HHH HH H HH HHH A LLLLL HH HHH AAA LLL OOOOOOOOOOO HH HHH A AA LLL OOOOO OOO HHHHHHHHHHHHHH AA LLL OOO OOO HHH HHH AAAAAAAA LLL OO OO OOO HHH HHH AA AA LLL O OO OOO HHH HHH AA AA LLL OOO HHH HHH AA AA LLLL L OOOOO OOO HHHH HHHH AAA AAA LLLLLLLLLLLLLL OOOOOOOOOOO COMBAT EVOLVED LEGENDARY DIFFICULTY GUIDE By: DeusExMachina (Neoseeker) MrWalkthrough (GameFAQs) __________________ Contents: 1. Intro 2. Storyline 3. Characters 4. Difficulties 5. Weapons -Human Weapons -Covenant Weapons 6. Enemies -Covenant -Flood -Monitor and his friends 7. Artifacts 8. Vehicles -Human Vehicles -Covenant Vehicles 9. Other tips 10. Walkthrough -The Pillar of Autumn -Halo -Truth and Reconciliation -The Silent Cartographer -Assault on the Control Room -343 Guilty Spark -The Library -Two Betrayals -Keyes -The Maw 11. Secrets 12. How to contact me 13. Legal 14. Final word 1. Intro Hi, my name is Anton Bovin and this is my fourth guide. The other guides I’ve written were for the games called Evil Twin: Cyprien’s Chronicles, Myst III, and Worms: Forts Under Siege. This guide’s name, of course, comes from my legendary writing skills. And, of course, the last sentence wasn’t serious. I don’t consider them legendary and neither will you. I’m planning to make this guide more complete than the others I saw on the Internet by adding a complete walkthrough. While the others do give some very useful advice about playing Halo, something as simple as a door you can’t find might halt your progress through the game and all those tips on killing the bad guys won’t help. But...if you haven’t passed at least one of the easier difficulties (preferably Heroic), then it’s probably not a good idea to even attempt passing Legendary. You’ll probably meet the same fate as your enemies in Easy difficulty five minutes into the game. And again. And again. Well, you get the picture. So if you don’t have a history of finishing games on their hardest difficulties, for you playing on Legendary is just a reason to die a lot. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but it’s not very practical to learn how to handle certain guns when you’re surrounded by the game’s most advanced enemies. So if you feel like you’re up to passing Legendary, this guide might help you a lot. However, if you need help passing the game on another difficulty, this is still usable. The number of enemies might just be slightly different. You may find the walkthrough unclear about precisely where to go and the number of enemies in every area, but I will include the vital information about how to stay alive and finish the game that way. There are some spoilers outside the walkthrough part, so if you care, play the game first. I’m going to try not to make everything sound too easy, while others say something like, “Take down that Gold Elite’s shield with the Pistol from long range, then get up close and kill it with the Assault Rifle”. That distorts the hardness of the Legendary difficulty and if you follow similar advice, you’ll spend a large fraction of the time seeing yourself flying through the air and restarting from the last checkpoint. ______________________________[ 2. Storyline]_____________________________ The story is set in the future, in the year 2552. Humankind is tired of living on Earth due to overpopulation and decided to build an engine that will transport spaceships at the speed of light to other planets. They built it and started going to those other planets. Everything seemed to be going all right when all contact with the colony called Harvest was lost. The human government sent the ship Argo to see what happened. Argo was never seen again. That was a cue for the United Nations Space Command to send a fleet of warships to Harvest. One surviving ship returned and reported that an alien warship was in the colony’s orbit and had obliterated the population. The war went on for thirty years during which humans got a transmission from the aliens, which revealed that they called themselves the Covenant and for some reason they didn’t like humans and decided to kill them. It so happened that because of this, the humans didn’t like the Covenant either, so they decide to board a Covenant ship and find their home world. They put the boarding party on the ship called the Pillar of Autumn, but before they could organize, the Covenant destroyed Reach, the last human citadel against the aliens. The Pillar of Autumn had to make a blind jump to a random location in space to try to lure the Covenant away. They arrived near a huge ring-like artificial planet near a gas giant, Threshold. Now they have to land there and discover what it hides... ______________________________[ 3. Characters]____________________________ Master Chief-this is the last survivor of the secret Spartan II project. From what I hear, he once was a normal kid, then the government trained him in the military, artificially strengthened his bones and muscles, implanted an interface chip into his brain and put him into the MJOLNIR armor he will wear throughout the game. The armor contains a layer of crystal that’s capable of supporting an AI construct and it also contains the Holy Grail of your survival: the shield. It regenerates a few seconds after you’re hit and can do so indefinitely. But if you’re under constant fire and you lose the entire shield before it regenerates, your health starts decreasing. Once that is gone, you’re toast. So if the shield gauge is nearly empty, take cover. If there is no cover nearby, hope for a miracle. If you don’t like hoping for miracles, like me, fight till you’re dead or “revert to saved” in the pause menu. Going back to the less important parts, Master Chief is the most important member of the Pillar of Autumn boarding party, since the rest of the Spartan II’s were killed when Reach was destroyed. You will be him for the entire game. Captain Keyes-he is 26 years into his military career and became a minor hero when he saved a colony ship from a Covenant ambush. He was also chosen to be the captain of the Pillar of Autumn and the leader of the operation to board the Covenant ship. You’ll spend a lot of the game trying to save him from the Covenant and generally looking for him. Cortana-the Pillar of Autumn’s AI core, 80 percent of the game you’ll have her inside Master Chief’s armor. When the Pillar of Autumn lands on Halo, Master Chief has to take her off the ship so that the Covenant doesn’t capture her. She will be quite handy, intercepting communications and opening doors. She’ll also give you vague hints about what to do and where to go. Marines-I thought for a long time whether to put them into the characters section, but they’re human after all and don’t really fit anywhere else. Well... they’re marines. They’re not very good at fighting and usually serve as either cannon fodder (sacrifices, if you want it that way) or a source of ammo. They tend to get themselves effectively exterminated at the start of every major battle (all the game, really) and are of no real use except for a few rare occasions where they stick around long enough to take a lot of fire that would otherwise go towards you. They almost always carry Assault Rifles and assuming you prefer to use it, the game should be made considerably easier by the marines. ______________________________[ 4. Difficulties]___________________________ This guide is for Legendary, but since I recommend playing at least one of the easier difficulties first, I’ll include a full description of them. I will start each description with the description provided in the game. Easy -“Enemies cower and fall before your unstoppable onslaught, yet final victory will leave you wanting more.” Easy is the easiest difficulty and you can literally run through, shooting the Covenant and generally having a good time. In my opinion, this is the best place to get started, but because the difficulty increases exponentially (i.e. the enemies’ strength and the damage they do to you is doubled each time you go to a harder difficulty), some people reasonably argue that it’s better to get started with Normal rather than Easy. But if you trust my opinion, start with this. Normal -“Hordes of enemies vie to destroy you, but nerves of steel and a quick trigger give you a solid chance to prevail.” This is remarkably more difficult than Easy, but the description says the truth: be patient, fire at everything that moves that’s not a human, and if you get killed too much, figure out a new way to do things. Always sneak up on enemies if you can, and use cover to dodge enemy fire. Use grenades to clear up areas that you’re finding hard to clear from where you are. Heroic -“The enemies are as numerous as they are ferocious; their attacks are devastating. Survival is not guaranteed.” This is a challenge. You’ll have to pick the strategy you will use, not just run into an area full of enemies and start emptying your guns into them. Do it and you will probably die. Always take cover and allow the shield to recharge. Reload your guns. Backtrack to a previously cleared area to get grenades, new weapons and ammo. Get back to the enemies. Flank them if possible. Use a nearby object as cover, throw in a grenade or two, and start shooting. Legendary -“You face enemies who have never known defeat, who laugh in alien tongues at your efforts to survive. This is suicide.” This in-game description doesn’t leave me much to clear up. Like it says, this is suicide. You will be dying a lot, but if you have enough determination and patience, you might actually make it to the end of the game in one piece. If your life expectancy is too low, rethink your options, start using different guns to see how good they are against the enemies you face, and of course, be as careful as possible. ______________________________[ 5. Weapons] _____________________________ Human weapons The usefulness/uselessness of these weapons varies. The only three weapons equipped with scopes are human-made, so they are good for stealthy and efficient attacks, something you’ll need in Legendary. Weapons, along with strategy, are everything in Halo. In Legendary you’ll have to fight like there’s no tomorrow, so you need to know which weapons suit your strategy best. I’ll write about every aspect of every weapon I can think of. And more as I think of them. At the beginning of each one I’ll write some statistics (to provide some vital info to those who don’t want to spend hours reading all the text) that are my opinion only. At the end I’ll write a verdict. -MA5B Assault Rifle Accuracy: 3 (out of 10) Power: 4 Clip size: 8 (60 rounds) Number of rounds you can carry: 9 (600 plus those in the weapon itself) This is a gas-operated, magazine-fed, automatic weapon. Firing 7.62 mm armor-piercing rounds, it sounds pretty good. But no, it takes something like two clips to kill a Blue Elite, assuming you get at least half of the rounds into it. And that’s hard because the Elites can dodge your shots very easily. This gun is useless against most enemies, whatever the name implies. However, it’s great to kill Flood Spores and is almost as good for Grunt disposal. Just take individual shots at each Spore, since any kind of damage destroys one and the others that are near it. As for Grunts, come up close and empty twenty rounds into it. That should kill one for good. Don’t even contemplate killing an Elite with an Assault Rifle unless you don’t have any ammo in the other gun. If you empty a whole clip into it, you still probably won’t take down its shield. While you’re reloading, it’ll take down your shield and a number of health bars. The second clip might not even be enough to kill it. One of the other things that make the Assault Rifle useless is its inaccuracy. It’s only effective against Grunts and Spores, and it’s only effective against them at close range. Otherwise, the shots just spread out and you don’t hit anything. For better accuracy, repeatedly press the trigger, so the recoil doesn’t have enough time to affect your accuracy too much. It has a useful feature: a compass that points you in the general direction of the gas giant. I don’t use it much myself, but when you’re not outside, it can be used to orient yourself in the right direction. What else...oh, yeah, these are pretty common among the marines you meet, and if you prefer this gun over the others, you can usually pick it up next to a marine that is laying on the ground with an unusually large amount of blood around him. In fact, there are practically no marines in the entire game that have something other than the Assault Rifle, and that’s the Sniper Rifle. Some carry the Covenant guns they find, but the majority just prefer to use their original weapons. Too bad. They can do a lot better with the Covenant ones. There are also some humans that carry Pistols, but those are Pillar of Autumn engineers or something. I admit that this is one of the best weapons against Banshees. They always swoop on you when they attack (that’s pretty much the only way to attack), and sometimes you can obliterate a Banshee the first time it does this. Great. It’s one of the very few highlights of the Assault Rifle. Verdict: doomed to mediocrity... do not use this unless you have no other choice. You can usually squeeze better results out of even the Plasma Pistol. -M6D Pistol Accuracy: 9 Power: 8 Clip size: 8 (12 rounds) Number of rounds you can carry: 9 (120 plus those in the clip) At first, I underestimated that usefulness of the Pistol, but then, I didn’t need the stealthy and useful kills it delivers. Now, however, I need all the usefulness of the weapons that I can get. Now, just to get this clear, the Pistol’s degree of usefulness depends on the situation. If you can choose between a Pistol and an Assault Rifle prior to going into an area full of Grunts, then, of course, choose the Assault Rifle. But, if you’re going into an area with Grunts and Elites, take the Pistol and some weapon that’s good against Elites (my choice is the Needler). Pick off the Grunts from a distance with the Pistol, then kill the Elites with the Needler. But it’s not going to be this easy. The Elites are going to put up a good fight and you probably won’t get out of this without losing at least a couple of health bars. It’s good against Grunts. One shot to the head immediately kills a Grunt, so sniping them is easy. When the situation demands that you have a Pistol, use it on Grunts instead of more valuable and/or less efficient weapons. The Pistol is one of the best weapons to use against Jackals. If you can shoot one in the head, that’s great. But sometimes, I could just shoot randomly at the Jackal and still kill it in one or two shots. Maybe I accidentally hit it in the head. When you can, shoot the cracks in its shield and the Jackal should only take a couple of shots before departing to some happier place. It’s virtually useless against Elites. If you’re trying to snipe