Originally conceived as a third-person real-time strategy game for Mac computers, Bungie’s Halo franchise has gone on to become among the greatest first-person shooter franchises in gambling and an incredibly important one at that. It’s not unreasonable to say that when it was not 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 efficiently altered the console first-person shooter with a match that featured an interesting sci-fi story and setting, a charismatic hero at the Master Chief, and needless to say, fluid controllers and thrilling gameplay. Over time and a half because Halo first came on the scene, the franchise is now synonomous with the Xbox brand and has established many sequels and also spin-offs of quality.

Even though the franchise isn’t as hot as it once was, using Halo Wars 2 out this past year and Halo 6 someplace on the horizon, Halo isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. As a longtime Halo enthusiast myself, I believed it would be interesting to attempt to rank each match from worst to best (omitting remasters and ranges naturally ). Apparently, that means this will be a marginally biased record, however I believe that you’ll find that I have justified all my rankings. Feel free to share your own personal position of the Halo games in the comments!

I haven’t managed to play Halo Wars two yet, therefore I have not included it here, but I’ll be sure to incorporate it in once that changes.Join Us halo combat evolved rom website Also, I’m not including Spartan Strike because it’s basically a poor version of Spartan Assault and could rank in the bottom of the record anyway.

9.

Set between the events of Halo 3 and Halo 4, Spartan Assault is a top-down twin-stick shooter that was originally launched on mobile platforms, but finally made its way to Xbox One and Xbox 360. Regrettably, the jump to consoles didn’t do much to alter Spartan Assault in the unremarkable, however competent twin-stick shooter that it is. That is a genre, after all, that has given us some incredible games over the years, including Geometry Wars, Super Stardust HD, and Resogun, along with Spartan Assault falls far short of these titles.

Even the game’s online co-op style and general presentation are definitely its best features, but at the end of the day, this is more of a passing curiosity for Halo fans compared to an adventure they’ll want to come back to. You will find much better twin-stick shooters out there which are actually worth your time and money and aren’t laded using microtransactions.

8. Halo Wars

Featuring an honest-to-goodness campaign using a good narrative set ahead of the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, as well as the typical range of multiplayer modes you would expect to find at a RTS, Halo Wars excels in accessibility and is the ideal game for those put off by much more complex RTS games located on PC. But that accessibility is also what holds Halo Wars straight back, as it is too simplistic to appeal to the more hardcore RTS crowd rather than compelling enough to sway most Halo fans from the series’ more conventional first-person shooter adventures.

Additionally, while I’ll concede that Halo Wars does an outstanding job of copying the Halo universe into a competently-made RTS, I’ve never been a massive fan of this genre, and this is part of the reason why I’ve ranked it low. However, Halo Wars did enough to spawn a sequel and also by many reports, it’s better than the original (it probably helps that this is also available on PC now out).

7. Halo 4

When Bungie left Microsoft in 2007 to partner with Activision to what would eventually become Destiny, the secrets to the Halo franchise were first given to 343 Industries, a Microsoft-owned studio, even after the release of Bungie’s closing Halo game, Halo: Reach. To mention that 343 had big shoes to fill could be a huge understatement, since they not only had to show with Halo 4 which they could craft a game which could endure to Bungie’s function, but also justify the yield of Master Chief, that had effectively”finished the battle” at the decision of Halo 3. To this end, 343 was mostly successful. One area that Bungie never exactly excelled at was crafting matches with pretty images, so it came as a bit of a surprise to see precisely how much better Halo 4 seemed compared to its predecessors (seriously, it is still a miracle how they got it running about the Xbox 360 at all).

The game’s effort has been tough, introducing players to a completely new world and race of enemies in the Forerunners, while additionally diving deeper in the franchises’ mythology. Spartan Ops was yet another enjoyable accession, giving gamers a variety of cooperative assignments to play with friends that only got better as they went together. Regrettably, some questionable design choices make Halo 4 the worst’conventional’ Halo match. While the effort featured several trendy setpieces, narratively it had been all around the map and near-incomprehensible into the typical player, relying heavily on extraneous stuff such as books, comics, and also a (admittedly pretty good) miniseries named Halo: Forward Unto Dawn to fill in the openings. On the other hand, the largest problem with Halo 4 was easily its multiplayer, which attempted to ape Call of Duty’s loadout and perk design also heavily, leading to an experience that totally missed the point of Halo’s level playing field mentality. Luckily, 343 made strides to enhance these issues with their next kick at the can, however, not without presenting a few new issues along the way.

