The Master Chief Collection itself is an absolute labor of love, and even for full price it feels like a steal - especially with the regional pricing; I actually want more people from my country to buy this game collection, as I'm pretty sure it's actually the best game purchase I've made this year.

To be clear, with the single purchase of the collection, you get all of Halo:CE Anniversary, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, and Halo 4; you also have the option to buy each game individually. The games are listed as DLC because Halo MCC works as a "game content manager" of sorts. When you buy only a single game, you get this "manager" for free, and that game is all the content you have for it. You can later buy each or all of the other games, and that would just add the purchased games as more content to your manager. In this way, the games are considered "DLC" by Steam so they can be under a single game entry in your library, and each game installed or uninstalled via Steam's DLC management tab.

With the new update that effectively releases Halo 4 on PC, we also get cool things like cross-play between PC and Xbox, and even keyboard+mouse support for Xbox players. Also with the new update, you choose a preferred input method, and then you can restrict whether you want only matches with players in the same platform, and whether you want only matches with the same input method as you (though it warns you: introducing such restrictions in your matchmaking can make you wait longer for a match).

Sadly, there's no split-screen multiplayer yet, but I hope it's implemented with a future update.

As for the games themselves, I'm actually getting to experience them for the first time, and at the point of this review I'm a couple levels into Halo 3 (playing the games in release order).

Halo 1 is awesome, it still has this "magic" I recall observing from afar (since I never had an Xbox) when I'd read about it or saw videos of it or listened to its iconic musical theme (which has become iconic not only of this particular game series, but video game culture in general). As some guy in YouTube said, the open levels and intelligent enemies really make the "Combat Evolved" subtitle justified. There's a sandbox-like feeling to the gameplay, where you're encouraged to make the best use of the weapons you have around and the best use of the terrain to outsmart your enemies. The enemies themselves come in different varieties, with different levels of aggression and different patterns of reaction to situations, and you have to take their quirks, strengths and weaknesses into consideration as you make split-second decisions in combat. Battlefields, and even cramped close-quarter levels, actually feel alive (...until you overcome encounters and they feel dead, haha). The biggest issue with Halo 1 is when a certain new class of enemies shows up. People criticize the first Halo for the backtracking in later levels, but to me the biggest problem with it are the encounters with this class of enemy. Where Covenant fights are interesting and with a lot of tactical depth, these other enemies just mindlessly rush you in big numbers, which can feel overwhelming but also pretty boring. Thankfully, a viable strategy is to just rush through them and get to the next area as quickly as you can. Also thankfully, I guess, this enemy is interesting and fear-inspiring in, uh... a plot-wise kind of sense. All in all, though, Halo 1 is a great game, and upon playing it you can also notice the huge influence it had on later first-person shooters, even on PC. Ah, yeah, the Anniversary graphics completely butcher the art style of the original game, but thankfully and amazingly you can switch between "remastered" and original graphics instantly at the press of a single button.

Halo 2, is awesome, too. It greatly improves on pretty much every aspect of the original game, and the Anniversary edition does a much better job with the graphics, better maintaining the original art style (though you can still switch between the two with a button, like before, and to be honest I really dig the original Xbox graphics). Halo 2 is a much more cinematic game than the original, but in a good sense: many battles feel more like big set pieces with lots of things happening around you, but they still feel like little sandboxes with plenty of tactical decisions having to be made by the player. Story-wise, there's greater emphasis on the Covenant and its driving forces, although, probably famously among old Halo fans, the campaign ends pretty damn abruptly, apparently on account of the game going through development hell back in the day, and having content cut and pushed onto Halo 3. Luckily, with the Master Chief Collection you don't need to wait for three years and buy a next-gen console to "finish the fight". Oops, sorry to break the cool effect of my last sentence before going into Halo 3, but I just recalled one thing I really, really hate about Halo 2 Anniversary: the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pre-rendered cutscenes. I get it, they look cool. But they don't feel like they belong in the game, or in a game, for that matter. Real time cutscenes will always be better. Pre-rendered cutscenes will always feel like a gimmick that undermine the actual game's graphics and create an artificial separation between game and story, which kinda goes opposite to what I reckon developers want to achieve when telling a story within a game. I really wish the H2:A devs had just remade the original cutscenes with the new graphics in real time, that would've been much better and more tasteful.

So, Halo 3, which I'm currently playing. Gameplay somehow feels smoother than Halo 2, which already felt pretty damn great, and is now spiced up by new elements like these one-use balls that give you stuff like this shield sphere, or ruin enemy (and your) shields, stuff like that; as well as stuff like being able to rip turrets off the floor and carry them around. The story also feels actually epic, and I'm invested in making humanity's last stand. Graphics are a great improvement over Halo 2 (though not over its Anniversary edition), and there's real-time cutscenes with not so old graphics, now. So far, so great.

Well, anyway, buy Halo MCC. Especially if you haven't played any of the Halo games before, like me. Also, I'm looking forward to revisiting the games I've finished, in co-op. Let's play together if this "early access" review of sorts, heh, has convinced you to buy the collection.