the Elite from a distance, the Elite will fire a few shots at you, then crouch behind a rock or something until its shield recharges. This will continue until you run out of ammo, get tired and kill the Elite with something else, or die at the hands of said Elite. But don’t get any ideas, you can actually kill a Blue Elite with a single clip of the Pistol, but you can only do it when it’s charging at you from a distance and doesn’t have any cover. And when there are other enemies around, you will get killed before you know what’s happening. But when you get close to a Hunter it’s a completely different story. Believe it or not (I’d prefer you to believe it), one shot from the Pistol kills a Hunter instantly. That’s assuming you manage to get one of their weak spots. Those are the orange parts that are not covered by the armor. It’s therefore easy to snipe one down from a distance. Well, actually it’s not easy because they tend to face you when you’re within shooting range. You can still get one by shooting the very narrow gap between its head and its armor. Otherwise, wait for it to melee you. When it’s running toward you, dodge the attack, then turn around sharply and shoot the big orange part of its back. The Flood have a weakness that’s not easy to spot, but it’s there. Not only can they be killed with four or five shots, you can actually shoot off their arms. Or those things on them that somewhat resemble arms. So if you care to try this, you could make yourself some pet Flood. No, seriously, these Flood that can do nothing more than to walk around after you and take enemy fire that is intended for you. I actually never succeeded in making one, because I hit the wrong parts and ended up killing the Flood. Pretty much the only thing that will keep you from always having a guaranteed shot is the fact that the bullets don’t reach the target instantly. Try not to shoot from too far away because of that. Verdict: some people consider the Pistol the best weapon and I don’t blame them. If it’s not the best, then it’s certainly a runner-up, directly behind the best weapon. It’s perfect for sniping and kills some enemies in one shot. -S2 AM Sniper Rifle Accuracy: 10 (duh) Power: 9.99999 Clip size: 4 (just what it says- 4 rounds) Number of rounds you can carry: 7 (24 plus those in the clip) I really like this gun. But it’s a shame that you don’t get to use it a lot. It’s powerful and kills some enemies in one shot. Like the Assault Rifle, it’s gas-operated and magazine-fed. There are two scope magnification levels: x2 and x10. The scope also has a built-in night vision function activated by pressing the white button. One of my biggest complaints is the reticle. It’s very small and it’s the only thing that makes the Sniper Rifle a sniping weapon only. Of course, it’s possible to get good enough with it to use it in close range combat, but again, the reticle is small and it’s hard to tell when you’re targeting an enemy or not. The clip size is horrible. It can only hold four rounds at a time and Master Chief can only carry 24 rounds (plus those 4 in the clip). That doesn’t apply to the Truth and Reconciliation level, where you have something like 64 rounds in all. And until you get below 24, it won’t take any ammo. The scope lets you be far away from enemies and still make their ranks noticeable thinner before using something less powerful to finish them off. On Truth and Reconciliation, for example, you can use the Sniper Rifle to kill almost all the enemies before running in and risking your own hide. The Flood are absolutely immune to the Sniper Rifle. NEVER take on one of the converted Flood (Flood humans, Flood Elites) with the Sniper Rifle unless you’re totally insane or want to see how long you’ll last. The scope’s got another serious drawback, and that’s the fact that for some unexplained reason, when you take any damage while the scope is on, the scope turns off. This may often lead to your sudden demise, because it’s hard to kill anything without the scope. That applies to the Pistol and Rocket Launcher too. I’ve never actually used it on a Sentinel, but even if it works very good, it would be mighty hard to kill one because while you’re aiming, even one Sentinel will turn off the scope and half of your shield along with it. Don’t waste it on Grunts unless you know that you won’t need it anymore. The very least I recommend you to use it on are the Jackals. The manual says that a Sniper Rifle round is anti-materiel munition and can easily penetrate several armored soldiers. In English, you shoot everything behind the target as well as the target itself. Watch what’s on the other side of your target before shooting. If this is true, then you can use less ammo and still kill a lot of enemies. The Sniper Rifle rounds are visibly deflected off a Jackal’s shield. Don’t even attempt to kill one by shooting at its shield. The technique that works best is to wait until they start walking around calmly, thinking that you’re gone. You see, when a Jackal does it, its entire head is above the shield... You know what to do. A Hunter can be instantly killed by a Sniper Rifle shot into one of its weak spots. When there is an area with Hunters in it, you can sometimes hunt them down with the Sniper Rifle. Wait until it’s facing away from you, then target the orange part of its back and fire. I discovered that the melee attack is one of the fastest. You can use it to move Shades to more comfortable places in case of an enemy ambush. Let’s say you’re on a ledge with a Shade next to you and below is a narrow three or four meter deep passage. You know for a fact that there are enemies just around a turn in that passage. Melee the Shade down into the passage (it slowly moves if you melee it, so it should take a number of attacks to get it down there). Flip it if necessary, then lure the enemies out and, exploiting the narrowness of the passage, mow them down with the Shade. Oh, and you can actually do it in Truth and Reconciliation. Verdict: all right, but the clip size is the only thing that restricts it from being one of the most useful weapons. If you prefer to kill enemies before they have a chance to kill you, the Sniper Rifle is just for you. -M90 Shotgun Accuracy: 9 up close, 5-medium range, 2-long range Power: 9 up close, 5-medium range, 2-long range Clip size: 8 (12 shells) Number of rounds you can carry: 9 (60 plus those in the gun itself) Great gun. Against everything. This is how you use it: fill it with all 12 shells and kill everything in your way. The first time you’re allowed to use it is in 343 Guilty Spark level and it delivers awesome one-shot kills to the Flood. Any type of Flood. I don’t recommend using it on Spores, mainly because it’s too valuable to waste. If you see a Flood Bomb near a large number of enemies, shoot it and the enemies are done with. Saves you ammo and health. It’s good against minor Elites. A few shots kill a Blue Elite. But you have to be close to a Grunt to kill it... the reason for this is beyond me. Occasionally, you can bring down two Flood from a distance with one shot. Sometimes they won’t even get up! The Shotgun occasionally blows their limbs off, and can be used to do so instead of the Pistol. It’s going to be a miracle if you complete a level after 343 Guilty Spark without using the Shotgun. Try it on Hunters. It kills them very fast, just shoot the head until it’s dead. If it melees you (or tries to melee you), dodge, turn around, and shoot the back. Very easy. Just make sure that the other Hunter (assuming it’s alive and well) doesn’t walk/run/waddle at you from behind or starts having fun with its Fuel Rod cannon because you’ll probably die. They’re harder to kill in enclosed areas because there’s not enough room for them to move around. So they stay close to each other. That means twice as much firepower all directed at you. And that’s bad. For these situations, it’s better to have a Pistol. Wait for them to empty the Fuel Rods, then zoom in and snipe the weak spots on the front. On Normal and Easy, a couple of shots kill a Sentinel. On Heroic, it takes three to four. Imagine what it’ll be like on Legendary. In other words, don’t waste it on them. It’s much better to use it on Flood and smaller Covenant. It’s too bad that Bungie didn’t put combos into Halo. It’d be awesome if you could detonate a grenade flying through the air or lying on the ground with a shot from the Shotgun. You usually have to use Shotgun shells in colossal quantities and it helps that you can carry 60 shells in your pocket and 12 more in the Shotgun itself. ALWAYS reload before going into a room you haven’t cleared before. The more time you can fire without reloading the more chances you have of survival. Of course, if you have two shells in the Shotgun before going into an area with numerous enemies, you chances of survival is practically zero. Of course, you can empty those two shells, then take cover and come out shooting. But the enemies will know that you’re there and you won’t be able to catch them off guard again unless you wait outside for long enough. Verdict: unless you’re trying to perform some subtle maneuver which requires you to drop the Shotgun (like trying to take down an Elite’s shield and then killing it with the Pistol), carry this gun at all times. -M 19 SSM Rocket Launcher Accuracy: depends on your aiming ability, enemy movement, etc... otherwise I’d give it 2 Power: 10 Clip size: 2 (only two rounds!) Number of rounds you can carry: 3 (8 plus those in the weapon) This is good for cleaning up enemies that are harder to kill with other weapons. Those are vehicles and Hunters. You can also use it on Gold Elites. The number of rockets you can carry is even more horrible than the Sniper Rifle (only ten). But the rockets are huge, judging by the size of the wooden (??!!) crates they come in. I use this mainly on Wraiths. It’s not very easy, but if there’s a Banshee next to one or two of those Wraiths that I need to fly… well, I gotta blow them up. And this is the only choice. Otherwise the Wraiths will probably kill you. This is good against Hunters. Shoot a couple of rockets at one from the front or one from the back and it’s dead. That seems fair: a Rocket Launcher against its Covenant counterpart, the Fuel Rod cannon. This weapon has a very, very big fault. It’s called the reticle. Or rather, its size. It’s gigantic and it obscures most stuff around the target, making it nearly impossible to aim at long range. However, the last sentence of the previous paragraph wasn’t entirely true due to the fact that the Rocket Launcher is equipped with a feature that isn’t exactly mentioned in the manual, but I think there’s a vague hint of it. The feature is a x2 scope. It helps when you’re trying to take apart a Wraith from far away, but can’t quite get it because of the immensity of the reticle. It’s also helpful when targeting a Shade. Sometimes when you hit a Shade, the thing will turn over and no one is going to turn it back over, making it unusable for the Covenant. One shot is lethal to you. That makes Rocket Launcher-wielding Flood very dangerous. They’re sometimes even accurate with it. I remember a part of the Two Betrayals level where you have to assault a large field with the widest variety of enemies I’ve ever seen in one place. There were two Wraiths, Gold Elites, a couple of Invisible Elites, some Blue and Red Elites, a very large number of Grunts and Jackals, two Hunters, Flood Elites and Flood humans (one of them carries a Rocket Launcher)... a lot of stuff. Imagine getting through all those enemies just to get to one of those Banshees that you need to fly. Now, when you come to that place, wait for the Flood with the Rocket Launcher to do some damage to the Covenant and get killed. Hopefully the Flood with the Rocket Launcher will destroy or damage one of the Wraiths. Now pick up its Rocket Launcher and shoot the Wraiths. If you’ve got any rockets left, use them on the Gold Elites. The melee attack looks like it could do some big damage, but I don’t think it’s more powerful than the others. Try not to use it on Banshees. You can rarely hit them with a Rocket Launcher and the rockets are way too powerful to waste. On the rare occasion when you do manage to hit a Banshee with this gun, the flaming wreck will descend upon thee with very nasty consequences unless you jump out of the way or hide behind something (any part of the environment will do as long as it protects you from touching what was left of the Banshee while it’s still moving). DO NOT shoot anything near you with the Rocket Launcher. Say there’s an Elite running toward you. By the time you decide to fire, aim, pull the trigger, and by the time the rocket reaches the Elite, it will have covered half the distance between you and itself. That means that it will be considerably closer to you. And that means that you will be twice as likely to take damage from the shot. Of course, it depends on how far the Elite originally was before taking this pessimistic view of things. So use your common sense. Sometimes it’s good against Ghosts. If one is standing still reasonably close to you, shoot it and it might not have time to duck before taking the rocket. But if it’s far away don’t even think about shooting it. It’s uncomfortably easy for them to dodge any rockets that you fire at them. You can use this to get Elites out of cover or use the huge splash damage to kill them right there. If there’s an Elite behind a rock, shoot a rocket at the ground beside the rock to get the Elite out of there, or if the rock’s relatively thin, fire at the rock itself to kill the Elite. There’s a useful trick that can be used to improve accuracy. When you have a Sniper Rifle and a Rocket Launcher, zoom in on a target, then without moving get out the Rocket Launcher and fire. The rockets go directly through the center of the reticule, despite its size, and if you don’t move, you can send all of your stock at the same exact spot. This doesn’t work on Elites, who can dodge the rocket long before it’s even close to the Elite itself. Oh, and I know for a fact that another person has this tip in their guide. I swear on my Xbox that I discovered it myself before reading another guide for Halo. Like I said before, this weapon is great against Gold Elites. Actually it’s the best one there is against them. A Gold Elite can survive a direct hit with a rocket, but two halfway accurate shots should kill it for good. It’s hard to hit a Sentinel with a rocket, but if you do manage to do it, you will receive a reward in the form of several dead Sentinels that were caught in the explosion. When carrying a Rocket Launcher it’s better to have the other gun out. If you accidentally press the trigger with a wall directly in front of you, prepare a coffin and a death wish. Verdict: guilty. Life in prison and few seconds on the electric chair after