Halo: The Master Chief Collection

Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a well-crafted love letter to Halo fans with tons of engaging single-player content, but its online matchmaking issues mar the experience for competitive players.

Overcoming its deserved reputation after a notorious launch, today the Halo Master Chief Collection is a polished, super-deluxe package of content that successfully links three generations of amazing Halo games together in a way that feels like it was made by and for people who care deeply about this legendary shooter franchise. The enhancements to the campaigns make it a joy to replay Master Chief’s story (and two other UNSC tales as well), but it’s the now-smooth multiplayer that’s worth coming back to over and over again. It’s not just a collection of some of the best first-person shooters ever made, it’s a great redemption story, too.

The Master Chief Collection makes good on most of its promises. It packs in four full games’ worth of single-player and co-op action, all spruced up and running better than ever before. It saddens me that, because of its early online multiplayer problems, what should’ve been a celebration of the return of Halo’s old-school multiplayer greatness is currently an exercise in frustration. Right now we can only sit back and wait for Microsoft to fix its servers and party problems, and until then the greatness of revived and enhanced Halo 2 multiplayer is still an unfulfilled promise. Still, great games like this should never die. This collection delivers more than a huge Halo fan like myself could have reasonably imagined and, even with its (hopefully temporary) online issues, it packs an insane amount of first-person shooter greatness onto one disc. Here’s to reliving old memories and creating new ones, because maybe in 10 years from now, this Master Chief Collection will mean to some of you what Halo 2 meant to me a decade ago.

Perhaps you ought to, because The Master Chief Collection proves that Bungie’s series can last the distance. The first three Halo games have all dated to some extent, and playing them again throws up flaws you either didn’t spot first time around, or that your brain has generously glossed over. Yet it’s still easy to see why each game in this collection is considered a classic. All hold up remarkably well today.