The Master Chief Collection itself is an absolute labor of love, and even for full price it feels like a steal - especially with the regional pricing; I actually want more people from my country to buy this game collection, as I'm pretty sure it's actually the best game purchase I've made this year. To be clear, [b]with the single purchase of the collection, you get all of Halo:CE Anniversary, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, and Halo 4[/b]; you also have the option to buy each game individually. The games are listed as DLC because Halo MCC works as a "game content manager" of sorts. When you buy only a single game, you get this "manager" for free, and that game is all the content you have for it. You can later buy each or all of the other games, and that would just add the purchased games as more content to your manager. In this way, the games are considered "DLC" by Steam so they can be under a single game entry in your library, and each game installed or uninstalled via Steam's DLC management tab. With the new update that effectively releases Halo 4 on PC, we also get cool things like cross-play between PC and Xbox, and even keyboard+mouse support for Xbox players. Also with the new update, you choose a preferred input method, and then you can restrict whether you want only matches with players in the same platform, and whether you want only matches with the same input method as you (though it warns you: introducing such restrictions in your matchmaking can make you wait longer for a match). Sadly, there's no split-screen multiplayer yet, but I hope it's implemented with a future update. As for the games themselves, I'm actually getting to experience them for the first time, and at the point of this review I'm a couple levels into Halo 3 (playing the games in release order). Halo 1 is awesome, it still has this "magic" I recall observing from afar (since I never had an Xbox) when I'd read about it or saw videos of it or listened to its iconic musical theme (which has become iconic not only of this particular game series, but video game culture in general). As some guy in YouTube said, the open levels and intelligent enemies really make the "Combat Evolved" subtitle justified. There's a sandbox-like feeling to the gameplay, where you're encouraged to make the best use of the weapons you have around and the best use of the terrain to outsmart your enemies. The enemies themselves come in different varieties, with different levels of aggression and different patterns of reaction to situations, and you have to take their quirks, strengths and weaknesses into consideration as you make split-second decisions in combat. Battlefields, and even cramped close-quarter levels, actually feel alive (...until you overcome encounters and they feel dead, haha). The biggest issue with Halo 1 is when a certain new class of enemies shows up. People criticize the first Halo for the backtracking in later levels, but to me the biggest problem with it are the encounters with this class of enemy. Where Covenant fights are interesting and with a lot of tactical depth, these other enemies just mindlessly rush you in big numbers, which can feel overwhelming but also pretty boring. Thankfully, a viable strategy is to just rush through them and get to the next area as quickly as you can. Also thankfully, I guess, this enemy is interesting and fear-inspiring in, uh... a plot-wise kind of sense. All in all, though, Halo 1 is a great game, and upon playing it you can also notice the huge influence it had on later first-person shooters, even on PC. Ah, yeah, the Anniversary graphics completely butcher the art style of the original game, but thankfully and amazingly you can switch between "remastered" and original graphics instantly at the press of a single button. Halo 2, is awesome, too. It greatly improves on pretty much every aspect of the original game, and the Anniversary edition does a much better job with the graphics, better maintaining the original art style (though you can still switch between the two with a button, like before, and to be honest I really dig the original Xbox graphics). Halo 2 is a much more cinematic game than the original, but in a good sense: many battles feel more like big set pieces with lots of things happening around you, but they still feel like little sandboxes with plenty of tactical decisions having to be made by the player. Story-wise, there's greater emphasis on the Covenant and its driving forces, although, probably famously among old Halo fans, the campaign ends pretty damn abruptly, apparently on account of the game going through development hell back in the day, and having content cut and pushed onto Halo 3. Luckily, with the Master Chief Collection you don't need to wait for three years and buy a next-gen console to "finish the fight". Oops, sorry to break the cool effect of my last sentence before going into Halo 3, but I just recalled one thing I really, really hate about Halo 2 Anniversary: the goddamned pre-rendered cutscenes. I get it, they look cool. But they don't feel like they belong in the game, or in [i]a[/i] game, for that matter. Real time cutscenes will always be better. Pre-rendered cutscenes will always feel like a gimmick that undermine the actual game's graphics and create an artificial separation between game and story, which kinda goes opposite to what I reckon developers want to achieve when telling a story within a game. I really wish the H2:A devs had just remade the original cutscenes with the new graphics in real time, that would've been much better and more tasteful. So, Halo 3, which I'm currently playing. Gameplay somehow feels smoother than Halo 2, which already felt pretty damn great, and is now spiced up by new elements like these one-use balls that give you stuff like this shield sphere, or ruin enemy (and your) shields, stuff like that; as well as stuff like being able to rip turrets off the floor and carry them around. The story also feels actually epic, and I'm invested in making humanity's last stand. Graphics are a great improvement over Halo 2 (though not over its Anniversary edition), and there's real-time cutscenes with not so old graphics, now. So far, so great. Well, anyway, buy Halo MCC. Especially if you haven't played any of the Halo games before, like me. Also, I'm looking forward to revisiting the games I've finished, in co-op. Let's play together if this "early access" review of sorts, heh, has convinced you to buy the collection.