that. The gun is just something to occupy a weapon slot if there are no big enemies around. If that wasn’t enough, you have to be close to the enemies to hit them with the Rocket Launcher at all, something I wouldn’t recommend. -M41 LAAG (a.k.a. Machine gun) Accuracy: 8 up close, 4 at long range Power: 9 up close, 5 at long range Number of rounds you can carry: none (can’t carry anything for the Machine gun) This gun is installed on the Warthog and the Scorpion. While it’s dead useful on the Warthog, the Machine gun on the Scorpion is kind of bleak when you can use the Cannon instead of it. When you have a Warthog you don’t have to have any marines to use the gun. When you’re alone, park the Warthog reasonably close to an area with enemies in it (I think it’s not hard to realize that I’m not talking about an area containing Hunters). Make sure that the Warthog is facing in the general direction of the enemies so that if you need to recharge your shield, you can jump off straight behind the vehicle. Now get into the gunner seat and mow down the enemies with the gun. It’s great against Grunts even if the Grunt is far away. When you arrive at an area full of enemies, first kill the Grunts to eliminate a major threat because three or four Grunts with Needlers can stick enough needles in you to start an explosion. It kills Elites better than almost any other weapon. Stand in the gunner seat and shower the bullets in an Elite’s direction. They’ll be too busy dodging the bullets to fire much at you while you’re quite effectively killing them. To get the best results out the Machine gun on the Scorpion, hold the left trigger to constantly fire the Machine gun and use the Cannon when necessary. The damage won’t amount to much because you’ll be probably targeting major enemies. It’s not very accurate at long range, but still more or less effective. The shots spread out due to the recoil. The bullets are very visibly deflected off a Jackal’s shield like the Sniper Rifle. But that doesn’t mean that the Jackal can stand up to the barrage of lead before rolling over to the side. When it does that, some of it is exposed. If you’re lucky, some of the bullets will hit the Jackal. All the techniques of using the Machine gun on the Warthog that I mentioned are perfectly usable during the Silent Cartographer level. You see, all of them involve you being without marines or at least without anyone in the gunner seat. On Legendary, if you follow my advice in the walkthrough, all the marines are going to get killed very early in the level. But you have to get used to that. The advice on the Scorpion is usable only during the Assault on the Control Room level, primarily because it’s the only level where you’re actually allowed to use the tank. I guess that in co-op and multiplayer you’re allowed to be in the gunner seat while your friend is driving, but here I don’t have any possibility of any kind of multiplayer, including co-op and split screen. I discovered it kind of late, but the M41 LAAG is by far the best weapon to use against the Banshees. It’s very easy to kill one without even losing any health bars. Verdict: awesome at short range, fine at long range. I can’t guarantee that you’ll like it, but it kills even Elites very fast up close. -90mm HV gun (Cannon) Accuracy: if you can aim it right, almost perfect Power: 10 Number of rounds you can carry: none (can’t carry anything for the Cannon either) The most powerful gun in the game. Absolutely. Totally. It kills two Hunters that are close to each other in one shot. That should give you some idea of how good it is. It’s the best weapon against Wraiths. It’s very long-range and can easily take out a Wraith from far away as long as it’s not hiding behind something. The splash radius is enormous and it’s not a good idea to fire at something anywhere near you. It can kill the marines sitting on the tank. The reticule is relatively small and is perfect for short and long range targeting. There’s an indicator underneath it that shows how much time is left till you can fire the next round. Well, it doesn’t exactly tell you how much time is left, it’s just four dots. When all four appear and disappear, you can fire. It’s good for destroying Banshees. Unlike rockets, the high velocity projectiles travel very fast and give you a considerable chance of shooting the Banshee down. If you see a group of bigger enemies close together, shoot them. That should kill all of them, except for some stray enemies that didn’t happen to be close enough to the shell. You can’t look very high with it. What I mean by that is that you can only look 45 degrees or so up or down from the horizontal position. That severely limits your ability to shoot. It’s one of the best weapons against Ghosts. The rockets from the Rocket Launcher are too slow to hit a Ghost and grenades are too valuable and inaccurate. I’m not sure, but I think it detonates any grenades that are close to the blast. That kind of puts you in danger of eating your own bullet/Cannon shell if you fire it too close to yourself. Assuming the tank is relatively close to a grenade you fire the Cannon close enough to detonate the grenade. This is very unlikely, but it’s possible. Verdict: extremely good, but Bungie did the unforgivable sin of not letting you have the Scorpion outside a short fraction of the Assault on the Control Room level. -Fragmentation Grenade Accuracy: all depends on how you can aim Power: 6 (it varies, but it generally does a lot of damage) Number of grenades you can carry: 3 (only 4 grenades in your pocket) I personally consider it more useful than its Covenant counterpart, but I guess that’s only because it requires less skill to use. You can sometimes pick this up around dead marines. They are not as common as the Plasma Grenade, so use wisely. This is the best weapon to use against Jackals. Just throw one at a Jackal and take cover while the grenade explodes, usually killing the alien. One of the most important advantages of the Frag Grenade is the splash damage. It’s bigger than the Plasma Grenade’s and gives you more chance of killing the enemies in the area. It has an approximately three-second timer that starts once it hits some solid surface. But it doesn’t mean that it can explode in the air. If it comes to rest immediately after it hits some solid surface, it will explode after three seconds. If it hits a wall and comes to rest on the ground underneath it in two seconds, it will be a second before it detonates. Of course, if it comes to rest immediately after touching some solid surface, the grenade will explode after three seconds. The timer is another advantage of the Frag Grenade over the Covenant version: it doesn’t give the enemies as much time to run away. This grenade is almost invisible once you throw it, but it does light up the surroundings slightly. If you’re behind cover and are planning to throw a Frag Grenade into the enemies you’re taking cover from and you accidentally throw the grenade at the object you’re using as cover, the light and the sound of the grenade hitting the object should point out to you that you have two options: run away as if a Gold Elite cornered you or lose your shield and two health bars. Again, these are rare, so use wisely. Frag Grenades are useful if you tend to use an organized approach in Halo. By that I mean, you don’t throw a Plasma Grenade somewhere and hope it sticks to an enemy. Choose where you throw it carefully. Don’t try it on Elites. Sometimes it will damage its shield, but I’ve never seen a Frag Grenade take it down completely, let alone kill the Elite. A Frag Grenade can be bounced off walls into places that are hard to reach from where you are at the moment. It can also be used to get enemies out of cover. But that doesn’t help much because the enemies will go right back under that cover. Grunts and Elites jump away when they see a grenade, so it’s not very useful against them. It doesn’t do much damage to Hunters either. But it’s more or less useful against Flood. Since it’s predictable where they go (straight at you) you can make makeshift landmines out of the Frag Grenade. Just throw one at the ground where the Flood will be in a couple of seconds and hope you get them. But if there are two or more Flood in one particular place that are too busy shooting you to move, throw a Frag Grenade at them. They don’t care, but you may, since it might make all the difference. I read somewhere that marines can be kind of erratic with Frag Grenades in Legendary. I didn’t believe it at first, but, believe me, they are. In the very beginning of the Silent Cartographer level, I tended to rush in... straight onto their grenades. They can be detonated with the Rocket Launcher, Cannon, and other grenades. Verdict: they are good against the smaller Covenant and Flood. They’re not very useful, but for some reason they’re something of a rarity. Covenant weapons The Covenant weapons are sometimes more powerful than the human weapons, but while the human weapons can be used in a more subtle fashion (sniping and some other hidden stuff like bouncing the Frag Grenade off walls and shooting off the Flood’s limbs), the Covenant guns are designed for cruder combat. You just can’t do anything with them except for running into an area full of enemies and start shooting away. By the way, some of them have hidden functions that are not easy to notice. -Plasma Rifle Accuracy: 8 Power: 7 Number of rounds you can carry: 8 (100 units of total charge-200 shots) In my opinion this is one of the best Covenant guns. It’s like the Assault Rifle, but much more powerful and accurate. The only thing that kept me far away from this weapon in Legendary is the aspect put in to compensate for its numerous advantages: overheating. It’s annoying how fast it overheats and how long it takes. It’s just a couple of seconds, some people might say, but those people probably don’t realize that a couple of seconds is more than enough to lose your shield and sometimes even your life. The Plasma Rifle battery contains 100 units of energy and each shot takes .5. So that’s two hundred shots altogether. But you can only get full Plasma Rifles from enemies in vehicles, who haven’t used it yet. It’s good for killing Spores, but the battery size is three times smaller than the Assault Rifle, so it’s three times as valuable. Still, if you don’t have an Assault Rifle, this is still usable. It’s still not perfectly accurate, but much more so than the Assault Rifle. It’s effective against the Covenant, but the Plasma Rifle is very effective against the Sentinels. It kills them very easily and fast. On Easy I could kill a Red Elite before the gun starts to dump the heat. On Legendary you don’t get such privileges. You have to use other guns to effectively kill the bad guys. Well, no. You can actually kill a Red Elite with a Plasma Rifle before the latter starts dumping heat. But that is assuming that you’re very accurate with it and there are no enemies around that can take the hit. The Plasma Rifle can be picked up from most dead Elites and some of the Flood. If you always use this, it will be pretty common. Actually, only some very rare Elites have Needlers and a slightly larger fraction have Plasma Swords. The rest wield Plasma Rifles. It doesn’t exactly have any special features except that it’s one of the two Covenant guns that overheat. That doesn’t give you a lot of advantage over your enemies, and that’s it. The same old Plasma Rifle all the time. It’s forgivably ok against the Flood. No, it’s not the best gun against them, and no, it can’t shoot their limbs or anything like that. But if you have this and the Sniper Rifle, it’s obvious what to choose. Try this on Sentinels. It’s the best weapon against them (aside from the Plasma Pistol), but you’ll run out of ammo before you notice it. Still, if you have Sentinels in the same room, use the Plasma Rifle. It disposes of Grunts and Jackals pretty slowly, but if you have a Plasma Rifle nearby, take it, kill the minor enemies, and then pick up the weapon you dropped. The Plasma Rifle is more or less accurate at long range. The reticule doesn’t light up red if the target’s too far away, but you can still use it as a last resort. Verdict: it’s useful against pretty much everything, but it keeps overheating in the middle of a battle, which is not very useful. -Plasma Pistol Accuracy: potentially-8 Power: 3 through 8 Number of rounds you can carry: 8 (100 units of charge, 200 shots in normal mode, 10 in overcharge) Hmmm... Where should I start?... Right. The Plasma Pistol’s useful in some situations, but completely useless in others. It depends. This may be your favorite gun, but it may be the one you stay away from most. This dividedness of mine is caused by the fact that I like automatic fire weapons. Yes, it’s possible to fire it very fast, but makes me tired and I need not to be. The function that sometimes makes it useful is commonly known as overcharge. Basically, you hold down the trigger and the gauge on the back of the gun will fill almost instantly. When you release it, naturally, it fires at the enemies. The beauty of it is, it can take down any energy shield (Jackals’, Elites’, and yours, not Hunters’). The enemies don’t usually dodge it, so it saves you a lot of pain by taking down Jackals’ and Elites’ shields before they have time to hurt you. And it makes finishing them off immensely easier. The part of it that makes hitting enemies a lot easier is that it also homes slightly. Once I actually shot it at a Banshee a few meters away and it homed in so well that it hit the Banshee when it was about a hundred meters away. One overcharge can shoot down a Sentinel. That’s proven at the very start of the Two Betrayals level, when you have to kill off the Sentinels with the Plasma Pistol. With no Needlers or Rocket Launchers around you can use the Plasma Pistol to make Elites a lot easier to kill. Just use an overcharge to take down one’s shield and then kill it with some other weapon. But remember: when you take down an Elite’s shield it’ll take cover for its shield to recharge. When it does that, get behind the same cover and point out to it that taking cover doesn’t always help. Like the Plasma Rifle, the Plasma Pistol battery consists of 100 units of charge. The semi-automatic mode is much more economic, requiring .5 units per shot. Each overcharge requires 11 units and rips through the battery like a Cannon shot does through enemies. The overcharge’s homing ability is the only thing that keeps me occasionally using the Plasma Pistol. Without it your foes can step aside at the last minute, wasting 11 units of your battery. You can still do it, though, but it’s made a bit more difficult. The Jackals don’t usually dodge it at all, taking the hit and then dying very easily from any weapon. The overcharges can home even if the reticule is only close to the