6. Halo 5: Guardians

The first proper Halo game to appear on Xbox One, Halo 5: Guardians doesn’t seem to have enough credit. A large reason for this might need to do with 343’s regrettable decision to cut split-screen entirely in favor of achieving better visual fidelity and a higher frame rate, a decision that pops off a ton of fans who were accustomed to Halo being their go-to sofa co-op shooter (myself included). Once 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. While its campaign suffers from many of the very same problems as Halo 4’s and ends on a cliffhanger to boot up (you would think Microsoft would have set a moratorium on cliffhangers after the huge backlash into Halo 2’s ending), its flat design was a bit more powerful (a mission about the Elite — sorry, Sangheili — homeworld is a highlight) and was designed with co-op play in your mind, for better and worse.

Still, as important as Halo attempts are, the multiplayer is the main draw for most players and it’s this component that gives Halo 5 the edge on its predecessor. Thanks to a number of gameplay tweaks centered on character agility, Halo 5 will be the fastest and most fluid game in the franchise and its own aggressive manners made excellent use of these modifications by ditching Halo 4’s CoD inspirations in favour of a return to more conventional layout. To put it simply, Halo 5 provides one of the best competitive online experiences in gaming right now thanks not only to how well designed it is, however, because of 343’s commitment to consistently supplying free upgrades. In a age where players are generally expected to cover additional avenues, 343 has really taken a different route and made every new upgrade free to every one of its players. In reality, they’ve added a lot to the game because its late 2015 release that it barely resembles the match it had been launch and in some ways feels like the many fully-realized Halo multiplayer that thus far.

5. Halo 3: ODST

Beginning life as a piece of growth content to Halo 3 called Recon, ODST turned into something a bit more ambitious through development and effectively became an independent entrance in the franchise, despite the’3′ in its title might indicate. Place on Earth through the events of Halo 2, ODST switches up things by casting players not as the Master Chief but instead as’the Rookie,” a member of the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers who has separated from his group after falling into the ravaged city of New Mombasa. With a score score score by preceding Halo composer Marty O’Donnell, ODST fell players right into a rain-soaked town and place more focus on exploration compared to previous Halo matches, together with the Rookie looking town for signs of what happened to his lost squadmates. Each piece of evidence triggers a flashback mission that are normally more action-oriented than the Rookie’s, helping contribute some variety to the proceedings.

Although the Rookie nonetheless controls equally to the Master Chief, he’s no Spartan and is considerably more vulnerable because of this. This small change has a huge impact on the moment-to-moment gameplay, as players need to have a more measured approach to combat than they did in previous Halo matches, even on lower problems. ODST introduced the horde mode-inspired Firefight into the show, a co-op manner that tasks players with holding out as much as possible against waves of increasingly challenging enemies.

4. Halo Two

Halo 2 is now notorious because of its cliffhanger ending, which admittedly remains among the worst in gambling. Another principal difficulty that buffs often raise is the effort spends too much time on the Arbiter, that had been released as a new playable character in this installment, at the cost of the Master Chief. That being said, Halo 2 could have no campaign whatsoever and would still be among the very best Halo games thanks to the multiplayer, which reflected that the franchise’s first foray into online gambling.

There is a fantastic reason Halo 2 has been the most popular game on Xbox Live in its heyday, since there was just no additional multiplayer experience just like it consoles. The map collection is arguably the finest in the series, with all-time favorites like Lockout and Zanzibar producing their debut , and also the debut of new gameplay programs like dual-wielding and car hijacking gave players a lot more choices on the battlefield. You can definitely find the signals that Halo 2 has been rushed to market — probably the most evident in its deflecting texture pop-in and abrupt ending — but it is also one of the most important matches in Xbox history and provided an early blueprint for the way to do online multiplayer directly onto Xbox Live.

