Halo Single Player Version 3 Mod Impressions

Halo: Combat Evolved is one of the most iconic games of all time and while the Xbox version has seen love to update it, the PC side of things has long been forgotten. This is of course with Anniversary on Xbox 360 revamping the game and then Anniversary being packaged in The Master Chief Collection. With that, a team of dedicated fans have worked on a long term mod called Halo Single Player Version 3 for over a decade. This mod completely rehauls the entire game while adding a number of improvements and new features. It's much more than just a skin if that's what your initial thoughts are as they've really dove in to change everything.

The textures are beautiful, looking gorgeous in just under native 4k assets (2560x1440) as well as improved audio. This is of course just for the single player campaign of the game, but the work that has been done here is of true passion. The enemies and characters all look familiar while being greatly enhanced. The guns feel better than ever before and there are new ones such as a chaingun to unleash on your foes. The Flood are straight up terrifying here and the Covenant have great quality to their designs.

The Halo Single Player Version 3 is an easy download, you simply grab the installer and it'll also install Halo: Combat Evolved. You do however need a CE key for the game to play and that honestly might be a rarity at this point. For the most part the game itself runs fine, but I did have initial sound issues and launcher crashes when adjusting settings. Once you do get it running, the experience is well worth it and it's a different type of Halo to play. It's not up the quality of Anniversary in terms of tweaking the geometry, but it provides something fresh that I happily appreciated. The new weapons were fun to use and while I did find some of the tweaks to be rather challenging, it was just as magical of a time as playing the regular game.

I love the Halo franchise and to see others to have this much passion as well means a lot. It completely changes the game you remember and it's nice to see the PC version get some care so many years later. Other improvements include some dynamic elements to levels that I won't spoil, armor abilities such as sprint and some badass ODST troopers. So jump the Autumn, plug Cortana in and say hello to the floating metal ball of Mr. Spark once again to rejoice in this special setup.

Read our Halo: 15 Years Later article
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