target. That makes hitting enemies with it even easier. That’s all about the overcharges. Now going back to the normal firing mode. This is semi-automatic, and done by tapping the trigger. As I mentioned before, this can be done real fast, but I evidently don’t possess the ability to do so. Looks like the melee attack is actually done with Master Chief’s fist. That makes his inability to melee when he’s without weapons inexcusable. Jackals, some Grunts, and some Flood have this gun. And since the Grunts are the most common enemy in the entire game, that should make getting it pretty easy. Verdict: I don’t use it a lot, but sometimes it does the jobs no other weapon can do by taking down shields. -Needler Accuracy: 10 (highlight of this gun) Power: can be up to 9 Clip size: 8 (20 rounds in a clip) Number of rounds you can carry: 8 (80 plus those in the clip) This gun is kind of weird. Basically it shoots glowing purple rounds that somehow home in on the target and stick to it. After a couple of seconds they kind of explode with the sound of breaking glass. The Needler keeps its ammo in clips, like the human weapons. The rounds are usually collected from some dead Grunts’ Needlers. But there are clips for the Needler that are found only in the 343 Guilty Spark level. The Needlers lying on the ground are pretty abundant, especially around dead Grunts. The Needler is one of the best weapons against Elites. That’s because if you stick six or more needles into an enemy, they explode on a big scale. And I mean it, two or three of these explosions kill a Gold Elite. Empty a clip into one and it’s dead. If there’s an Elite with a Needler, take cover and pray. I think that these are only Blue Elites, but I may be wrong. Oh, and I found two Red Elites with Needlers in Easy, but I never saw any in Legendary. Anyway, these Elites fire around ten needles in you at once and that could easily take down your shield. Dodge them if you can. Take a Needler yourself and stick a clip into the Elite. The Needler has an interesting property about it, which is those crystals/needles on the top. As you fire a round, one of them will drop slightly. As you empty the clip, they become noticeably smaller. When the 20 rounds are gone, the crystals are gone too. The Flood often carry Needlers. Beware those. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to dodge the needles so they don’t start an explosion, but you may not be able to do it. But even without an explosion they can decrease your shield dramatically. When you see one, take cover behind some object (preferably one set into a wall by one end so it can’t flank you) and wait for it to come after you. When you see it, kill it with a Shotgun if you have one or at least a Pistol. Most Grunts carry Needlers in Legendary. Try not to take on more than two or three at a time in case something bigger decides to come your way. Learn how many explosions are needed to kill each enemy. At the moment I’m passing The Library level, so I’m no longer using the Needler (it’s no use against the Flood, they just keep going at you and using your own needles against you), but to use it more economically on non-Flood levels you need to learn that. It’s kind of satisfying to stick a clip or two into a Hunter and watch them explode. They don’t do a lot of damage, but they jerk the Hunter momentarily, giving you something of an advantage. The needles bounce off the Hunters’ shield, so don’t try this from far away. It’ll kill you before you do any damage to it. You can also use corpses on the ground to make makeshift landmines. Say there are enemies running toward you and there’s a corpse on the ground between you and them. Fire off six or twelve shots into the body and in a couple of seconds it will explode. The explosions detonate all nearby grenades lying on the ground. It’s kind of hard but possible to use it for unexpected attacks. The needles bounce off the Jackals’ shields, so the Needler’s useless against them. On the rare occasion when you manage to hit one with a couple of needles it’s cheaper for you to just use grenades. It’ll do you a lot more damage than you’ll do to it. Although the tracking ability’s a lot better than the Plasma Pistol’s, this is still useless against Banshees. The Banshees are slow, but still fast enough to easily dodge your needles. They will explode before they reach the aircraft. Verdict: use only in appropriate situations and I certainly don’t recommend taking it everywhere with you. Use it on Elites and maybe Hunters if you can afford to. -Fuel Rod cannon Accuracy: 4 Power: 9 Number of rounds you can carry: can’t carry anything with the Fuel Rod cannon It sounds kinda nuclear... looks like the Covenant doesn’t care about environment pollution. Although it sounds and looks more powerful then the Rocket Launcher, it’s really not. But it’s still the closest. My only complaint is the fact that you only get to use it on the Banshee because the Fuel Rods the Grunts carry self-destruct after the legal owner is dead and the Hunters’ Fuel Rods are integrated straight into their armor. But that still doesn’t explain why Master Chief can’t just rip it out. It’s good against vehicles, but since the vehicles it’s usually used on tend to contain you, that’s kind of not good news. But you can still use it on other Banshees (you’ll get a chance to do it in the Two Betrayals level). Although the Fuel Rod cannons are not a serious threat to a Wraith, they can still take one down. All it takes is time. It’s useful against infantry. Don’t try to take out a Hunter with a Fuel Rod cannon, but it works pretty well against Grunts, Jackals, and the weaker Elites. Unlike the Rocket Launcher, mother gravity has some effect on the Fuel Rod projectiles. Remember that when you use the Fuel Rod on a Banshee. Enemy Banshees only use the Fuel Rod cannon to extract you out of vehicles and gun turrets. That’s a relief. Otherwise it would be much harder to shoot the Banshees down. I’ve been directly hit by a Fuel Rod cannon a couple of times and discovered that it’s not lethal. But it does shatter your shield and a two health bars. Most of the damage you’ll be taking from the Fuel Rod cannons will be splash damage. The Hunters usually are not very accurate with it. The Grunts carrying Fuel Rods are even less accurate. All that seems to matter to them is to carry it upright and fire. I’ve never been as much as scratched by a Grunt carrying a Fuel Rod cannon. And you can use them to hurt their own comrades. Kill a Grunt with a Fuel Rod cannon when there are enemies around and the cannon will detonate after a few seconds, killing or at least everyone nearby. The range of the Fuel Rods is practically unlimited, as long as you can see the target. Again, the projectiles drop slightly, so you usually have to aim slightly higher than the target. Gold Elites are one of the hardest targets to kill with the Fuel Rod cannon. Believe me, even on Heroic one of these things can survive a direct Fuel Rod blast with some shield left. Verdict: not the best weapon, but it might have been if you could have carried it around with you outside of a Banshee. -Shade Accuracy: 6 Power: 9 Number of rounds you can carry: infinite This is technically a gun turret, but since all it does is stand in one place fulfilling its role as a gun turret until someone shoots its organic contents out of it, I decided to list it as a weapon only. To be clear, this weapon is not only installed on the turret, it’s also available on the Covenant Dropship. It can be a pain if there’s one around, but it’s easy to dodge it, especially from a distance. Don’t try to use it when you’re surrounded by the Flood. I once tried. And I actually used it for five seconds before they turned it over. It doesn’t do much damage to them, but the Flood will kill you very easily. All right. I wasn’t fair in the last paragraph. It’s actually very good if the Flood are coming from one direction. The four energy bursts that shoot at once kill them very fast. They just keep going at you, so all you have to do is hold down the trigger. But again, they have to come from only one direction because the slow rotation speed of the turret will make it impossible to concentrate on two sides at once. Note that although the Spores attach themselves to the turret and appear to suck something out of it, they don’t do any damage. When you’ve disposed of the bigger Flood, jump off and melee them to cause a chain reaction. Let’s say there’s a Shade with a Grunt in it and next to it is a Wraith. That eliminates the possibility of using most weapons. The Shade can actually do more damage than the Wraith, because it’s easy to avoid the Wraith’s weapon and the same can’t be said about the Shade when you’re close. If you’re out in the open with no place to hide, the Shade is almost guaranteed to kill you. Shoot one with a Rocket Launcher to turn it over or you can try to stick a Plasma Grenade to it. As I mentioned before, Shades can be meleed to different places. If there are a lot of grenades around, you can use them to move the Shade more quickly and fill back up with the ones lying around. If there are enemies running at you from one direction, you can use the Shade to mow them down very fast. I noticed one tendency of fighting enemies while their Shade is turned toward you, which is that they take two times less damage if you’re firing at the front of the Shade than if you’re shooting the actual enemy. Try not to do this, but snipe them from a distance while the Shade is turned away from you. Verdict: awesome against most enemies, good for people like me who like to pick up a big gun and fight standing in one place. -Plasma Sword Accuracy: depends on the Elite that’s carrying it Power: 10 (lethal on Legendary) This is one of the most annoying Covenant weapons, especially because you don’t get to use it. It’s probably not hard to guess that this is a melee weapon only. The bad thing is, it’s lethal to you on all difficulties including and after Normal. Absolutely lethal. Ouch. Only Elites carry these (thank Bungie), but it doesn’t help that these are mostly Gold Elites. But as long as you can fill one with a clip from a Needler from a distance, you’ll be fine. Some Invisible Elites also carry Plasma Swords, but then there’s not much point in being invisible when you have the very visible sword hanging in front of you. I guess the only benefit of that is that you can’t easily bring the Elite down with a melee attack, since it’s hard to see the back. I think that you’re allowed to use it in Halo 2, but I don’t have it yet. Too bad. Verdict: keep away from the Elites carrying Plasma Swords and everything should be tip top. -Plasma Cannons Accuracy: 7 Power: 8 Number of rounds you can carry: infinite These are the equivalent of two Plasma Rifles, mounted on a vehicle. They always come it twos and are on Banshees and Ghosts only. If you’ve got a Banshee flying towards you, hide. The Plasma Cannons can rip through your shield very effectively and you may not get out of this mess with your health like it was before meeting the Banshee. The Ghosts are no less effective with them and they can kill you very fast due to their maneuverability, which makes them hard to hit. Use the Banshees’ Plasma Cannons as long range weapons against the lighter infantry. They’re not very accurate, but because of the absence of any kind of ammo or heat issues you can hover directly above enemies and pound them with the Plasma Cannon rounds indefinitely, depriving Elites of cover because there’s just nowhere to hide if a 2.25-ton aircraft is hanging directly above and raining down plasma in very large quantities. With time, you can actually kill a number of Gold Elites in the same area with these guns if you’re on a Ghost, which is proven in Two Betrayals. Verdict: it’s not the best weapon, but it can be quite scary in the right hands. It can kill multiple big enemies in one area very fast. Most weapons can’t do this. -Plasma Grenades Accuracy: depends on how you aim it Power: 8 (can kill any Elite if it sticks) Number of grenades you can carry: 3 (4 grenades in you pocket) This is the Covenant version of the Frag Grenades. As I mentioned before, I consider them less useful for killing enemies. The best part of the Plasma Grenades is that they stick to the enemies they hit. They kill any Elite, big or small, Blue or Gold, but it has some consequences. If you kill an Elite with a Plasma Grenade, you sometimes don’t get to pick up grenades that it carried. But still, it’s kind of satisfying to hit an Elite with one if you can. Usually when you stick a Plasma Grenade to an Elite, it valiantly runs away, declaring ”Aeeeee!” in a very brave fashion. Sometimes it runs in circles and then runs away. If you’re close enough, it tends to charge at you, sometimes catching you in the explosion. The Grunts do something similar. They usually run away shouting “Get it off!!” and then exploding. I think that they run pretty much randomly, but sometimes they decide to formally address their own comrades with their new problem. That often results in the mass death of the late Grunt’s friends. The Black Elites tend to throw their Plasma Grenades at you, and they are very accurate. This is especially noticeable in The Maw level, where you have to assault the cafeteria. The Elites there throw their unlimited supply of Plasma Grenades at you, forcing you to dodge them. The grenades are useless against Hunters. I’m not sure how much damage they do to the things, but my impression is that it’s somewhere around zero. Don’t try to use Plasma Grenades on them. NEVER use Plasma Grenades on Flood unless the Flood don’t know that you’re there. The reason is that the Flood keep running at you no matter what, and it’s not very good if they have a powerful explosive device on one of them. Say there are Spores crawling toward you. If you throw a Plasma Grenade on one of them, it’s going to stick. Then that Spore will continue crawling toward you. You can imagine what happens when the grenade detonates. It’s even worse with the Converted Flood. Although you can outrun the Spores, you can’t outjump these things. Meaning that if one of the Converted Flood is running toward you with a Plasma Grenade on it, it’s very bad. They tend to stay as close to you as possible and if one lands next to you, the consequences could cost you a full shield and a couple of health bars. The Flood Bombs are for some unexplained reason thrown away by grenades. Although your grenades stick to the front, the Flood Bombs usually land way too close to you for comfort. It’s not very easy, but you can get some kills by kind of sniping Elites with Plasma Grenades. When you hide behind cover, Elites don’t always face in your direction. Use these moments to come out slightly, aim, and stick a Plasma Grenade to an Elite. Unlike the Frags, Plasma Grenades stick