There should be no introduction necessary for Halo, as it's been consistently one of the top titles on the Xbox since the console was released. But just in case you have been in hibernation for the last two years or (even more unlikely) somewhere Microsoft hasn't gotten to yet, then this first bit is for you. Halo was originally planned as a PC release but when Microsoft bought developer Bungie they also bagged Halo and decided it was to see life as a release title for their soon to be released console, Xbox. Normally console release titles have a difficult life, either not being anything special or in the case of the bigger budget titles usually as flash in the pan fads. Halo has really been something different, being not only a considerable flash but managing to keep the pan hot for two full years. Its continued success has made it not only a gaming icon but also a benchmark for many new FPS titles on any format. Finally the PC conversion is with us thanks to Gearbox Software, who are no strangers to PC shooters and responsible for the production of the Half Life add-ons. But can Halo make the impact on the PC that it made on the Xbox?

The premise to the story is in the grand scheme of sci-gi stories nothing that remarkable; the human race is threatened with extinction by the Covenant, a group of aliens who, for unspecified religious reasons, have decided that mankind is evil and needs to be eradicated. Our story begins as a massive space battle erupts between the lone human battleship The Pillar Of Autumn and a fleet of Covenant ships. Despite badly damaging or destroying a large number of opposing vessels, the Covenant begin a boarding action and this is where you come in, in the guise of Master Chief. Awakened from a cryogenic sleep, Master Chief is the last of his kind, a cyborg tailor made for combat. The brief but helpful induction with the controls is interrupted by Covenant boarding parties and after the technician you are with is killed by an explosion you must make your own way to the bridge as weapons fire flashes all around you, grenades explode and people die. Without a weapon as yet, you get your first glimpse at the danger the crew of the Pillar of Autumn are in from this fearsome group.

Once on the bridge, Captain Keyes orders you to protect the ship's AI module, a construct called Cortana, whilst the he tries to land the Autumn on a strange ring structure orbiting the nearby planet. You head off into the battle that is raging all throughout the ship as you make your way to an escape pod slaughtering all Covenant who stand in your way. Once on the planet you try to regroup with the remaining human forces that managed to escape and fight off the continuous streams of Covenant troops also hunting for the marines and more importantly for you. Along the way you discover that Halo, the planet ring structure you are on, has a purpose and many secrets; indeed, the plot twists and turns throughout the game shooting off in unexpected directions on several occasions and taking you through an adventure you couldn't even dream of.

Now I have to admit that although at no point during my time with Halo did I think or feel that this was truly a remarkable game, it never once faltered or let up in its pace. There are some really wonderful touches of innovation that bring some life back into a genre that is being stifled by low risk repeat efforts from many developers. One of these is the weapons or rather the lack of them and it's something that plays a major part in the game from start to finish. You are only able to carry two weapons at any one time along with an assortment of fragmentation grenades and alien plasma grenades. When you start to run low on ammunition you have to start hoping for a supply stash somewhere close by or start looking for weapons dropped by dispatched enemies. Being the all round war god that the Master Chief is, he has no problem in using any of the Covenant weapons, so you have no shortage of tactical options. I have to say that Halo is the only game that I have ever played that has had me picking my target based on what weapon they are using because I wanted their ammo, rather than because it's the biggest threat. The one thing that will keep your eye during the game even at the lowest difficulty is the level of ammo you're using and you will, without realising, find ways to destroy the troops fighting you in some very efficient ways in a bid to save every round possible.

The shield system is also a very nice touch and differs from just about every game I think I have ever played, in so much as it doesn't require you to actively hunt out charge points or incremental boosts to get it back to full strength. The shield the Master Chief carries self recharges back to full strength after about ten seconds but will only do so if it's not being drained by incoming fire. This means that as your shield gets low you will fall back to a defensive position so that your shield can recharge. It's a simple innovation but it provides an ebb and flow of gameplay that is more natural, if there can be anything natural about fighting aliens on an artificial, planet-sized ring structure. Once your shield is depleted you begin to lose health and normally quite fast, but even when you health is reduced to just one bar, once your shield is back up there is no part of the game that becomes impossibly difficult to do.

