GameCyte

While plenty of classic analog games have seen digital adaptations over the years, it’s not unprecedented for the transition to occur in the other direction. From Everquest pen-and-paper RPGs, to Street Fighter CCGs, to board games based on World of Warcraft, Doom, and even Pac-Man, tabletop gaming is no stranger to video game franchises realized in physical space. I have a strong affinity for tabletop games, myself: Earlier in my gaming career, I was employed by a very well-known board game designer, and to this day I maintain a large collection of products from the likes of Klaus Teuber, James Ernest, and more. So, when it came to my attention that one of gaming’s most prominent properties was making the jump to the coffee table, I was glad for the chance to review the Halo Interactive Strategy Game.

Created by B1 Games and Genius Products, Halo ISG morphs Bungie’s mega-franchise into a collection of figurines, cards, and modular environment pieces, encouraging players to create their own ideal turn-based FPS. With an interactive DVD included, we took Halo ISG for a test run… and found out first-hand just how badly a franchise can be translated into a new medium.

Halo ISG is not a good board game. The rules provide for a wide variety of Halo-based characters, weapons, and accessories, very few of which enact any genuine change to the overall “strategy” of the game, which is terribly unbalanced. The actual event of shooting another character is needlessly long and difficult, often leading to your own death. The few strategic options that are available to the player focus far too heavily on randomly determined outcomes, leading to a pointless and frustrating experience. All of this is a serious shame, because the production value is quite high for a board game: The figurines are very nice, molded out of child-friendly soft plastic with a fair amount of detail. The character cards are well done, containing little pieces of Halo lore and trivia alongside easy-to-read game stats. The modular board design is versatile and intuitive, providing plenty of creative opportunities to kids and amateur level designers, and a healthy dose of replay value. If Halo ISG had been a game that was worth replaying, they’d really have something.

Pitting the UNSC against the forces of the Covenant, Halo ISG is designed for two players “or teams,” though the game comes with no rules for team play. Players may choose from three game modes, and three levels of difficulty, in an effort to provide some variety to the game, though the basic gameplay of all three remains the same. Whether playing Slayer, Capture-the-Flag, or one of a few objective-based Campaign games, each player will want to use his characters to navigate the board and slaughter his opponent’s pieces. This is accomplished primarily by moving your character to be within a number of squares equal to or less than his weapon’s “range” statistic, in a straight line, relative to his target. From there, the weapon is fired, and the outcome is determined by a roll of the dice: Each character and weapon has a “strike” statistic, which are added together to determine the number of d2 to be rolled for your attack. The dice can come up with either the UNSC logo or a Covenant symbol, and if you roll more of your symbol than your opponent rolls of his own (his dice determined by his “shield” statistic), you kill him.

Statistically, this should balance the weapons and defensive capabilities in a fairly predictable manner, but as anyone who’s played a game where the main events are determined by dice can tell you, your luck will ultimately make or break the outcome. During our test run, it didn’t matter whether the UNSC player was using 5 dice, 7, or even 9 — he was consistently rolling results of 3 or less, allowing the Covenant to win every single fight, regardless of weapon, character type, or otherwise. Even the most cunning strategy in the world won’t make a lick of difference if your dice are cold in Halo ISG. Granted, this sort of one-sided outcome is a statistical anomaly, and shouldn’t come up that often over several games, but the simple fact that it can happen — especially as easily as it did — indicates the game’s over-emphasis on chance, which would seem to be anathema to something calling itself a “strategy” game.

The solution, then, would seem obvious: The best possible path to victory lies in using the best characters and collecting the best weapons, in order to maximize one’s odds, no? Unfortunately, the game’s largest downfall is in its execution of the characters’ available moves — namely, that one cannot move and fire a weapon in the same turn. Let me repeat that for emphasis: In order to shoot at an opponent in Halo ISG, a game based on a shooting and combat title, the only way to successfully execute a ranged attack is for your opponent to already be in the line of fire.

Nine times out of ten, this means that setting up a shot is akin to laying your own armored helmet on the chopping block. The weapons vary only slightly in range, which means that if you end a move where your opponent is only a few squares away in a straight line, you are now consequently in his range to shoot you on his next move. The only conceivable way to shoot your opponent in Halo ISG is to put yourself in check immediately before your opponent’s move, making ranged attacks difficult at best, and completely inadvisable at worst — a style of play which is the complete opposite of Halo’s signature guns-blazing, fast-action style.

There are a few ways around this flaw, but each one comes with a massive flaw of its own. As mentioned, there are weapons which allow one to shoot from longer ranges, but acquiring them is an entirely random process. When assembling a game board, one is allowed to distribute a collection of “weapon” tokens around the playing field, allowing characters to obtain bigger and better firepower when reaching said tokens. Unfortunately, the weapon one acquires is drawn at random from a “weapons” deck; one may well receive a selection that’s even worse than the character’s base weapon, or even a weapon that cannot be used by that character, meaning one will have to waste several turns in a row waiting for the desired firearm to appear.

There are also defensive items available for use in Halo ISG, conferring single-use abilities like invincibility from attack, cloaking devices (which essentially do the same thing), long-range grenades, and others. Unfortunately, these too are drawn out of a random pile, leading to the same “nope, not that one” tedium, only with an added twist: Mixed in with the accessory cards are a handful of “Flood” cards. When these are drawn, Halo’s fearsome Flood aliens swarm your character and instantly kill him. Sorry, no bonus item for you, you randomly lose. I’m hard pressed to think of any strategy game where the risk/reward system goes to the extreme of instant, unavoidable death. Well, let me qualify that: I’m hard pressed to think of a good strategy game.

