When Halo: Combat Evolved first launched for the Xbox, I was fairly impressed that someone finally managed to translate standard FPS mechanics onto a console. Some people claim that GoldenEye 007 was the first console FPS success story, but GoldenEye had wonky controls due to the N64 controller and it's single analog stick, which made aiming difficult and circle strafing nearly impossible. The Xbox, with its two analog sticks, neatly avoided this problem. Shortly after Halo's release, every console FPS borrowed its control scheme.
However, by being on a console, compromises had to be made. I do not fault Bungie for making concessions to have Halo run and play well on the Xbox. After all, they managed to basically take the mechanics of Quake and mapped them to underpowered hardware that uses a gamepad. As a result, the game speed had to be slowed down, the players moved slower, the jumps floated in air a bit longer, the weapons were easier to handle. Halo: CE is basically dumbed down Quake.
What I do fault the developers at Bungie for is the intentional game design that made Halo easier, safer, and less technical to play. A core principle of Halo's design is that children, aged 12 and up, should be able to pick up the game and play at a decently competent level, without feeling that the game was 'too hard' or that multiplayer was 'unfair'. By raising the skill floor of Halo, the consequence was that the skill ceiling got lowered at well. If you were amazing at highly competitive shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, then Halo would seem too simple, shallow and slow.
I will now enumerate everything that makes Halo a shallower, more casual experience than its "arena shooter" predecessors. Remember that Halo was intentionally designed to be similar to older shooters, but easier for a new audience of gamers.
Shields over health: Shields exist only to make it impossible for a victim to die in a single burst of fire. The attacker must first break his target's shields before he can do any real damage. Armor has been a concept in FPS games since DOOM, but in DOOM they only mitigated damage taken to your health, in Halo your shields are effectively a second health bar.
Passive Shield Regeneration: Means that now there is no consequence for taking a large amount of fire, because you can recover your full shield bar by just waiting around for a bit. Instead of incentivizing the player to run into battle, it actually does the exact opposite. On easier difficulties this means you have no real challenge and no need to play with forethought, and on Legendary difficulty this becomes a real problem as the only way to really make it past most waves of enemies is to pop out of cover, take as much damage as you can while killing one or two enemies, then ducking back into cover to regenerate your shield. This is especially frustrating against higher tier enemies, since on Legendary they will have double or triple your amount of shield, so fighting against them becomes a war of attrition while your struggle to deplete their shields before you can go in for the kill. This is what made the "noob combo" such an overused tactic, more on that later.
Weapon Reloading: You may argue that reloading a weapon is more "realistic", but the Halo game universe is one in which mankind has mastered faster than light travel, has ships that can travel between solar systems, and super soldiers that can live inside a suit of powered armor indefinitely. Star Wars has interplanetary travel, and no one needed to reload their blasters. Star Trek has the same, and no one needed to reload a phaser. You may note that the Covenant weapons, which don't need to reload, still overheat. Reloading and Overheating exist for one primary purpose - to delay an attacker from killing an opponent and to force them into an artificially vulnerable state. In effect, it slows down combat.
Against shielded opponents, you cannot kill them in a single magazine, and must reload or switch weapons in order to press your attack. Many weapons are designed around this concept and the metagame is designed around you choosing two different weapons to kill an opponent. Which leads into the next problem
Two Weapon Limit: DOOM allowed you to carry 7 weapons at a time, Quake 3 went up to 13. Halo lets you carry only two, due basically to the limitations of the gamepad, but also to restrict your options in an engagement, and to discourage you from simply switching weapons to keep killing your foes. By forcing you to carry two weapons at a time, you are pigeonholed into a certain strategy for facing your foes.
In single player this is far more frustrating than in multiplayer, since you will be carrying the weapons with the most utility most of the time, and powerful, specialized weapons become a hindrance, especially if you want to conserve their ammo for use on the more powerful enemies. You will be fighting weak, low tier enemies more often that the higher tier Elites or Brutes, but when the high tier Elites or Brutes do show up you find yourself without a good power weapon to counter them. The low tier enemies carry only pistols and other weak weapons, and the power weapons are carried only by the power enemies, so when you kill them and take their weapon, you suddenly find yourself with a power weapon but no one to use it on, but hordes of weak grunts that will waste your ammo until you run out and run into another strong enemy with a power weapon. That's just bad game design.
In multiplayer its just an artificial, cheap way to force you to stop chasing enemies, and to retreat into cover to reload and exchange weapons in order to face the next encounter. This also means that against multiple opponents, your chances of survival are lessened since you will simply run out of bullets before you can kill more than 2 foes.
And now the "noob combo." High shield enemies with powerful weapons are no fun to fight against if you don't have an appropriately powerful weapon. Luckily, the developers at Bungie gave players an easy counter in the form of the humble plasma pistol - the charged up shot can completely disable a target's shields and leave them vulnerable for any secondary weapon to finish this off. Using a moderately high damage weapon like the magnum pistol, or DMR/Battle Rifle in Halo 2 and beyond, made this a ridiculously effective strategy. Its usefulness carried over into multiplayer as well, and is derided by many players. And its easy to see why, it shortcuts the balance of the game and lets you use two simple, common weapons to outdo some of the most powerful ones. And yet if this option was not in the game, then the metagame balance would be constantly skewed towards however holds the more powerful weapon, which is why the "noob combo" persists in every Halo game. It must exist because the entire franchise's game design is fundamentally flawed.
Halo did manage to do a lot of things right. It was a technical marvel on the Xbox, it had a rich, intriguing science fiction world, the music was top-tier, the characters believable, enjoyable and fleshed out. However the moment-to-moment gameplay, the "30 second loop" of combat falls short of its peers, other FPS games that were out on PC at the same time. Unfortunately it spawned a generation of children that believe that Halo was the best shooter ever, and its wild popularity caused every subsequent FPS to ape the Halo mechanics of regenerating health and two weapon combat. Even before Call of Duty 4, Halo: Combat Evolved had such an impact that it managed to casualize the whole First Person Shooter genre.
It's still enjoyable in mild doses, but the same can't be said about its sequels. There's nothing good about Halo 2.
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