre, that is part of the reason why I’ve ranked it so low. However, Halo Wars did well enough to spawn a sequel and also by many accounts, it is even better than the original (it probably helps that this one is also available on PC now out).
7. Halo 4
After Bungie left Microsoft in 2007 to associate with Activision for what would eventually become Destiny, the secrets to the Halo franchise were given to 343 Industries, a Microsoft-owned studio, even following the launch of Bungie’s closing Halo game, Halo: Reach. To say that 343 had large shoes to fill would be a vast understatement, since they not only had to show with Halo 4 which they could craft a game which could endure to Bungie’s work, but also warrant the recurrence of Master Chief, that had efficiently”completed the struggle” at the decision of Halo 3. To this end, 343 was largely successful. 1 place that Bungie never exactly cried at was crafting games with pretty images, so it came as a small surprise to see exactly how much better Halo 4 looked compared to its predecessors (seriously, it is still a wonder how they got it running around the Xbox 360 whatsoever ).
The game’s effort has been tough, introducing gamers to a completely new world and race of enemies at the Forerunners, while additionally diving deeper in the franchises’ mythology. Spartan Ops was another enjoyable addition, giving gamers various cooperative missions to play with friends that just got better as they went along. Regrettably, some questionable design choices make Halo 4 the worst’conventional’ Halo match. Luckily, 343 created strides to improve these problems with their next kick in the can, however, not without introducing a few new problems on the way.
6.
The very first proper Halo game to appear on Xbox One, Halo 5: Guardians does not seem to have enough credit. A big reason for this may have to do using 343’s sensible decision to cut split-screen entirely in favor of achieving better visual fidelity and a higher frame rate, a decision that pissed off a slew of fans who have been accustomed to Halo being their go-to couch co-op shooter (myself included). When you get past the sting of just having the ability to play together with your friends online however, Halo 5 actually has a great deal to offer you. While its campaign suffers from many of the exact problems as Halo 4’s and ends up on a cliffhanger to boot up (you’d think Microsoft could have put a moratorium on cliffhangers following the huge backlash to Halo 2’s end ), its level design was somewhat more powerful (a mission on the Elite — sorry, Sangheili — homeworld is a highlight) and has been designed with co-op drama in mind, to get better and worse.
Still, as important as Halo efforts are, that the multiplayer is the main draw for most players and it is this component that gives Halo 5 the advantage on its predecessor. As a result of a variety of gameplay tweaks focused on character agility, Halo 5 would be the quickest and most liquid game in the franchise and its own competitive modes made excellent use of those modifications by ditching Halo 4 CoD inspirations in favor of a return to more traditional layout. In other words, Halo 5 provides one of the best aggressive online experiences in gaming right now thanks to how well made it is, however, due to 343’s devotion to regularly offering free updates. In an era where gamers are generally expected to cover extra avenues, 343 has taken another route and created every new update free to all its players. In actuality, they have added so much to the game since its late 2015 launch that it hardly looks like the game it had been at launch and in some ways feels like the many fully-realized Halo multiplayer offering to date.
Shame about that deficiency of split-screen though.
5. Halo 3: ODST
Starting life as a bit of expansion content to Halo 3 called Recon, ODST morphed into something a bit more ambitious during evolution and effectively became a separate entry into the franchise, despite the’3′ in its title might suggest. With a score score score by prior Halo composer Marty O’Donnell, ODST dropped players right into a rain-soaked city and put more attention on exploration compared to previous Halo matches, together with the Rookie looking town for signs of what happened to his lost squadmates. Each bit of evidence triggers a flashback mission which are normally more action-oriented than the Rookie’s, helping contribute some sort into the proceedings.
Although the Rookie still controls similarly to the Master Chief, he is no Spartan and is considerably more vulnerable because of this. This little change has a large impact on the moment-to-moment game, as players have to take a more measured approach to fight when they did in preceding Halo games, even on lower problems. ODST also introduced the horde mode-inspired Firefight to the show, a co-op manner that acts players with holding out as long as possible against waves of increasingly difficult enemies.
4. Halo 2
Halo 2 is now notorious because of its cliffhanger ending, which admittedly is still among the worst in gambling. Another major difficulty that lovers often raise is the campaign spends an excessive amount of time on the Arbiter, who had been released as a new playable character in this setup, at the expense of the Master Chief. That having been said, Halo 2 might not have any effort whatsoever and could still be among the very best Halo games thanks to its multiplayer, which reflected that the franchise’s first foray into online gambling.
