The Halo series has the historic distinction of inspiring millions of gamers to spend hundreds of dollars on new consoles just to play it. The Master Chief Collection

– which includes all four numbered entries in the series – is a great reminder that Halo succeeded not because of hype or flavor-of-the-month popularity, but because of timeless first-person shooter design. With excellent stories, sandbox battlefields, and great AI, everything holds up against modern shooters, many of which owe a huge debt to Halo’s inspiration. It’s all presented beautifully, with remade graphics and sound that allow old hands like me to relive the glory days through rose-tinted glasses, and new fans to appreciate the classics without having to look past decade-plus-old graphics. However, Halo’s memorable multiplayer modes are undermined by unacceptably unreliable and bug-ridden performance in the days after launch, to the point where I can’t recommend that you buy Master Chief Collection right now for that functionality. That’s heartbreaking, but on the bright side there’s still more than enough single-player and co-op content here to strongly recommend it for those alone.

The fan service begins right at the main menu: a flick of the thumbstick starts playing the soundtrack of the selected game. It’s a laudable touch, considering how big a part Halo’s musical scores have played in establishing the series’ memorable atmosphere.

I jumped straight to the star of the Master Chief Collection: Halo 2 Anniversary. Like 2011’s Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary is actually running two graphics engines at the same time, allowing you to instantly switch from 2004 graphics to 2014’s Xbox One coat of paint and back again at the touch of a button. Admittedly, the new facade is a bit rough around the edges – I saw occasional frozen enemies, some framerate dips, and a few long loading screens that jarringly interrupt the pace as the impressive new cutscenes cue up. And while the graphics are up to modern standards in many ways, they’re hardly jaw-dropping. Some parts of the campaign seem unnecessarily dark, for instance, and I don’t agree with all of the choices made on the new art. But the sum of Halo 2 Anniversary’s parts – most notably a classic campaign that now runs at 60 frames per second – trumps its minor annoyances.

I’m giving the audio a standing ovation. Halo 2’s already-great soundtrack has been remastered, and sounds bigger and fuller while remaining reverential and respectful to the original. It’s so good I’d listen to it in my car. Meanwhile, Chief’s chunky metallic footsteps have been added, and every weapon sound has been replaced with beefier, more aggressive versions. The new Battle Rifle and sniper rifle in particular pack a satisfying wallop, but I could’ve done without the more musical Covenant energy sword and overcharged plasma pistol effect. It sounds like the Jetsons’ car floating by. You can appreciate the contrast easily, because the audio, like the visuals, also cycles between the 2004 original versions and the 2014 remastering along with the graphics.

And you know what? Halo 2 remains a damn fine game, especially now that you can jump straight into Halo 3 and minimize the whiplash of that hard-stop of an ending. Bombastic set pieces like the battle on the Scarab, the Scorpion tank trek across the bridge, and the Banshee run near the end all mix with a plot that ably weaves the parallel stories of Master Chief and the Arbiter. Phenomenal new cutscenes not only breathe new life into the plot, but make me long for a feature-length CG Halo film. The best example is the stunning Gravemind scene. What was an unintentionally hilarious conversation with a featureless brown worm is now a dramatic confrontation with the hideous amalgamation of all Flood parasites, rendered here in disgusting detail.

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The other three included Halo games all run at 60fps too, but all suffer from the same noticeable, but far from crippling framerate dips. That doubled speed gives the campaigns and multiplayer modes alike a newfound smoothness and polished feel. All but Halo 2 run at 1080p, which still looks good at the slightly lower resolution of 1328 by 1080. There’s no going back from this smoother framerate: the Master Chief Collection is the definitive version of each of these games.

It’s great to see the lost art of local split-screen co-op multiplayer revived here, in all four games. It’s now much more playable, thanks to splitting 1080 lines of resolution between players instead of just 320, and on much larger TVs than were common a decade ago. Don’t expect to maintain 60 frames per second in split-screen, though – the dips are far more frequent this way.

Master Chief Collection’s version of Combat Evolved is based off of 2011’s Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. It can’t match up to Halo 2 Anniversary’s Xbox One-ified upgrade, but it’s a whole lot better than dusting off your 2001 Xbox to replay this still-great game. Some things, like Chief’s relatively short jump height and inability to board vehicles, feel a bit archaic now. But the original Halo’s excellent story and still-remarkable large-scale combat sandboxes – not to mention the goosebump-inducing chanting-monks theme – make the first Halo both enjoyable and relevant in 2014.

Halo 3 is probably the relative low point in the looks department. It has neither the benefit of Halo CE or Halo 2’s recent coat of Anniversary paint, nor of being fairly new like Halo 4. The resolution and framerate boosts do give it a nice, clean look, at least. And with the exception of that exacerbating “Cortana” mission, it remains arguably the series’ finest start-to-finish campaign, complete with an ending that retains all of its emotional punch.