The vehicles offered to you do break up the gameplay very well, giving you the opportunity to play different situations in different ways. In some cases the choice to stick it out on foot and go man to man or take to the nearby vehicle and open up a larger can of whoop ass is a tough one and that is one of the great things about many of the set pieces in Halo; there is real choice and little limitation to the tactical approach you adapt in the many challenging situations you come across. So often in many FPS titles, when you come across a tough section it is all too obvious how to get through it because the scripting leads you deliberately to an almost perfect solution. Halo does this and at the same time it doesn't; its scripting gives you that same perfect solution to almost all really tough encounters, but it's the fact that it leads you to a choice of solutions, all of which have their merits and drawbacks -it is your choice, not the choice of the person that designed that particular section of the level.

The split in the types of vehicles available also underpins this tactical choice very well. The marines have the familiar Warthog dune buggy with big machine gun and the formidable Rhino tank with a very big gun, each of course offering places for your fellow marines to occupy. The Covenant get the flying craft; the hovercraft Ghost and the flying Banshee, both of which pack twin plasma cannons. You will often find an assortment of these dotted about in certain areas of the game that will give you the chance to rest your tired feet and happily go hunting for whatever you like in real style and probably with a big grin on your face when you do, especially when you're at the controls of the supremely powerful Scorpion tank.

The AI used in this game is nothing short of breathtaking in the believable and natural characteristics that it lends to all of the game's actors. The Covenant has four basic troop types of varying toughness. The Elites are robust and come equipped with powerful weapons and a shield system just like your own. This means that they will push forwards more whilst their shields hold are not averse to taking the odd hit. Once the shield begins to weaken or fails, they begin to display traits that you would normally expect of a human player; dodging shots, hiding behind cover, retreating and taking a more defensive position until their shields regenerate and then they come at you all over again. This makes your life harder and therefore as a game experience makes things that much better, because it's the sort of thing you would do in similar circumstances. The Grunts are the game's comical edge and they continued to make me smile all the way through the game. In combat they are not the be all and end all of the Covenant war machine but in sufficient numbers they can be a real pain the rear. However, when their Elite commanders are felled they turn tail and flee, waving their arms in the air and screaming hysterically. The lizard-like Jackals are a real nuisance with very tough energy shields and plasma pistols, whilst the brutish Hunters are massive, heavily armoured behemoths that take a massive pounding unless you can locate their weak spot and hit it with the right weapon.

Fellow marines act with a tactical nature that suits their role and like all grunts they naturally do the odd stupid thing from time to time. The Flood, you'll discover them in time, act very differently, with a single-minded hive mind that makes them appear to have all the AI finesse of a typical Doom baddie, but this is intentional and as they are so great in number it makes sense that they would push forward suicidally if necessary, because although you'll kill some of them, some of them will reach you if you're not very careful and don't run around and dodge. At the end of the game I was so impressed by the level of excellence behind the AI routines that I am very much getting stuck into the harder difficulty levels just for the sake of the challenge.

Halo naturally comes with the standard multiplayer options that we have all come to know and love in most FPS titles but with one massive and missed option. For the PC there is sadly no co-operative play mode, one of the biggest attractions in the console version. This is largely down to the fact that for the PC version Gearbox would have had to write all the network code for the game from scratch and that potentially could have set the release date back another year. After two years they felt, and rightly so, that we had waited long enough. Both Gearbox and Bungie have said that they would love to bring co-operative play to the PC Halo some time in the future but do not know when or how they will do this. On the whole though, there is plenty to keep most gamers happy for hours with the inclusion of many new levels and a couple of new weapons for the PC multiplayer over the console version. There are plenty of servers already up and those with low ping are more than playable; in fact there are some really good moments to be had with this title, especially when the vehicles get involved.

Halo however does suffer from a few problems and some that I feel are glossed over by the majority of the press at large. The first and the most common gripe with Halo and one I must also add my voice to is the level design. The exterior levels are nothing short of some of the best game geography I have ever played across but the interior levels are little more than the repetitious effects of a game built with Lego. It is as though someone needed to flesh out the game and so the design team decided to cut up their level into blocks, copy them many times and then put the multitude of blocks together in a repeating pattern that was in some way similar to a previous level. There are several examples of this and it has to be said that the best part of the second half of the game was marred by this Lego effect.

