As the Prequel to Halo : Combat Evolved is Halo : Reach the canonical groundwork on which the whole Halo Franchise heavily relies on. The Planet Reach is a major Player within the U.N.S.C. Empire, a human alliance that recently got into contact with another alien species alliance called the Covenant. Contacts between those fractions weren’t peaceful and harmonious and spiraled into violence. One the other hand are some of the U.N.S.C. colonies corrupt and operate rogue. This is why the Spartan Program, a classified Elite Soldier acquiration and training Program, was created and deployed. Each and every Soldier highly specialised and representing a major force strategically as well as on the field, individually.

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Halo : Combat Evolved

Halo was the first part of what is now a globally known multi-million dollar franchise. It connects hopes and ambitions of a young game developer crew with careful planning and cunning strategies of an international acting, stock enlisted multi-billion dollar cooperation. That said, it is easy to underestimate the impact of this game on a socio-cultural level to a whole generation. It’s careful and well implemented background story mystified an otherwise as crude and violent depicted genre especially in the early 2000’s and stood out to fighting Demons or Nazi’s, other story backgrounds introduced and used by ID Tech in that time.

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Halo : 2

Halo 2 got out of rythm. The game was announced too early, developed too hastily and released too late. To this day it has the reputation to have unnecessary lengths, stretched level architectures and pointless objectives. That said, it still has some very characteristic level designs, a capably narrated story and a coherent and consistent framework for gameplay and storytelling. It introduced double weapon (or akimbo) mode and a more agile gameplay as the result of the success of it’s predecessor and it’s multiplayer.

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Halo 3 : O.D.S.T.

Halo 3 ~ ODST is an commercial addon to Halo 3 which itself was mostly popular due to it’s Multiplayer Features, not it’s Storytelling and therefore not well received by parts of their audience, myself included. Only later Franchise Derivatives would earn worse critics than the third part of the series and indicate a further decline in gameplay experience. O.D.S.T. stood out to me, because of it’s atypicial approach to the Halo Universe both in Storytelling and in Gameplay Mechanics. Spartans are augmented superhumans with an futuristic armor-sets. Bred, taught and trained from childhood on to overcome any obstacle imaginable. Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (O.D.S.T.) are NOT like that. They are very mortal by any means and have less options on the field. On the other hand they have even fewer tolerances for mistakes and every action weighs a lot.

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