Halo is the reason most people are buying an Xbox - and CJRavey takes a trip to the alien ring world to find out why.

Halo is good. Really good in fact. It's so astonishingly good, you may want to expire after finishing the game rather than sully your telly with any other piece of gaming.

Do you get the drift? It’s good. Now go and buy it.

But of course, with the Xbox being a shiny new and pricey piece of kit, you’ll no doubt want to know more about the game, and why it’s so good before you head to the checkout.

Halo: Combat Evolved puts you behind the gun of a specially enhanced, space suited super-marine, named Master Chief. Bar the name, which sounds a bit too much like Master Chef to me, you’re super cool and double hard – and when one of the Earth’s big battlecruisers is attacked by an alien fleet, (the aggressive Covenant, enemies of all humans) the captain decides it’s time to thaw you out.

You wake up aboard the said battlecruiser, (the strangely UK-centrically titled Pillar of Autumn), and before you’ve even had chance to have your Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, you’re being brought up to battle ready status by technicians. These helpful tecchies run you through the basic controls.

Controlling Master Chief is fairly simple, your left stick controls movement, and the right has you looking around; familiar territory if you’ve played console shooters before. If you haven’t, stay with it and you’ll soon be blasting away. The chunky Xbox buttons are perfect for quick action, with the triggers providing a satisfactory method of blowing enemies to kingdom come.

Halo may be a first person shooter – one of the most beloved genre of hardcore gamers – but the game won’t presume you know it all, nor hinder you if you do. A good example is the inverted look-pitch. This potentially newbie-confusing control issue is resolved within the frame of the story – and if you didn’t understand the last sentence, don’t worry, as the tecchy characters within the game explain it better than I do! Halo makes this process simple, by ‘calibrating’ your sight, as you target lights as if you were at some kind of science fiction opticians.

It’s shame that this dedication to not putting new gamers off isn’t carried through to the next stage of the game, as you escape from the potentially doomed craft. Abandoning ships involves some Doctor Who-style ventilator shaft action, down dark corridors which all look the same. It’s easy to get disorientated , though experienced FPSers will have no major problem.

Then your escape pod lands on the mysterious alien ring world of Halo, and petty corridor annoyances are forgotten and forgiven. Halo the world looks fantastic – meaning that Halo the game looks top notch too. All those days of jealousy, looking at your PC-playing comrades are over, at least for a while! If you want to impress upon your friend, other half or even parents, that your investment in the Xbox was worth every penny – look at the grass beneath your feet…

You can see every blade with photographic realism – you can see individual pebbles in the rocks and cliffs. It all still looks like a virtual world, but it’s a damn cool one which successfully pulls off both organic dreamscapes and angular alien structures. All full of chunky gun sounds and ligthing effects that make Blackpool Illuminations look like a tawdry festival of lightbulbs (which it is… well, you know what I mean).

The balance in Halo is just right – before your awe at the outside world can recede, you’re evacuating the area as an alien dropship approaches. Gawp too long and you’ll have a Covenant force blasting you to bits. Then you’re shooting away, and just as that initial joy runs out, you meet fellow marines. This is where surround sound is a gift – and unlike our thrifty GameCube editor, I went out and got surround – as you hear your fellow marines make atmospheric, and often hilarious comments. ‘Sorry - my bad,’ one will shout after accidentally putting a new hole into his colleague’s head. The genius artificial intelligence of the game also helps to keep the feeling of super-reality going.

Just when you think the delight will wear off, you’re in charge of a jeep-style vehicle called The Warthog. This is controlled in a unique method – point the ‘cursor’ where you want to go, and the unit’s four independent wheels will swivel to face you in that direction. It’s odd at first, (although it sounds deceptively simple) but incredibly good fun – especially when you have a marine gunner on board.

There’s alien weapons to be had, as well as the chunky human Assault Rifle. Lazers may overheat, or run out of batteries though – so keep looking to swap or upgrade your weaponry. Grenades are also available, both phaser-based grenades and the much more fun (and rare) frag grenades. Ka, and also, boom.

The plot is good solid science fiction, that you can follow and enjoy, with nods to everything from Star Wars, Starship Troopers to Larry Niven’s Ringworld novel. There are many revelations in the story, which I won’t spoil – I’ll only say that when you discover that there’s something on Halo that even the evil Covenant are cacking themselves about, things really kick off.

Developers Bungie must also be commended for making the smaller Covenant aliens act, and sound, rather like chimps. Genius. Credit is also due for the soundtrack – from the aforementioned humorous comments, to the music which seems a cross between Clannad, Queen and American Soft Rock (in a good way, believe it or not). The way in which the smaller Covenant soldiers react to you is something I’ve never really seen before – they act as us humans would, screaming ‘there’s hundreds of them’, etc. They also occasionally run away, bless ‘em.

Multiplayer extends the life, and enjoyment of the game hundredfold – as all good multiplayer modes should. Though play against a keen PC gamer as I did, and they’ll soon be missing the fast paced whirling around and firing of the PC FPS world – not to mention a mouse and keyboard. Me, I like using a controller – because I’m a dumb console boy.

Up to sixteen of you can gather together (with the aid of 4 Xbox consoles and 4 system linkleads), or if you only have the one Xbox – shame on you – then it’s four players, max. Two of you can also set off on the single player campaign, like a sci-fi Starsky and Hutch. It’s much more fun though is blowing your mates up though – especially when you throw Warthogs and other vehicles into the mix!

Several multiplayer maps are on offer, from large arenas to more intimate killing zones, each giving you a set amount of max players, and stating whether vehicles are available. Once you’ve chosen your arena (each as gorgeous as you’d expect after having played the main game) there are literally a chock load of options, from old standards such as Capture The Flag and Deathmatch, to Stalker. Nope, that last one has nothing to do with our designer and Mary-Kate and Ashley, it’s all to do with one chap being invisible, and hunting down the rest. Like Goldeneye, the replay value from the multiplayer will ensure this game is very rarely put back in its CD case!

I could rattle on all day about Halo, but I’d much rather be off playing it – so why don’t you go and do the same?