There is a fantastic reason Halo 2 was the hottest game on Xbox Live in its heyday, since there was simply no additional multiplayer experience just like it consoles. The map collection is arguably the very best in the show, with all-time favorites like Lockout and Zanzibar producing their debut , and the debut of new gameplay systems such as dual-wielding and car hijacking gave players a lot more options on the battlefield. You can surely see the signs that Halo 2 has been rushed to market — probably most obvious in its distracting texture pop-in and abrupt ending — but it’s also among the most crucial matches in Xbox history and provided an early blueprint for the way to do internet multiplayer directly on Xbox Live.
3. Halo: Combat Evolved
Here is the game which introduced the Xbox and altered first-person shooter style in a way few other games have achieved before or since. What’s remarkable about the first Halo is the fact that it holds up remarkably well now, more than 15 years following its initial release. Sure, it now looks quite dated and its level layout begins to fall off a cliff around the halfway point, as Bungie recycles corridor-after-corridor in order to pad out the match length, but that is certainly a situation where the positives far outweigh the negatives.
These are gambling moments that stick with you personally plus that they were anchored through an interesting sci-fi story, amazing weapon style (has there been a much better weapon at a FPS compared to Halo’s pistol?) And, oh yeah, a ridiculously addictive multiplayer style that has been played in several dorm room from the early 2000s. Afterwards Halo games improved over Combat Evolved’s design in many locations, but it is hard to think of many other first kicks at the can that turned out this nicely.
Additionally, there’s not any superior title display in all of gaming. That audio…
2. Halo: Reach
Bungie’s closing Halo games was also one of its finest, as Halo: Attain is now a near-perfect sendoff from the storied developer. Though it does not comprise the Master Chief, Reach arguably has the greatest total campaign in the entire series, as each of its nine assignments is a winner and there’s no Library level in sight to drag the whole thing down. A prequel entry detailing a few of the biggest battles between people and the Covenant, Attain details the destiny of Noble Team as they desperately struggle to prevent the Covenant from annihilating the world Reach. Whereas every Halo game that puts you in control of Master Chief is designed to make you feel like an unstoppable super soldier, Reach takes the reverse approach and quickly becomes a game about collapse. Sureyour personality (the blank slate called Noble Six) is just as competent in battle as the Chief, but he and the rest of his team are fighting a war they have no expectation of winning. Though the game does end on a hopeful view, Bungie’s choice to throw gamers into a winning battle which only gets worse as the narrative progresses is a daring one and few games, FPS or otherwise, have attained the same level of melancholic forfeit as Reach can communicate in its own campaign.
If that weren’t sufficient, Attain also includes a few of the better multiplayer encounters in the franchise, with equally Firefight along with the usual suite of aggressive modes present and accounted for. While Reach’s in general map choice is a little poorer compared to the likes of Halo 2 and Halo 3 along with the addition of armor skills was cool, but restricting — rememberthis was before Running proved to be a permanent ability in Halo — I firmly believe that Sword Base would be the greatest Halo map of time and its addition alone elevates Reach to all-time status in my eyes.
1. Halo 3
Halo 3 might be my overall favourite game in the franchise, however I can’t deny it is the ideal. Beginning with the campaign, Microsoft marketed the game because Halo that could”finish the fight” and in this respect, Halo 3 did not disappoint. The game finally gave fans the full scale Earth invasion they had expected from Halo 2 and while the amounts set on Earth are good, the rear half of the campaign moves the ante with amounts placed around the Ark, the installation that generated all the Halo rings at first area (that being said, the amount Cortana can go expire forever). After the polarizing inclusion of this Arbiter in Halo 2, it was fantastic to play a campaign as Master Chief back, however, Halo 3 also gave the Arbiter his due with its combined play, with support for up to four players.
Moving onto multiplayer, Halo 3’s map choice was a small step back from the stellar designs of Halo 2, however, it made up for it with its near-perfect equilibrium. It is only difficult to find fault with a lot of anything in regards to Halo 3 multiplayer, as it feels as though it was designed with every fan in your mind. Want to climb the ranks in competitive play? Done. Want to hang with friends and play together with your buddies on the internet, together with split-screen visitors to boot? You can do this also. But Bungie even figured out a way to balance dual-wielding with the rest of the weaponry, to the point where either felt like viable alternatives rather than way Halo 2 privileged dual-wielding at the expense of anything else but the energy weapons. Additionally, this is the game that introduced Forge, which has become a mainstay mode ever since.
Bungie was able to cap their own Halo trilogy away using the best game in the series and now that I can only hope 343 may follow suit with Halo 6, that will represent the conclusion of their Reclaimer trilogy. Until then, it is Halo 3’s struggle to lose when it comes to the greatest overall Halo game.