to enemies and guarantee the death of the Elite they stick to. The Plasma Grenades have a smaller splash radius than the Frag Grenades, which makes them less suitable for throwing in the middle of enemies and hoping they hit something. They do guarantee one death if you throw them into the middle of a group of enemies, though. The fuse is slightly longer than the Frag Grenades’, but it still gives enemies a bigger chance of jumping out of the way before it detonates. It’s good against Sentinels if you can stick one to a Sentinel. When a Plasma Grenade goes boom, it takes out all Sentinels close to the grenade at the moment. Verdict: the Plasma Grenades only work if you can aim them accurately enough, but then it pays off with a number of dead enemies. -Mortar Accuracy: 1 Power: 10 This gun is installed on the Wraith only. Meaning that you can’t pilot it. What a shame... It’s the Covenant version of the Cannon. I guess that’s because it’s the most powerful Covenant gun. It kills you with a direct hit. When you’re around a Wraith, keep an eye out for the Mortar projectiles, another for your stock of rockets, and another for the Wraith itself. The only thing that stops it from being the ultimate killing machine is the accuracy. The projectiles are very slow and extremely easy to avoid. I’m passing the game for the fourth time and have been hit by a Mortar three or four times. When you’ve got a Banshee and are trying to take out a Wraith it helps to know that the Mortar rounds have a height limit. Meaning that you can stay safe and at the same time bombard the tank with anything at your disposal. The Mortar has a characteristic sound to it. When you hear it getting more noticeable, look around. It might make the difference between life and death. Verdict: it doesn’t pose any immediate danger to you, but still, watch out for them, especially at short range. ______________________________[ 6. Enemies]______________________________ Every race is every other race’s enemy, except when the Sentinels help you in 343 Guilty Spark and The Library levels. If there are different races on one playground at once, stay out of the way and wait for one race to remain, tossing in occasional grenades and trying to keep the population of each race reasonably even so the leftovers don’t waste your health and ammo when they can get disposed of by the other race. The Covenant Your primary enemies. They come big and small, but all share one quality: they will do everything in their power and as far outside their power as possible to destroy you and all the other humans on Halo. The Covenant are often your worst enemy, so unless the other side(s) are winning, do not help the Covenant. -Grunts These aliens are small, short, stupid, dog-like, suicidal, and the only enemies except the Monitor that can speak English. Believe me, if there are more than five Grunts with Needlers in the same room with you, they can actually be dangerous. But otherwise, they’re easy to kill. A couple of melee attacks will do. The Grunts are one of the three enemies that are killed with a melee attack from behind. Use this to your advantage when you’re wearing an Active Camouflage. I can almost picture this ad in some newspaper: Grunts come with glow-in-the-dark blood, Needlers, Plasma Pistols, and Plasma Grenades!* *Each Grunt killed separately. Parental discretion is advised. These are mainly a source of ammo. Nothing else. They’re barely strong enough to carry their own weapons, let alone fire them accurately. One headshot with the Pistol (which I recommend you to carry at all times) and Mr. Mediocre (also known as Grunt) is dead. Of course, one headshot with the Rocket Launcher works better than anything else, but it’s just too valuable to waste on Grunts. The Grunts are used as cannon fodder by the Covenant and cannon fodder is usually supplied in large quantities. So are the Grunts. They’re probably the most numerous enemies in the game. The Plasma Grenades are the most important thing they carry. Not all of them actually carry the Plasma Grenades, but they could help a lot. If there are Elites around, pick up a dead Grunt’s Needler and kill the Elites. Grunts say stuff like “Heads up!” and “Here it Goes!” when they throw a Plasma Grenade. Listen for those when there are Grunts around. That could save your life. Grunts come in three types: Red, Yellow and Black. The Yellow Grunts are slightly easier to kill and I think they always carry Plasma Pistols. Red Grunts is the type of Grunts you’ll encounter most in Legendary and they sometimes carry Needlers and Plasma Grenades. Looks like Bungie decided not to be so kind as to fill the game with weaker enemies. On later levels Black Grunts sometimes carry Fuel Rod cannons. They’re still too weak to get the aiming right, but the splash damage can hurt you. Bad. Use the fact that the Fuel Rods explode a few seconds after you’ve “taken care” of the Grunt to hurt its own friends. Their voices almost made me fall out of my chair the first time I saw them. Just thought I’d mention it. The Grunts have a very interesting habit of falling asleep if they think that you’re not around. If a Grunt is sleeping, one melee attack should kill it. Good for sneaking up on them. Just don’t fire your weapons or get noticed by the bigger enemies because they will inadvertently come your way and wake up the sleeping Grunts, giving you another pain in the pants. The Grunts are also cowards. If you kill one or two of the nearby Covenant, they start running away. But that positions that big thing on their backs between your Pistol and their heads. Not very good for saving ammo. Still, it gives you some time and room for fighting the bigger enemies. They mostly use the grenades when you’re in a vehicle. If you’re trying to kill them with the Warthog’s Machine Gun, be ready to jump off and run away very fast. I think that the Grunts are one of the two types of enemies who can pilot the Shade. -Elites Elites are the commanding officers in the Covenant military. They are big and painful and the only enemies that have a shield like yours. That leaves no weak spots and makes the Elites a lot harder to kill than most enemies. The Elites are annoying. Very annoying. They are very multi-functional and can pilot vehicles and Shades. The Elites actually come in five types. -Blue Elites These Elites are the easiest to kill, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re easy to kill. They can be very annoying if they want to. They carry the Plasma Rifle and I think that the Blue Elites are the only ones that carry the Needler in Legendary. When you see an Elite with a Needler, hide or run away. When you can, shoot one with a rocket because the Blue Elites are the only ones that are completely killed with one. You can kill a Blue Elite with a single clip of a Pistol if it’s charging at you or, most importantly, when it has no cover. -Red Elites They are just a tad stronger than the Blue Elites. They fire slightly more plasma and can be easily killed by a rocket and a Pistol shot or two. Do not take one on in the open (that actually applies to the Blue Elites too) and take cover to recharge your shield. You can use a technique I call Plasma Grenade sniping that I mentioned in the Plasma Grenade section. That’s very effective against them and can save you a considerable amount of health and ammo. I’ve seen these use Needlers in Easy, but nowhere else. -Invisible Elites Unless you can’t put two and two together, it shouldn’t be hard to realize that these are invisible. They’re actually permanently invisible, but that gives you an advantage too. As a consequence of being permanently invisible, they have no shield. That means no mess with Elites taking gigantic amounts of firepower, crouching behind rocks, and coming out in their shiny new armor. The only difficulty in disposing of them is that the permanent invisibility makes them somewhat hard to see. When they’re firing at you they become slightly visible (actually they’re always slightly visible, like a blur in the air. The trouble is spotting it). That’s your chance. The Pistol works great. Just wait in some bottleneck opening with cover in it. Wait for them to come out and start firing. Do as much damage as you can and use the cover for your shield to recharge. Rinse and repeat until there are no more Invisible Elites left to kill. You get a chance to do exactly this in the Silent Cartographer level, when you’re coming out of the security room toward the place with the two dead Hunters in it. Occasionally these don’t have the Active Camo and for some reason, no shield. -Black Elites The Black Elites are very hard to kill. And I mean, very hard. They are nearly impossible to approach without losing a number of health bars before you fire a single shot. Killing them is another thing. With a Shotgun it’s hard, but it’s a better option than the Pistol or, especially, the Assault Rifle. The only place where I recall any Black Elites is the cafeteria in The Maw level (but there is actually a large number of them in Keyes level in Legendary). The cafeteria in The Maw is a very hard part and it took me almost an hour to figure out how to do it. Eventually I managed to kill them and get past. Happy end for all except those Elites. -Gold Elites AVOID AT ALL TIMES. I mean it. They’re gold, mean, and extremely ugly, and when one is carrying a Plasma Rifle behind you, you’ll be dead before you have time to turn around. If there’s a Gold Elite with a Plasma Sword behind you, you’ll be dead even faster. The Gold Elites jump very high and that makes them harder to avoid. You can use rockets against the Gold Elites with Plasma Swords (as long as you can stay away from it), but my favorite is the Needler. One clip is enough to kill one. But when there’s a Gold Elite with a Plasma Rifle, I recommend using rockets only. To kill a Gold Elite with a Needler you need to stay out in the open to have enough time to fill the Elite with a clip. With rockets you can get out of cover, shoot the Elite with a rocket and retreat back behind the cover. Three Sniper Rifle rounds are enough to kill one. Two rockets can do the job too. Despite my paranoid opinion of the Gold Elites, believe it or not, you can kill one with two clips from the Pistol. But that’s assuming that it doesn’t have any sufficient cover and you do. This is possible to do in the Two Betrayals level when you have to take out the second pulse generator. Park your Banshee on the platform outside the generator room and just snipe the Elite on that massive structure in the middle of the area you’re in. When it starts firing, retreat slightly toward the generator’s door and wait till the Elite stops firing. Come out and continue sniping. Repeat until the Gold Elite’s dead. Try not to come close to an Elite while it’s still in its most unpleasant condition (alive). Their melee attack is really painful and I think it can kill Master Chief if he’s hit from behind. The attack can take down half of his shield and often makes me start over. Learn the Elites’ phrases. When they see you for the first time they make one sound. When they see a grenade they make another sound. When one of them has its shield depleted it makes yet another sound. A hysterical “Aeeeeeee!” means that the Elite’s probably dead. They have this habit of wasting time by waving their arms in the air and making a certain sound that makes the words “war cry” come to mind. They only do it when they have their shield empty or are about to fight. When you hit an Elite with a rocket it starts doing what I mentioned in the previous paragraph. The best way to kill it off is to save the rockets and use the Pistol. Gold Elites aren’t very common and an average Elite is usually killed with a couple of shots from the Pistol after it’s taken a rocket. They dodge very effectively, but sometimes it’s a death sentence to the Elite. On the Assault on the Control Room level where you have to assault the bridge with the empty Banshees on it, you can make an Elite dodge right off the bridge. Just grab one and swoop down on and Elite. If it was on the edge of the bridge, it sometimes dodges straight off. Very satisfying. Note that you can’t do this Legendary. The Elites are another race that’s killed instantly by a melee attack from the back. This is extremely useful when you’re cloaked and want to kill some bigger enemies and not have to fight them when the cloak turns off. -Jackals I hate them. Those shields they carry are practically impenetrable and you have to avoid close range combat with them. Jackals come it two types: Blue and Yellow. That’s determined by the color of their shields. In Legendary there’s not much difference between them, since the color of the shield is one of the two things that distinguish one type from the other. The other thing is that Blue Jackals are easier to kill. The overcharges could really hurt if there’s anything nearby with a gun or at least with an ability to hit you, bite you, or explode in your face. Your best option is the Pistol. A few shots kill a Jackal and a headshot kills it faster. Snipe them from far away for some easy kills. A melee attack works very good. Whack a Jackal with your gun and it will let its shield drop for a second. That’s your chance to fire. Three melee attacks kill a healthy Jackal. Grenades work all right. The Jackals start to step aside as an afterthought when the grenade is about to explode and that’s usually the last damage that the Jackals will ever take. Plasma Grenades sometimes take down a Jackal’s shield without killing it. Kill those Jackals before they have a chance to recharge their shields or you’ve just got a newly shielded problem that wasted your grenade. I’m not sure about Frag Grenades, but I know for a fact that Plasma Grenades bounce straight off the Jackals’ shields. Not that it’s far, but it’s usually too far to cause the Jackal any damage. I recommend throwing a grenade at their feet as that guarantees that the grenade won’t bounce off. The Jackals are yet another, and last, race that’s killed by a melee attack from the back. I don’t use this a lot because most of the times that I was wearing an Active Camo I didn’t meet any Jackals. But if they’re facing away from you, you can use this to your advantage. When they see you, they waste time by pointing at you and making a sound- trying to get their friends’ attention. When they do this, it apparently doesn’t occur to them that that gives you plenty of time to kill them because their shields are wide open. Use this to your advantage too. The Jackals carry Plasma Pistols only. At least. If they carried Needlers or Plasma Rifles, you wouldn’t stand a chance against even one in close range combat. Try shooting those cracks/notches in their shields. I think that if you hit one’s arm, the arm will get caught by the bullet and it will make the entire alien to twist