Season 6 is available now as the latest FREE update for Halo: The Master Chief Collection! Enjoy new content like: And with the remastered next-gen GTA V due to arrive shortly, it seems that, at least as far as video games are concerned, nostalgia is the future.XBOX GAME PASS MEMBERS – Download and play by selecting 'Halo: The Master Chief Collection', “Halo 3: ODST” and “Halo: Reach” under 'In this bundle'. It’s an absolute monolith of a package, beautifully presented for the 21 st century. If you like games that are so big you can immerse yourselves in them for months, The Master Chief Collection offers excellent value. On the subject of the latter, Master Chief Collection also allows you to tap into the multiplayer beta when that goes live. It’s a little basic in terms of special effects, but does a passable job of filling in the narrative blanks between Halo 4 and 5. Cutely, you can access terminals in the game itself which take you to relevant Halo TV material – do a bit of exploration, for example, during the Silent Cartographer mission and you will see what we mean.Īs a final gesture, the game gives you access to Halo: Nightfall, the live-action TV series produced by Ridley Scott. Halo TV is a sort of video-led web resource for Halo-fanatics, packed with info that fills in obscure characters’ back-stories, adding to the lore surrounding the universe. Certainly, the Master Chief Collection contains all the ingredients for putting Halo firmly back on the map as a multiplayer destination of choice, although it’s difficult to say at this point which iterations of the game, modes and maps the hardcore will gravitate towards. There were no detectible latency or connection issues when playing pre-release, but over the last 24-hours we’ve experienced matchmaking delays, which should be solved in the coming days. Online performance has been variable so far. It could be worse – Halo has always kept the number of online game variants pretty low, and 343 Industries does at least pull out recommended game types. All the maps and modes present and correct, leading to hundreds of options – which, frankly, is pretty bewildering and daunting to navigate unless you have a strong idea of what you like. In the early days of the Xbox, it was Halo, not Call of Duty and its ilk, that turned console-owners onto the joys of playing first-person shooters online, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection takes a kitchen-sink approach as far as multiplayer is concerned.

Best of all are the cross-game Playlists, which include such gems as the chance to play through the whole quadrilogy uninterrupted, or to play every single mission featuring the Flood, or to play all of Master Chief’s epic end-of-game escapes. So you might, for example, choose Halo 2 Anniversary’s Playlists and find all the missions involving vehicles, or all the boss-battles, in one chunk. Playlists group together missions, arranged thematically. But the development team has also added a great new way to access that vast stash of material more interestingly. Sure, you can choose the single-player campaign of each title, and play through them in sequence. Surprisingly, the play experience feels very similar when you revert to the original graphics, even with the sudden reduction in draw-distance.ģ43 Industries hasn’t just chucked the four main Halo games in a box and left us to get on with it. As with Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, you can switch between Halo 2 Anniversary’s original graphics and the remastered version at any point in the game. But the element of the package that will most excite Halo geeks is Halo 2: Anniversary.Ĭreated especially for this release, it’s a ground-up remastering job, with stunningly updated cut-scenes. Plus an awful lot more.Ģ011’s remaster of the original game, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, along with Halo 3 and Halo 4, have received light makeovers for The Master Chief Collection, each upscaling the graphics resolution commensurate with the jump to the Xbox One.

And it really has been curated: stick Halo: the Master Chief Collection’s single disk in your Xbox One, and it gives you the full single- and multiplayer elements of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary and Halo 3 and 4. Developer 343 Industries (keeper of the Halo flame since creator Bungie bowed out to make a date with Destiny) has curated it with plenty of love and not a little skill. There’s no doubt that the ambition of Halo: The Master Chief Collection vastly outstrips any previous retro remake – indeed its budget probably matches most brand new projects. On the one hand, it shamelessly invites us to wallow in the past on on the other, it’s one of the biggest Christmas blockbusters for Microsoft’s shiny new Xbox One. Halo: The Master Chief Collection, however, represents a very upfront form of reminiscence.

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