As for Halo 4, its stunning visuals are Master Chief Collection’s most pleasant surprise. What was already a high point for graphics on Xbox 360 legitimately looks like it was made for Xbox One when running at 1080p and 60fps. Its sound design remains the best in the series, too, aside from the Battle Rifle. I wish it’d gotten the same sound thunderous effect as Halo 2 Anniversary’s version, because now it sounds like a child’s toy by comparison.

Master Chief Collection also offers Campaign Playlists, a clever way to take advantage the fact that all four Master Chief adventures are under the same roof. Whether you’re playing the last levels of each campaign back-to-back or consecutively tackling every tank mission on the disc, they’re a clever addition – particularly in local or online co-op.

Multiplayer

Tragically, online functionality has been extremely messy in the days following Master Chief Collection’s launch. I’ve seen everything from extended matchmaking wait times to being dumped into a seemingly random map and gametype option that wasn’t voted for. Additionally, crashes to desktop, freezes, parties being split up into separate teams, uneven team pairings, and custom-game oddities like mixing up the teams when time you come out of a match mean that, for the time being, you have to wrestle with Master Chief Collection just to play it online. It’s a true shame that, for now, Halo 2 was easier to play with your friends a decade ago than it is today on exponentially more powerful hardware and a more robust Xbox Live.

When it works like it’s supposed to, as it did at a pre-release review event and hopefully will for everyone one day soon, Master Chief Collection’s massive multiplayer suite makes me happy. That’s primarily because it gives me two things I’ve waited years for: the ability to play Halo 2 on Xbox Live again and the chance to play the original Halo’s groundbreaking multiplayer online (which even Halo CE Anniversary spectacularly failed to give). It’s here, and on dedicated servers, no less (in matchmaking; custom games are peer-to-peer, as they always were), with the multiplayer modes of Halo 3 and 4 thrown in for good measure.

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After several hours rotating through the four multiplayer games and their combined 100-plus maps (every DLC map is here, save for all of Halo 4’s subpar Spartan Ops, which is due to be added via a free update in December) I’ve come to reaffirm in 2014 what I believed in 2004: Halo 2 is still the king. Running around Blood Gulch, Hang ‘em High, or Sidewinder and three-shotting my friends with Halo CE’s lethal default pistol is nostalgically satisfying, but Halo 2 made such a leap in terms of gameplay and features that it makes Halo CE feel its age more than the others.

Perhaps Halo 2’s greatest accomplishment is its incredible complement of maps, many of which remain classics. Swords-only on Lockout, 1-Flag CTF on Zanzibar, anything on Midship, – Halo 2 packs 25 maps, and 90 percent of them are gems. And long-gone but not forgotten gametypes like Fiesta are lovingly resurfaced, as are the deep customization options. For instance, I resurrected an old Coagulation map variant I created 10 years ago called Covie Gulch, which replaces the Scorpion tank with the Wraith and the Warthog with the long-absent Spectre. It’s all back, with the small but annoying exceptions of no longer being able to transfer party leadership to another person in your group and the presence of open-channel voice chat instead of Halo 2’s useful proximity/push-to-open-a-channel combo.

Elsewhere, there are six Halo 2 Anniversary maps – a separate group of remakes on top of the complete original complement of Halo 2 battlegrounds – and they deserve special mention. These half-dozen built-for-Xbox One stages are, quite literally, modern takes on some of Halo 2’s best maps. They dutifully recreate the exact, welcome feel of Halo 2 in addition to the look. In fact, while it’s hard to complain about content when there’s so much of it, the six Anniversary maps are so beautiful and fun that I really wish there were more of them – particularly since they have their own matchmaking playlist on Xbox Live.

Halo 3 and 4, meanwhile, also return exactly as you remember them. For all the benefit of having every Halo multiplayer here, the downside is that it really is jarring to jump from game to game in consecutive multiplayer matches. A universal control scheme option mitigates this somewhat, but that doesn’t account for the mental and physical adjustments you have to make for the differences in jump heights, physics, weapons, etc. between each. The Battle Rifle appears in Halos 2, 3, and 4 for instance, but it is its own unique animal in each.

Finally, in the context of multiplayer, the game-unifying interface is mostly successful in helping to easily parse through so many choices. I appreciate how you can press a button to go straight back to the top menu, rather than have to repeatedly B-button your way back, step by step, if you want to go do something else. One complaint, though: it oddly fails to show you a preview of your Spartan or Elite multiplayer avatar after you build it in the very same interface.

Verdict

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.