along with it. That leaves a chunk of its back exposed where the shield came off. If you manage to shoot that, the Jackal will twist again and the alien’s entire front will be exposed and welcoming any firepower that comes its way. -Hunters They’re the toughest enemies, but in a way, they’re also one of the weakest. All depends on the weapons you use. The thing that makes the Hunters tough is their armor. It’s literally indestructible and makes it impossible to kill a Hunter by shooting its armor. They also have a shield made of some kind of metal, which they use to melee you if you’re close enough. The shield is also impenetrable and can protect Hunter from any kind of firepower. The thing that makes them weak is that they have “weak spots”. Those are the orange parts that spray nasty orange substance in all directions when they’re hit. And they are the large orange sector of the back and the neck. There’s also an orange spot on the front, but it’s inaccessible when the Hunter’s in combat position. When a Hunter doesn’t know that you’re there, it relaxes and reveals all of its weak spots. When it gets any kind of warning that there’s something that could potentially hurt it, it contracts to its combat position. That pretty much leaves only one place to shoot it, and that’s the back. A very lucky shot could take it out from the front if you somehow manage to squeeze a bullet in between the head and the armor. As I mentioned before, a Hunter can be killed with a single shot from the Pistol or a single shot from the Sniper Rifle. Other weapons are much less effective and it takes a lot of ammo to kill a Hunter with them. But if you don’t have an alternative... I recommend the rapid-fire weapons like the Plasma and Assault Rifles. But my favorite (besides the Pistol) is the Needler. When you face Hunters you usually have a lot of Needlers around. Try to get it to melee you. Then turn around and load the Hunter with a clip from the Needler. It jerks them forward and I think does substantial damage to them. If one is facing toward you and you feel like you should take it out, shoot its front with a rocket or two. That often puts them out for good. Their Fuel Rods are a very scary weapon sometimes. I think I once saw a Hunter fire three times in a row before its Fuel Rod started cycling. And I think they’re more or less accurate with it at long range, certainly more accurate than you would expect if you’ve seen how they fire it at short range. The thing that makes the Fuel Rod shots easy to dodge is the Hunters’ slow rotation speed. You can jump around one and it will fire off its gun as much as 90 degrees in the wrong direction. Like anything else, Hunters can be easily disposed of by running over it in a vehicle. They tend to dodge vehicles and then use their Fuel Rods on the vehicle. That often shatters any heroic plans of overriding a Hunter with a vehicle, since the only vehicle that car really do the job is the Warthog, and the latter gets easily overturned by a Fuel Rod projectile. You usually take on two Hunters at a time. I usually wait for one to come after me and finish it off first instead of fighting two at once, as that usually results in me having to rethink my strategies slightly. It’s immensely better to have at least one marine while hunting Hunters. While the Hunter is trying to hurt the marine, you can pound its back with some weapon or vice versa. The Flood This is a race native to Halo, and the Flood is often even worse than the Covenant. The Covenant tends to lose battles to the Flood unless there are Hunters involved. The Flood are all predictable: they go at enemies no matter what, and that gives you a slight advantage to work with. -Flood Spores The Flood Spores (further called Spores) are the original carriers of the Flood. They attach themselves the enemies and turn them into Flood. Spores are by far the weakest enemies in the game. Any kind of damage makes a Spore... kind of... pop. I’m sure that if the Master Chief had the option, he could poke through and kill a Spore with his finger. That damage also includes other Spores popping around them. If there’s a tightly packed group of Spores, you can kill one and it’s going to set off a chain reaction. Great way of Spore-killing. They are normally present in very large numbers and don’t seem to realize that going at you is complete suicide. When a Spore impacts your armor, it pops. The damage is pathetic, but can add up to a lot if you’ve got some bigger Flood around and you’re concentrating on them. But when you don’t have any shield left, beware of the Spores. One can attach itself to you and suck out as much as two health bars. If there are many Spores in one place, they could theoretically kill you in less than a second. To save ammo, I don’t usually shoot them. A melee attack is enough. It takes some simple timing and some getting used to, but generally it’ the best option against Spores. I used to carry an Assault Rifle specifically to use on Spores. Now I don’t. It’s better to carry a Shotgun to use against the bigger Covenant and bigger Flood and a Pistol for sniping. Do not use Plasma Grenades on them. I already explained this, but I need to stress it. If there are Spores going at you, a Plasma Grenade is likely to stick to one of them. Then the Spores are going to go on at you, but this time they will have a Plasma Grenade, ready to detonate, on one of them. These Flood are the nastiest when they meet marines. When a Spore attaches itself to one of them, the other Marines might shoot it, and therefore hurt their own side. When you have some spare rapid-fire weapons near you and a lot of Spores, you can pick them up and use them to speed up the Spore disposal process. Then pick up the dropped weapon. The Assault Rifle is perfect for this, seeing how much ammo one clip can hold. Frag Grenades work fine, but I personally don’t think that it’s acceptable to waste them on Spores. As I mentioned before, Spores are killed by any kind of impact. If one is as much as touched by a moving vehicle, it’s dead. This was proven in The Maw level. Note that if there are Spores going at you and there are Converted Flood around that don’t know that you’re there, the Spores won’t attract their attention. That means that you can stay concealed in one place indefinitely, fighting Spores, even if there are hordes of Converted Flood all around you who don’t know that you’re there. Be careful with the Rocket Launcher if there are Spores around. If one is directly in front of you when you decide to fire the rocket, then you’re probably toast. The odds of that happening are very long, but don’t rely on that. The Spores produce a characteristic sound that is easily recognizable even if the Spore is behind you. It’s important to know that Spores can climb walls better than a mountain goat. Don’t expect to hold them off by being on a ledge above them. -Flood Bombs These were once Grunts that were infected by the Flood. Now they’re disgusting incubators for Spores. They’re just what the name suggests- bombs. That means that under certain circumstances they explode with the force of a grenade, which can be very bad, depending on how close you were at the time of the explosion. If you meet one face to face and you have your back against a wall, it’s usually a good idea to “revert to saved” before the Master Chief’s armor can experience the terrible suffering that the Bomb will cause. There are a couple of ways to detonate a Flood Bomb. One is to simply get close enough. When the Bomb waddles close enough (I can’t really apply the term “walking” to how they move) or you do, it detonates. Since they can move by themselves, it’s really unpredictable when one is going to catch you off guard by exploding behind you. The other way is to just use your guns to prematurely detonate the thing. One reasonably close Shotgun shot is usually enough. Another alternative is to use the Pistol. One or two shots in the legs makes them kind of trip and bulge, like their normal suicide-bombing process, or it sometimes just explodes without any warning except jerking up slightly. Don’t stand close to a Bomb and shoot it with a Pistol, expecting that to warn you. It won’t help. Even if you’re too far from the initial explosion to cause you damage but your shields are down, still be careful. The explosion releases five or six Spores (how they survive the explosion, I don’t know) and they can do some serious damage if you don’t have at least a bit of your shields. Don’t try to use grenades. An explosion of a grenade or another powerful explosive for some unexplained reason usually causes the Bombs to fly away, bounce off walls, and detonate. It’s often very close to you and can cause a major drop in the shield status. They can’t do much except walk around with those tentacles of theirs stretched out and explode next to an enemy. That means that they can’t attack you from a distance. That gives you something of an advantage. The Bombs detonate any grenades nearby. Plus I noticed that they manage to launch some of them away from the explosion and then make them detonate. That makes it good to have a nice thick wall between you and the Bomb. The grenade-throwing tendency often led to my unexpected death in closed environments. Don’t try to melee them unless you want to end up in the same condition as you usually do after a direct Rocket Launcher hit. Make sure that if there are Flood Bombs near you, they’re coming at you from only one direction. It sometimes makes a nasty surprise if a Bomb explodes directly behind you. -Converted Flood Technically, these are two different types of Converted Flood, but the origins of the two kinds are the only things that separate them. -Flood Humans They’re humans that were infected by the Flood. They have an obvious head, but I don’t think that a headshot kills one. Nothing else to say about them, really. -Flood Elites They used to be Elites. Although some people think that they don’t have heads, they do. Sometimes when you look at a Flood Elite’s corpse, you might see a hose-like protrusion where their heads are supposed to be. In the best zombie traditions, sometimes you can do enough damage to them to kill them... then they get back up. Naturally, you can do enough damage the first time, but that requires certain weapons and/or a lucky shot. Never turn your back on a dead Converted Flood because it might not be quite dead. If you desperately need a Frag Grenade and see something on the ground that resembles one, don’t get your hopes up. That might just be a piece of one of the Converted Flood. They’re easily disposed of by one Shotgun shot from short range. Actually, it depends on how the shot is spread out. Sometimes you can put down more than one from far away with one shot and still not have them get up. The Converted Flood have extendable limbs, so these personas non gratas often extend them and smack you. Try to avoid contact with them whenever you can. The melee attack can take a large chunk out of your shields more effectively than most weapons. To make matters worse, half of them don’t carry weapons and melee you only. And the ones that have weapons don’t miss a chance to punch you when they’re close enough. Again, use the fact that these troglodytes keep going at you with any caution they used to have long gone, to your advantage. What works even better than the Shotgun are the Frag Grenades. Apparently the sludge in their skulls that’s officially called a brain is not capable of realizing that it’s not good for their health to have a Frag Grenade explode under their feet. Kill ‘em all. Muahahahahaha! They look bad. Probably smell bad too. Never mind. Any type of Converted Flood is capable of carrying weapons from either race. What I mean by that is, Flood Humans can carry human and Covenant weapons and Flood Elites can carry human and Covenant weapons. I think that it’s a widespread belief that Invisible Converted Flood don’t exist. So I reject that belief and tell thee the truth. They actually do exist invisible, but only in one place. The place is the armory in the Pillar of Autumn on The Maw level. Just as you enter it and go around the weapon stand in the center of the room, it should be pretty obvious where the Invisible Flood Elite is. I think that in Legendary there are a couple of them (one or two will come out of the door in the armory later). The only difference from the normal Flood is purely the fact that they’re kind of hard to see. It sure makes me feel better to melee the green-brown goo out of them. When fighting a Flood Elite of a Flood Human that has a Rocket Launcher, never have your back against anything because even if the rocket misses, it will probably hit the object that you have your back against. This normally ends the same way as a rocket hitting you directly. I learned this the hardest and most painful way and will remember this lesson forever and ever and ever. Monitor and his friends These are robots that are native to Halo, like the Flood. They’re friendly at first, but later become not so friendly. -343 Guilty Spark (Monitor) He’s just a flying spherical AI. You can’t do any damage to him (and he can’t either) when you see him or you’d have one problem less. -Sentinels They’re the Monitor’s guards. They also fly, but unlike the Monitor, they can hurt you and they can hurt you bad. They’re equipped with lasers that you can’t use. The lasers can burn through your shields like they do through Grunts and make recharge breaks occur very often. Some also have shields. Those are especially hard to kill. Not that you meet them often, but they can be a real pain you-know-where, you-know-why. Plasma Pistol overcharges work especially well. One overcharge brings down a Sentinel. The reticule doesn’t necessarily even have to be on target, but somewhere close. The runner-up is the Plasma Rifle. When there are some extras around, use them to kill the Sentinels. If you kill a Sentinel, don’t run up to it or at least don’t let it fall on top of you. That could really hurt your shield. ______________________________[ 7. Artifacts]______________________________ This section is about almost anything you find in the environment more than once as long as it’s not a tree, rock, wall, or a corpse. -Clips Just what it says- clips for guns. In Legendary they’re the most essential thing after cover and med packs. They’re available for several weapons: -Assault Rifle They’re rectangular clips with an orange sector that has some text on it. They’re the ones I rarely use, but they’re very useful if you’re using the Assault Rifle for some special purpose it’s good for. -Pistol It’s the same as the Assault Rifle clip, only the orange sector’s replaced by black. As the Pistol’s more useful than the Assault Rifle, it logically follows that its clips are more valuable. -Rocket Launcher It’s not exactly a clip, but it didn’t feel