Friday, March 13, 2020

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary


Overall, the Campaign experience in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary on PC is good. The game looks better than ever on advanced PC hardware (in particular, visual effects and lighting got large improvements). There's the occasional problem with shadow render distancing to deal with and some slight texture pop-in, but aside from that, there are no visual problems.

I experienced no input delay at all throughout my playthrough, either. Just like with Halo: Reach on PC, using a mouse and keyboard just feels like the right way to play Halo. The game is also able to run at a buttery-smooth 60+ frames-per-second (FPS) without any problems or slowdowns at all.


Things aren't all smooth-sailing when it comes to the audio, however. The worst problem is with the game's music, which will cut itself off, skip beats, overlap, or — in rare cases — not play at all. Considering Halo's music is one of the best things about the franchise, problems with it playing correctly are a bit grating to say the least. On top of this, gameplay sounds can sometimes glitch or not play either, which will definitely take players out of the moment. Also, sound effects may not echo or reverb properly.


From a gameplay perspective, things are mostly just as they are supposed to be, which is important for the game to get right. However, there are two issues with Campaign gameplay that are worth mentioning. The first is that there's a bizarre bug where the higher your framerate is, the faster your weapons become inaccurate when fired for sustained periods of time. This affects the Assault Rifle, Magnum, Plasma Rifle, and Plasma Pistol. In my experience, I found that the bug didn't hamper my gameplay experience much since perfectly hitting shots is rarely demanded of you in Campaign. To limit the impact of the bug, you can cap the FPS at 60 instead of using uncapped FPS.

The second issue in the Campaign is that sometimes, scripted events such as enemy spawns or important areas opening up can become delayed for a few seconds. This isn't a big deal most of the time, but it can get you killed if enemies spawn on top of you.


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