3. Halo: Combat Evolved

This is the game which launched the Xbox and revolutionized first-person shooter design in a way few other games have achieved before or since. What’s notable about the first Halo is it holds up remarkably well now, over 15 years after its first release. Sure, it now looks quite dated and its level design begins to fall off a cliff around the halfway point, as Bungie recycles corridor-after-corridor in order to pad the match length, but this is certainly a case where the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.

Who can forget the first time that they jumped into the driver’s seat of the Warthog and started driving around Halo, the next level in the game, or storming the beach on The Silent Cartographer? All these are gambling moments that stick to you and they have been anchored by an interesting sci-fi narrative, amazing weapon design (has there ever been a better weapon in a FPS compared to Halo’s pistol?) And, oh yeah, a ridiculously addictive multiplayer mode that was played in many a dorm room in the early 2000s. Afterwards Halo games improved over Combat Evolved’s design in many areas, but it’s tough to think of other initial kicks in the can that turned out this well.

In addition, there is no better name screen in all of gaming. That songs…

2. Halo: Reach

Bungie’s final Halo games has been one of its best, as Halo: Reach is a near-perfect sendoff in the storied developer. Even though it does not comprise the Master Chief, Reach arguably has the finest total campaign in the entire series, as each of its nine missions is still a winner and there’s no Library degree in sight to drag the whole thing down. A prequel entry detailing a few of the largest battles between humans and the Covenant, Attain details the fate of Noble Team since they desperately fight to stop the Covenant from annihilating the planet Reach. Whereas each Halo game which puts you in control of Master Chief is intended to make you feel to be an unstoppable super soldier, Reach chooses the opposite strategy and immediately becomes a match about failure. Sureyour personality (the blank slate called Noble Six) is equally as competent in battle as the Chief, but he and the remainder of his staff are fighting a war they have no expectation of winning. Though the game does end on a hopeful note, Bungie’s decision to throw players into a losing battle that just gets worse as the story progresses is a daring one and several games, FPS or have achieved the exact same amount of melancholic forfeit as Reach can convey in its campaign.

If that weren’t enough, Reach also features a few of the better multiplayer encounters in the franchise, with both Firefight and the standard suite of competitive styles present and accounted for. While Reach’s overall map choice is a little weaker compared to the likes of Halo 2 and Halo 3 along with the inclusion of armor skills was cool, but limiting — remember, this was before Running became a permanent skill in Halo — I firmly feel that Sword Base is your greatest Halo map of all time and its addition alone elevates Reach to all time status in my mind.

1. Halo 3

Halo 3 might be my overall favourite sport in the franchise, but I can’t deny it is the very best. Starting with the campaign, Microsoft promoted the game as Halo that would”finish the fight” and in this regard, Halo 3 didn’t disappoint. The game eventually gave fans the full scale Earth invasion they had expected in Halo 2 and whether the amounts put on Earth are great, the rear half of the effort moves the ante with levels placed over the Arkand also the installation that created all the Halo rings at the first place (that being said, the amount Cortana can go die forever). Following the polarizing inclusion of the Arbiter in Halo 2, it was fantastic to play a campaign as Master Chief back, however, Halo 3 additionally gave the Arbiter his due with its cooperative play, with support for up to four gamers.

Moving on multiplayer, Halo 3’s map selection proved to be a slight step back in the stellar designs of Halo 2, however, it created for it with its near-perfect equilibrium. It’s only tough to find fault with much of anything in regards to Halo 3 multiplayer, as it seems like it was designed with each enthusiast in your mind. Want to increase the ranks in competitive play? Done. Want to hang with friends and play with your friends online, together with split-screen guests to boot up? You can do this too. Heck, Bungie even figured out a way to balance out dual-wielding with the remainder of the weaponry, to the stage where either felt as viable options as opposed to way Halo 2 privileged dual-wielding at the cost of anything else but the power weapons. This is also the game that introduced Forge, which has become a mainstay style ever since.

Bungie was able to cap their Halo trilogy away with the best match in the series and that I can only expect 343 may follow suit with Halo 6, which will represent the conclusion of the Reclaimer trilogy. Until then, it’s Halo 3’s fight to lose in regards to the most effective overall Halo game.