right to say “big boxes with big projectiles for the big gun”. Each contains a maximum of two rockets. -Sniper Rifle It’s a box with a maximum of 16 rounds for the Sniper Rifle. Not as much as I would feel comfortable with. -Shotgun Not much different from the Sniper Rifle clips. About the only difference is that the Sniper Rifle Clips are seen on one or two levels. You see these slightly more often. -Needler They are like small purple crystals. What’s perplexing is that you only see them on the 343 Guilty Spark level, one where you completely don’t need them. Watch your ammo before you take a clip. If there are ten rounds gone from your Pistol (no matter how full your clip is), the clip on the ground will fill up the ten rounds and then disappear. Say you don’t have any ammo for your Pistol in your pocket or the weapon’s clip. The clip on the ground will fill up the 120 rounds in your pocket, but not in the Pistol’s clip. So the Master Chief will reload and you’ll be left with a full clip with 12 rounds and 108 rounds outside the Pistol. -Destroyed or pilotless vehicles They provide great cover against minor weapons. Use them to hide during the open-air battles. Most of the time, though, they will have small gaps that firepower can come through. Still, it’s better than standing out in the open. -Com Boxes This is what I call them because of the sound some of them make, but they might be used by the Covenant for storage. They’re purple boxes that are available on most levels and can be used essentially for cover. Sometimes you can find just the right spot to crouch so that the box holds you in a crouching position. -Over Shield This is extremely useful in some tough spots. All it does is provide you with two additional layers of shield. Those don’t recharge, so use wisely. I personally don’t really like the Over Shields because they make me kind of “extra careful” in futile attempts to save the Over Shield. Note that if the current Over Shield is not completely depleted, you can’t use another to refill. Be especially careful around Jackals, as they can take down an entire Over Shield with a single overcharge. -Active Camouflage The Active Camo makes you invisible like the Invisible Elites. But unlike them, you (presumably) possess a brain and should be more careful. It takes an Active Camo a couple of seconds to completely activate after you pick it up, so don’t run into the battlefield right after that. Another very important thing to point out, if you fire a weapon or take a hit, the Active Camouflage becomes weaker and enemies start to notice you. If you’re trying to do a stealth assault on some enemies, be sure not to bump into one of them. If you do, they sometimes fire in the relative direction of you. If it hits, your degree of toastedness depends on the enemies in the area, and is usually somewhat high. So try not to get noticed. Of course, the inability to fire weapons leaves you with only one weapon: the mighty and feared melee attack. Oh, and you can also use grenades. They don’t reveal where you are but they do cause a reaction from most enemies. Try to melee Jackals, Grunts, and Elites in the back while you’re wearing the Active Camo. That’s one of the most effective methods to kill Elites. -Med packs They’re rare, so be careful when using them. Like the clips, Med packs completely refill your health, but once used, they’re gone. Of course, if you’re never ever going to come back to the area with the Med pack and have lost some health, there’s not much point in leaving it there. -Pre-dead marines They’re marines that already dead without any help from the Covenant, Flood, or Sentinels. They are oases of health and ammo in the desert of poor health and shortage of ammo. These marines lie around with ammunition, Med packs, and a lot of blood around them in places that usually start questions like “How on Halo did they get there?”. -Stationary shields They’re shields that are just standing on the ground and can’t be moved. The Stationary shields are used mainly by Elites to recharge their own shields and by Grunts who accidentally get behind them. Note that enemies can’t see you while you’re behind a Stationary shield (strange- the shields are transparent) but you can see them while they’re behind a Stationary shield. Use the rare moments when an enemy is behind one to toss a grenade at the shield. The Stationary shields can also be destroyed by all Covenant guns except the Fuel Rod cannon, the more powerful human guns, and a vehicle ramming into one of them. A few seconds later the shield will reappear. -Human shields These are found on the Pillar of Autumn only. They’re metal shields (which I will call them in the future). -Active checkpoint What I call an active checkpoint is a checkpoint that doesn’t disappear after you’ve triggered it, but continues to checkpoint your progress no matter how many times you pass through it. ______________________________[ 8. Vehicles]______________________________ This section will describe... vehicles. They come in different shapes and sizes, and most have guns. They make some places much easier to survive and sometimes are even necessary for the story to proceed. Human vehicles The recognizable trend of the human vehicles is that they’re indestructible. Pound them as much as you want, they won’t even show a scratch. -Warthog Crew: 3 people (driver, passenger, gunner) Armament: M41 LAAG (Machine gun) Maneuverability: pretty good This light reconnaissance vehicle is the game’s trademark vehicle. It’s the first one you get to ride and it packs a very heavy gun in the back. More on that after the commercial. Commercial. The Machine gun is one of the best in the game. You can use it very effectively even without marines to use it, but it makes you a sitting duck with no one to drive the vehicle, unless, of course, you’re playing in co-op. The Warthog is not very maneuverable and the controls take some getting used to just after playing PGR 2, where you could do everything with the left thumbstick and the right trigger. Here the Warthog goes where the camera is pointing. That doesn’t allow for very much maneuvering and takes more concentration. But since all you can do in a Warthog is drive it, the only thing you really need to concentrate on is the driving. Try overrunning enemies with the Warthog. They tend to jump out of the way, but there’s a trick to this. If you’re speeding toward an enemy, turn for a second in any direction, then sharply turn in the other direction. If done right, the Warthog will turn 90 degrees and hit the enemy with its full side. It can carry three people: the driver, the passenger, and the gunner. The gunner is the one you should watch out for and if he gets killed, replace him with the passenger. The gunner seat is the first one they go for, so it’s easy. If you want to save the marines for later and drive the Warthog somewhere yourself, don’t let them get near the vehicle as they’ll get in. The passenger seat is the one you want to sit in least, because the view is limited to the 180 degrees in front of the Warthog. But once a marine with a Sniper Rifle gets in there... death to the Covenant. If you’re trying to use the passenger seat as cover while you’re in it, it only covers a small fraction of the Master Chief’s person and, quite literally, in the passenger seat the only thing you can do is shoot. No grenades or moving. Don’t even try driving the Warthog on ice. It’s practically immobile on there and will almost certainly get you killed. Be careful where you drive the Warthog in general. If you crash it into a log or something, it’s not going to respond very well for a few seconds. And that will normally cost you a full shield if you’re surrounded by enemies. It’s one of the fastest vehicles in the game. Use it. Not many enemies can outrun it (actually, no enemy can outrun it) and it’s good for hitting things, especially those that don’t know that you’re there. Be careful not to run into small objects. That sometimes turns the Warthog over and puts you in a very tight spot if there are big enemies around. -Scorpion Crew: can be up to five people (1 driver/gunner plus four marines on the tank pods) Armament: 90mm HV gun (Cannon), M41 LAAG (Machine gun) Maneuverability: maneuvers better than the Warthog on ice, otherwise very bad The human tank. It’s a big, heavy, and slow thing that has a very big gun on top and normally gives the driver the ability to completely kill everything in his way. You need to know that you’re allowed to use it only on a very small part of one level. The level is Assault on the Control Room and it comes in handy during the short part when the Scorpion is available. It’s very maneuverable on ice, certainly more maneuverable than the Warthog. I could actually almost outrun a Wraith, which hovers and should logically be a lot faster. Taking into account how much of the part of the Assault on the Control Room level where you can use the Scorpion is covered with ice, I can’t see how you could use the Warthog wore effectively. The Cannon is the most powerful in the game. It can potentially kill a Hunter or a group of Elites in one shot. The bad thing is that you have to concentrate on driving and firing at once, which is hard when you’ve got enemies on both sides (they can easily flank the tank). The Scorpion also has a Machine gun. It’s very useful on the Warthog, but it’s a very minor weapon on the tank. It gives me reasons to think that it’s much less accurate on the Scorpion, so I use it only against the lighter infantry like Grunts and Jackals until my Cannon recharges if they’re especially annoying at the moment. It’s easy to snipe things with the Cannon. One hit can take apart a Ghost or turn over a Shade and send it flying decameters off of where it originally was. It’s great for killing Wraiths. A couple of shots and you’re done. Thank whoever I should thank that the Flood can’t pilot vehicles. It would be a big pain if you had to fight head to head with a Scorpion. The tank should protect you, but it does not. Whatever damage is inflicted on the tank is inflicted on you unless a marine on one of the tank pods takes the hit. I don’t see how that can happen, but it does. It’s not very maneuverable, so try to stay away from cliffs or those big holes in the ground that are so common on Halo. Sometimes it might seem that you’ve got enough room to maneuver, but in a couple of seconds you sometimes discover that it wasn’t, but it will be too late. -Pelican Armament: none that I know of (no, actually there seems to be some kind of mini gun on the underside, but it’s never actually used) Maneuverability: as far as I can tell, fine The Pelican is the human dropship. You can’t drive it, so don’t get too happy that you’ll be able to carry more than four marines around. I only mentioned it because this section describes vehicles and it doesn’t feel right to skip any. Covenant vehicles The defining features of the Covenant vehicles are the purple color, the hovering ability, and the fact that they’re destructible. Don’t expect to be able fly around on one of these and be able to take infinite damage. Each one can carry one passenger only. Apparently the Covenant doesn’t favor risking more than one soldier in case the vehicle explodes. -Ghost Armament: Plasma Cannons Maneuverability: the best It’s the Covenant version of the Warthog. It’s fast and has a powerful gun on it. First of all, the maneuverability. It’s the most maneuverable vehicle in the game. It can move forward very fast, backward equally fast, and strafe to a side. The latter is very useful for a certain cheat that you can find out in the Secrets section (so you can read on without having to skip the spoiler, if you care about them). You can use the speed to circle enemies and pound them with the Plasma Cannons while taking minimal damage. Don’t try this on Hunters, though, because of their armor. It doesn’t work on Wraiths either because the tank will hit you with its Mortar before you can do any serious damage. And long distance targeting doesn’t work because the shots just spread out and the Wraith takes practically no damage. But the Ghost still has finite armor. It explodes after a direct hit with a rocket, that should tell you something. Be very careful when handling a Gold Elite. They shower plasma in your direction in immeasurable quantities and can put down the Ghost’s armor in seconds. You can do the wheelie on the Ghost. Just press the A button and the front end will pull up. This is useful for heaving the vehicle over some obstacles or onto a higher platform. It doesn’t work while strafing to the side or going backward. It’s just low enough to hit Elites. And that means that it’s low enough to hit you. Be careful not to let a Ghost overrun you. Ghosts are the only vehicles marines can pilot. They’re useless as far as combat goes, but they provide a great and long-lasting distraction for enemies. This is especially good when there’s a Wraith that you need to deal with. Remember that when there’s no pilot in a vehicle, it’s indestructible. Use Ghosts as cover. The Master Chief always comes out the right side of the Ghost when you tell him to get out, so you can turn your left side toward the enemies and hop out straight behind the vehicle. When you get back in the Ghost will have just as much health as it did before you got out. Be very careful not to run into small objects (relatively small, of course) because they might flip the Ghost over and that sometimes results in you getting hit by the vehicle, which may result in your unexpected demise. The Ghost can literally be used as a parachute. But that I mean that you can jump off cliffs or buildings and not take any damage as long as the Ghost doesn’t turn over. It’s very hard to control the Ghost in corridors and on narrow walkways because it easily gets stuck where I would have thought that it’s almost impossible to get stuck. -Banshee Armament: primary-Plasma Cannons, secondary-Fuel Rod cannon Maneuverability: could’ve been better It’s the only vehicle that can fly that you can actually fly. But the places where you‘re allowed to fly it are very limited as you might go somewhere where you’re not supposed to go. The Banshee is not very fast or maneuverable, but the fact that it can just hover out of range compensates for that. But still, I expected it to be a lot faster. It’s an aircraft, after all. But since it doesn’t need speed to keep itself in the air, the designers probably decided to make it slower. Still, you can go at eye-popping speeds in the Banshee. To do it, go high up and let go of the controls. Don’t do anything. It should hover for a second and then drop. Just don’t steer it. It’s really fun to drop from a mile or two up there. Strange thing is, vehicles can be damaged by weapons only, so the fall doesn’t affect them in any way. All the better. Like any other