Halo: The Master Chief Collection -- First Impressions

"I need a weapon."

At long last, the highly anticipated Master Chief Collection has been unleashed upon the masses in celebration of Halo 2's 10-year anniversary. The second installment in the acclaimed series of first-person shooters is joined by Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 3 and Halo 4 in one massive, content-packed collection available exclusively on Xbox One.

After downloading the digital version of the game (and a 15-gigabyte patch), I booted it up and was welcomed by the iconic "chanting monks" theme music that has become a staple of the franchise. Chills ensued.

I skipped the remastered rendition of Combat Evolved that was released on Xbox 360 a couple years ago, so my first order of business was to play through the classic campaign in glorious HD.

I came away quite impressed.

The game looks terrific and runs as smooth as butter. Controls are tight, soundtrack is epic and the storyline is still, in my mind, the best of any Halo game to date. Being able to instantly switch between the original and remastered versions with the click of a button is thoroughly fascinating and really highlights how far graphics have come in a relatively short amount of time.

My nine-hour journey through Combat Evolved was a fun-filled trek down memory lane - though a far more difficult one than I remembered. Even playing on normal difficulty, I must have died at least a dozen times at the hands of the Covenant and those pesky Flood. Not that I'm complaining, mind you - it was a welcome challenge that kept me on my toes but never felt harsh or unfair.

If I had one complaint about the campaign, it would be the less-than-stellar level design in some areas. Too often I found myself backtracking through the same narrow hallways, running up the same ramps and killing the same set of enemies in rooms that looked identical to one another.

I've always felt that first-person shooters should guide the player forward, creating a constant sense of progression. This isn't a game that involves looting or questing, so why am I revisiting the same locations?

Moving on from the campaign, I would like to quickly touch on the multiplayer component of the Master Chief Collection. After all, the selling point of this package is the ability to play iconic Halo maps and game modes online on a next-gen console.

Unfortunately, we can't. Not yet, anyway. Matchmaking is completely broken at this point in time, though some players have been able to find games with limited success. In my five attempts to find a match, I was only successful once and was placed in a game where - of the six players in the lobby - four were placed on one team and two on the other. Within thirty seconds everybody had been disconnected but me.

It sure was fun running around Lockout all alone with a battle rifle and nothing to point it at!

343 has issued a statement on the connection issues and will undoubtedly implement a solution. Hopefully that fix isn't too far out.

In the meantime, there's plenty of content here to keep me occupied.