Halo Combat Evolved was the game that revolutionized the first-person shooter genre. Developed by Bungie, it was a revolutionary masterpiece for its time, and launched the game to be one of the most well-known sci-fi games in history.
Spoiler warning! Proceed at your own risk!
The Story of Halo Combat Evolved
Halo starts out with the player waking up on board a human spaceship named the Pillar of Autumn approaching an unknown ring construct. The player learns that they are the Master Chief, a super soldier that has been deployed to help combat the threats against humanity. Shortly awaking the ship gets attacked by unknown hostile forces. After getting to the bridge the captain orders you to take the ship’s AI, Cortana, down to the ringworld to get her away from the enemy. The Master Chief manages to get to one of the lifeboats and escapes to the surface of the ringworld, but the craft malfunctions and kills everyone except Chief upon landing. After rallying all other survivors that are scattered in the area, the Chief learns that the captain was taken hostage by the Covenant, an alliance of different alien species that are waging war against the humans, but the player doesn’t know why.
With a new group of soldiers, Chief lead a nighttime assault on the Covenant cruiser to break the captain out. After successfully doing so, he learns that the Covenant believe the ring is a holy weapon that can be used against humanity, and have accessed its control center. Chief is ordered to seize the control center from the Covenant, while the captain and another squad look into a Covenant weapons stash. When Chief gets to the control center, Cortana tells him that the weapon stash the captain is looking for doesn’t exist, but is something much worse. She has Chief go and stop the captain without any further explanation as to what the problem is.
When Chief gets to the location, he encounters little resistance from the Covenant forces there, who seem to be fleeing from something else. As he delves further into the structure, there are dozens of slaughtered Covenant soldiers everywhere, with no sign of the Captain’s squad. When he gets into a low room near the bottom of the complex, he finds most of the crew, but they have been killed. Using one of the soldier’s helmet cams, Chief realizes that both the human squad and the Covenant were ambushed and killed by a horde of unknown alien lifeforms, which end up bursting through the doors and attack Chief as well. The parasites ended up transforming the Covenant and humans into combat forms to further spread the infection and Chief battles his way to the surface where he encounters the remaining human survivors. After a brief firefight with the unknown parasites, he is greeted by the ring’s AI, 343 Guilty Spark, who requests Chief’s help as they are both teleported away.
Spark tells Chief that he needs to reach the center of the complex known as the Library to retrieve the Index, which can be used to activate the ring and purge the parasites. As Chief fights his way along, Spark tells him that these parasites are called the Flood, an ancient enemy that caused the destruction of his creators long ago. After securing the Index, the two return to the control room to activate the ring, but Cortana stops them after learning that the ring was created to starve the flood of their food, not destroy them. Therefore, it killed all lifeforms within its blast radius. Spark confirms this, telling them that they should have known about that. He then turns on them after Chief and Cortana steal the Index and refuse to give it back. Chief proceeds to then fight his way out and destroys three power generators to slow Spark’s progress on activating the ring.
Cortana tells Chief that she plans on using their ship’s reactor as a massive bomb to destroy the ring and prevent it from firing, but they need the captain’s implant to do so. They find out that he is on board the same Covenant ship that he was rescued from before. As Chief and Cortana fight their way aboard, they learn that the Flood are slowly taking it over, and that the Covenant sabotaged the ship in order to prevent the Flood from escaping. Once at the control center they realize that the captain has been assimilated by the Flood. Chief kills him and takes the implant, now having the means to overload their ship’s reactor.
When Chief gets to the bridge, Cortana activates the self destruct, but it is halted by Spark, who is trying to avert the ring’s destruction. Chief then goes in and manually overloads the core, gets to a fighter in the hangar bay and manages to escape before the ring collapses. Cortana says that it’s over, but Chief states that it is just the beginning…