Next up is the lack of Co-operative play, the wait would have killed us so fair enough but at least give us an idea of when or even if it's going to happen. The controls are in line for some criticism too; they're a million times better than the joypad but the vehicles are almost impossible to control, especially the Warthog, at any speed above that of the a gentle Sunday afternoon drive. Using the mouse to steer a car has never been successful, in fact I can think of no racing game I have played or witnessed that has used the mouse as the control mechanism for steering. It's not that it's impossible to use, but it's pointlessly frustrating and certain sections of the game lose almost all of their appeal because you will inevitably have to reload and do it again and again until you are lucky or just get into the zone of it all.

Lastly, it has to be said that this game is by far too power hungry; if it ran on the Xbox then it should run happily on the modern PC but frankly it doesn't. I have a 1.6GHz Athlon XP with 512MB DDR and a 64MB GeForce 3, not a top end system I grant you but it makes reviewing the games more real world than having a super computer and getting a distorted image of real world results. Halo almost ate my system alive at certain points; I had to turn some of the options down to get an acceptable frame rate and at times even this was not enough for a visible lag between my actions with the controls and the actions on the screen. From what I have been reading I am not alone in this assessment, in fact there are many reviewers with far more powerful machines than me and they have all had a similar experience of Halo.

Graphically this title is as good as any of the titles currently available today and this from a title originally developed two years ago, impressive is the word that will frequently leap to mind during the early stages of the game as you soak in the breathtaking vistas of the Halo horizon and see it sweeping off into the distance up through the clouds and over your head in a full arc, with the planet it orbits and the system's star hanging in the sky. Weapon effects, animations, cut scenes and everything associated with the graphical nature of Halo is par excellence and will no doubt be giving many games a run for their money and be a benchmark for some time to come.

Sound is possibly the one area of the game that I could not criticise even if I wanted to, which I don't. From the expected weapon effects, to the speech of the many different characters, nothing is less than pure brilliance. The jewel in the crown (or rather Halo) is the soundtrack; despite the sci-fi setting it has an almost monastic quality with cellos and other similar string and choir vocals that have a reverence of a church experience. The people responsible for the soundtrack have hopefully been paid a year's wages as a bonus and sent off to a tropical island of their choice for a good six months in payment for the remarkable work they have produced.

To close on the Halo experience, I have to unfortunately knock it once more and it's something that I do not like doing but feel almost compelled to do, as I want to be a voice removed from the crowd. Halo scores well but not because it's a good game, rather because many of its elements are nothing short of ahead of everything else in the genre, but as a combined experience I am left rather unaffected by it. Sure, it's nice to look at and listen too and the story isn't half bad, the AI is effective and keeps the game interesting and challenging, there are some brilliant touches of innovation but it just isn't the all round brilliant game I thought it was going to be. I was very wary of starting this game full of expectation, as it normally only leads to a lessened experience so I entered into this review like a Star Wars fan on leaving the premier of Episode II. Even so Halo left me with a feeling of "so that was Halo then."

There are so many FPS titles on the PC and so many that are little more than clones of a title that went before them that it is refreshing to see a title that breaks the mould a little, but it doesn't in my opinion do enough to put it into the same category as the Half-Lifes and Quakes of this world. The gameplay is just too flat to give it on the PC what set it out among the console shooters. It's perhaps a shame that I feel this way and I know that many will disagree with me but I just somehow feel that there should have been something extra, something that was meant to be there but suddenly isn't and I do really hope that Bungie, Gearbox and Microsoft release expansions, updates and new chapters in the Halo series because I feel like it was all over too soon and missed something along the way

Halo is a great FPS title that will no doubt sit proudly in your collection but may not stand out from some of the other classics you have. You will have fun playing it and no doubt enjoy certain sections of it immensely but as a package you might feel you've played better games. Still, this is a must buy for any fan of the FPS genre; to deny yourself the chance to make up your own mind is to miss out on what Halo is really all about.

Reviewed by AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).