Still, let’s assume your luck holds out long enough to acquire a decent weapon, and a defensive item to keep yourself alive long enough to attempt a shot. Chances are, you still won’t get to do it, simply because, again, you cannot move and shoot in the same turn. Once you’ve put yourself in a position where your opponent is in check, it’s now your opponent’s move, which typically means there is nothing to stop him from simply moving one space to the side, thus destroying the straight line and ruining your shot. Halo ISG is not exactly a game of chess, either, where the ability to pin down an opponent can be achieved thanks to a tight playing field and an entire army of pieces — Halo ISG puts 7 pieces on each team, and delivers a playing field the size of roughly 7 chessboards. As such, managing to prepare a shooting opportunity is going to occur based largely on your opponent’s stupidity rather than any clever maneuvering of your own; two players with any understanding of the rules will likely run into a stalemate, trading “Why don’t you come over here,” “No, you stop camping,” until someone finally makes an ill-advised move out of sheer frustration.

The only meaningful offensive move that a player can make, in fact, which usually occurs as a result of these Mexican standoffs, is the melee attack. Unlike a ranged attack, characters are allowed to move and melee on the same turn, if their move takes them into an enemy character’s space. The downside of these attacks is that the edge is supposed to go to the defender — in a ranged attack, the penalty for failure is simply a miss, but a failed melee attack results in death to the attacker, and tied dice rolls are awarded to the defender. The massive flaw, then, is that the individual character types each have wildly different “melee” stats which determine these rolls, meaning that one player’s top character can steamroll nearly the entire opposition, through melee attacks, with little risk. This was how our test run ended — with the Covenant’s Arbiter standing atop a pile of slaughtered UNSC Marines, his fortunate dice ending the game in a matter of minutes. This was indeed a sad, sad sight: A game of Halo where the only attacks worth trying did not involve any guns.

There are a handful of other flawed rules to tie the whole package together, including level design choices which can actually strand your characters in dead ends, a needlessly frustrating inability to move from a higher platform to a lower one, and a couple of varied difficulty levels whose sole changes are to make weapon acquisition even more frustrating, and to allot hit-points for ranged attacks but keep melee encounters as one-hit-kills, further de-emphasizing the gunplay. HeroClix notwithstanding, perhaps Halo is simply better served in a digital format, which may have been why B1 Games included an interactive DVD with Halo ISG. Or so you’d think, until you actually try using the DVD, and discover that it is completely and utterly useless: Not only does it add nothing to the game, it will actively hinder your enjoyment of Halo ISG.

Reading the game manual, one will see the claim that “The DVD contains a How-To-Play segment,” which we took a look at. Perhaps an “interactive” tutorial was too much to expect, but we had hoped for perhaps narration, a step-by-step demonstration, perhaps some illustrations. No, B1 Games instead used the incredible technology of DVD and delivered this:

The DVD’s How-To-Play segment is a reprint of the game manual. It’s static on-screen text, copied word for word from the manual that tells you how to use the DVD. You even have to turn the pages manually — and there’s more of them, because they couldn’t fit as much text per page.

But wait, there’s more! The Halo ISG interactive DVD also “allows you to watch attack outcomes unfold in exciting footage pulled from actual Halo gameplay.” Not only that, but the DVD will also determine these outcomes for you, including combat, weapon acquisition, and item acquisition, if you are so inclined. That’s right — finally, a board-game adaptation without any of the pesky physical hands-on activities! Instead of just drawing a card from the top of a deck, you can select “Weapon” from a menu screen, and then have to dig through the deck to find that specific weapon to keep it on hand and know its stats. Awesome! And when you attack, why go to all the trouble of adding two numbers together and rolling a handful of dice, when instead, you can:

1. Select the “Strike” option
2. On a new menu screen, select which team you are on
3. On a new menu screen, select which character type you are attacking with
4. On a new menu screen, select which weapon you are using
5. On a new menu screen, select which opponent character type you are attacking
6. On a new menu screen, select whether or not the opponent is using a defensive item

Then, after only six screens, the DVD will roll the dice for you, and show you the exciting, exclusive battle footage: Two seconds of your character firing his specified weapon somewhere off-screen, followed by two seconds of the opponent character firing in vaguely the other direction, and a poorly-voiced result screen declaring who won. Riveting!! I’m sorry, but I cannot in any way imagine a Halo fan so rabidly die-hard that this will appeal to them. This is about the worst and most needless tie-in feature I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Ultimately, it’s a huge disappointment to see a game with such potential fall so flat on its face. Halo ISG, with its wonderfully modular board, its decent variety of weapons, and its quality figurines, could have been fun to play with. If one wanted to take the time to develop their own house rules, there might even be a decent experience lurking deep beneath the surface. Throw in some move & shoot rules, take out the restrictive movement and line-of-fire elements, throw out the “Oops, you lose” cards, and pretend the DVD was never printed — in short, change everything about it – and you might have a good game on your hands.

But make no mistake, that good game is not the one that comes in the box. Halo ISG is slow, poorly explained, contains very little in the way of “strategy,” and leaves nearly 75% of the game up to random chance. It fails to deliver any the excitement or appeal of the Halo IP. The “interactive” DVD that comes with the game is possibly the most ridiculous and counter-productive board game feature I’ve ever seen. Take a pass on Halo ISG, and spend your money on either a good board game or a good video game –  you’ll find neither here.

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