vehicle, the Banshee kills anything it hits. To use this effectively, swoop down on some enemies, ram all of them that happen to get in your way, and then fly away. It’s useful against Hunters, who can’t be damaged by the Banshee’s weapons. You can kill a Wraith with the Banshee, it just takes time. The Fuel Rod cannon’s not exactly up to the job and it takes ten or twenty hits to take down the Wraith. But it’s still possible. It takes something like fifteen minutes if you’re doing it in the careful way (swoop down on the Wraith, fire as many rounds as possible, and get the Halo out of there), but if you don’t have a Rocket Launcher and need to take care of a Wraith for some reason or another, this is a way. The Mortar has practically no chance of hitting a Banshee, but if you’re not looking... well, you may regret not looking. One shell is guaranteed to knock the aircraft out of the sky. That might happen if you’re trying to destroy it the way I described in the previous paragraph (it’s sometimes hard to avoid a Mortar shell if you’re flying directly at the tank). The Banshee can get you to good spots for sniping. The range for the Sniper Rifle is almost unlimited, so take your Banshee, fly up to whatever place that will provide a good sniping spot, and kill anything that you see. -Wraith Armament: the terrible and feared Mortar Maneuverability: very bad The Wraith is the Covenant tank. You’re not allowed to pilot it (NOOOO!!! WHY? WWHHHHYYYYYY???), but at least it’s not present in very large numbers. But I still want to meet to guy who decided not to make the Wraith pilotable. The Mortar doesn’t present any serious danger to you from long range, but at short range it could be very dangerous. One hit kills Master Chief and the splash damage usually takes a couple of health bars. That’s assuming that the tank can hit you. Take care of the Wraiths first unless you’re in immediate danger from something else. That eliminates a very big threat. Don’t play macho and take on a Wraith from a few meters away. That’s almost certain to kill you (the Mortar projectiles are slow, but they’re a great short-range weapon). Use rockets or something equally powerful to kill a Wraith from long range. I think that you can turn a Wraith over by running into it at top speed with a Warthog. I’ve never done it, but I think it’s possible. Most of the time Wraiths stay on ice, so it’s difficult to ram them with a Warthog. -Covenant dropship Armament: Shade Maneuverability: apparently, good I’m mentioning it for the same reason I mentioned the Pelican: it’s a vehicle. The Covenant dropships can be a pain with their Shade. And they add to the Covenant in the area. The troops don’t come out at once, so use that second or two to snipe them. ______________________________[ 9. Other Tips]____________________________ This is a section where I’ll summarize some of the things that I mentioned before and didn’t mention before. -Take cover Again, take cover. Always take cover. It’s one of the most essential things in Halo. Without cover you’ll die and have a very small chance of completing the game. -Reach my level of perfectionism- to a reasonable degree If you accidentally lose some health during an easy battle that had a checkpoint before it, I really recommend restarting the battle. But there are some places where it’s just acceptable to lose some health. But those places are rare. I usually have full health while playing Halo (who knows what I might run into next?) and the restarting tendency made passing Halo a lot longer than it would have if I didn’t restart. It still helps, though. -Use appropriate guns for appropriate jobs If you’re going to fight the Flood, naturally, don’t use the Sniper Rifle. If you’re going to fight the Sentinels, I would recommend a Plasma Pistol or a Plasma Rifle. And so on. -Use grenades as weapons of mass destruction First, grenades are the ideal weapon of cleaning up areas full of enemies. Second, they really can be used as weapons of mass destruction. Sometimes some places become literally saturated with grenades that no one has picked up yet. That’s your chance. Throw a grenade in there and it will often detonate all the other grenades in a chain reaction, usually obliterating everything in the area. -Take advantage of higher ground On those rare occasions when you’ve got higher ground, use it to your advantage. Sometimes it means the difference between a part of a level being easy or almost impossible to do. If you’re hiding out in a building, you can retreat to recharge your shield and come out to continue firing. And higher ground gives you the ability to throw grenades with a lot more accuracy. -Don’t experiment What I mean by this is, don’t try to experiment in any way. Say you’re at the end of a hard level and try to rush into an area full of enemies to see what happens. Just when you’re trapped and about to be slaughtered, a checkpoint goes off. That’s a reason to restart the level, start ripping your hair out, and banging your head against the wall. I actually learned this the hard way, but the level wasn’t so hard. That saved me from the latter two actions. -Use any chance you get to reload Whenever you can reload, do it. It’s kind of perplexing, but you don’t lose a single bullet by reloading. Ever. Plus it can save your neck- it’s not very good to be forced to start reloading in the middle of a firefight. ______________________________[ 10. Walkthrough]_________________________ A walkthrough is (as far as I know) not something other Legendary difficulty guides contain. I’ll make this as complete as I can, but it might still not be enough. I have to pass the game again on Legendary, but some parts are just too hard to pass the second time. I’ll divide the guide by level names, section titles, and what I consider major checkpoints. I. The Pillar of Autumn You begin by seeing Halo and the Pillar of Autumn. Then will follow Capt. Keys’s conversation with Cortana about how the Covenant followed them all the way from Reach to Halo... blah, blah, blah. Then Keys will tell Cortana to wake up Master Chief. Now you’ll see some military scenes with very military music in the background. After the curiously ugly animation of some marines taking position, the Sergeant (long for Sarge, which I’ll call him for the rest of the game) will deliver increasingly nasty speeches (the level of nastiness depends on the difficulty; Legendary breaks all limits) and then you’ll see the Cryo chamber. Two techs will wake up the Master Chief. -Reveille Here it is, the start of Halo. On Legendary you don’t have to do the diagnostics waste-of-time that was necessary in the easier difficulties. One of the few improvements in Legendary. So the tech that’s down with you will run straight for the door and outside. Follow him (oh, and I’m including the first part of this level for those who are using this guide to pass Halo for the first time). The door in front of the tech will explode, so stay away. Jump over the pipes to the left. It should be very straightforward from now on. Pass through a couple of doors, turn on your flashlight to see where you’re going, and crouch to get under the door. Head right and go through the door. Follow a few hallways to the next fight. Then go forward, jump over the marine that tells you that “the Captain wants you on the Bridge ASAP” to save time and shield, and go through the armory-like room with the injured marines in it. Continue going. And don’t stop for anything. You don’t even have a melee attack, so you can‘t do anything about it. Continue running. Eventually you’ll arrive in the middle of another firefight. Turn left and run along the length of the hall. Complete the grueling task of following the arrow on the floor saying “Bridge” and meet the Captain. -AI Constructs and Cyborgs First! Listen to the conversation. The good news is that the Captain will give you a Pistol. The bad news is that it’s not loaded. Now go out of the Bridge. The Master Chief will pick up some ammo for the Pistol in the third doorway you pass. There are three Grunts in the next room. Kill the Grunts and lose a piece of your shield in the process. Let it recharge and go through the next doorway. Master Chief will pick up an Assault Rifle. Fire what you have into the Elites in front and take cover behind the metal shield thing to reload and recharge. If one of the Grunts throws a Plasma Grenade at your cover, run. Otherwise, come out and finish off the Elites and Grunts. Now swap the Assault Rifle for a Plasma Rifle. Some Covenant reinforcements will arrive, so take them out. That won’t be easy, so take cover more often and throw grenades whenever possible (if you have them). It’s even acceptable to lose some health. Then take the only route out of the room, which is behind those Covenant reinforcements. I think there’s a Med pack outside, hanging on a wall near to the next door. Now it’s going to be pretty much the same. You’ll hear the sounds of weapons, grenades, and dying Grunts, then you’ll usually get a chance to flank the enemies, throw in a couple of grenades, and proceed to mop up the rest. So I won’t include the boring details, just the vital parts. At one point you’ll see a couple of marines standing in front of an airlock, then an explosion of a Plasma Grenade will kill them. Take cover behind the metal shield and throw a grenade at the airlock’s entrance. Hopefully the grenade will kill some of the Covenant. Finish off the leftovers. Now go into the boarding craft the Covenant just came out of. There will be a treat inside in the form of an Over Shield. Two treats, actually. That should last for some time. Take one and go on. Once you lose the first, backtrack to the second one if you can and take it. After a second boarding craft you should arrive at a staircase. That should prove that you shouldn’t be economical about taking Over Shields, because a door will close right behind you once you arrive at the stairs. Hopefully, you have at least a bit of an Over Shield left that can get you through this particular part without losing health. It’s not a very good idea to even try to clear the stairs and the ledge above of the Covenant, so run up the stairs and through the blast door. Now be very careful once you pass the staircase because the checkpoint will not trigger if you don’t kill all the enemies. Now pin a Plasma Grenade to an Elite in front if you can and crouch behind the metal shield. Wait for the Covenant to stop firing their guns at you, and then come out form behind the shield. Do as much damage as possible and take cover again. Rinse and repeat until you’re the only person alive within shooting range. Now proceed to the lifeboat that you’ll ride in the end. Eventually you’ll arrive at a weapon stand with a few Frag Grenades on it. Bombard the Covenant with the grenades. Once the bad guys are dead, get into a maintenance passage for the nth time and use it to go to the other side of the stand. Get close to the last lifeboat and trigger the cut scene. It’s rather impressive, but short. II. Halo -Flawless Cowboy The lifeboat crashes and everyone aboard (except the Master Chief, of course) is killed. So run out of the lifeboat, turn left and collect ammo for the Pistol and two Frag Grenades. Run across the bridge (that’s kind of deep down there. Explains why no sentient life has evolved on Halo- the sentient life had too far to fall). Now you have two choices. You can either go right or kill all opposition or you can use that big rock to the left to destroy all the patrol Banshees and kill the Covenant that will inevitably flank you if you go right. I prefer the latter and will give instructions for it. Go behind the rock and wait for a Banshee to fly at you. Dodge its Plasma Cannons until it’s within the Assault Rifle’s range, and when it is, just fire at the Banshee and do as much damage as possible. It’s possible to kill it on its first flyby, but it’s very hard. If it takes some health, restart. Anyway. When you destroy the Banshee and the other Banshee if necessary, go out from behind the rock just far enough to see the Covenant that came out of the dropship. Wait for one Elite to stand on the bridge and, if you’re lucky, start crossing it. Then fire at it with your Pistol until it dodges off the bridge or dies. Pick off the Grunts and head uphill. When you reach a pass between two boulders, stop. There should be some Grunts and an Elite. Kill all the Grunts with the Pistol first and then do some damage to the Elite’s shield with the same gun. While it’s crouching behind some cover, run over and surprise it with sixty or so bullets from the Assault Rifle. Then pick up its Plasma Rifle. It’s okay to lose some health in the process of killing the Elite because of the Med pack next to the lifeboat. Go back in the direction of the lifeboat. Right next to the point where the waterfall starts there are some small rocks. Drop onto those. Now flank the Elites near the lifeboat and kill them. It doesn’t matter how much health you lose as long as the health indicator doesn’t get too far below two health bars. Pick up a Needler from one of the Grunts and fill it up with another Needler. Pick up ammo for the Pistol and a Med pack, then go across the bridge all the way to the place where you acquired your first Plasma Rifle. Go further into the hills and through the canyon. The first drop is reversible by jumping on the small rock next to the big one and then jumping onto the part of the big rock that’s closest to the wall. When you’ve gotten everything you could, go forward and snipe the Grunts under the dropship. Now drop down and use the Pistol to snipe the leftover Grunts. Proceed to kill the Elites with the Needler. When there’s nothing left to kill except the marines, fill up the Needler and go up on that big structure. Wait for another dropship to arrive. Then snipe the Jackals and Grunts with the Pistol and wait for the Elites to start visiting your hideout. Hopefully they’ll come individually and let you stick a clip of the Needler into them. It’s all right to lose some health if you have to because of the three Med packs nearby. Now just snipe the Jackals and Grunts. When they’re all killed, come out a bit and throw Plasma Grenades at, or needle, the Elites. Some more dropships will come and dispatch more troops. When all the Covenant is dead, you’ll hear Foehammer’s transmission. Come down, refill with ammo and Med packs if necessary, and take Foehammer’s Warthog. A gunner will already be in there, so just get in behind the wheel and go down into the deep depression in the ground further up the valley, and then go into the tunnel. An active checkpoint should be near the entrance, so be careful when passing through it with bad health or low ammo because you’ll lose the chance to replay and correct that. Now just go through the tunnel until you arrive at a drop off and beyond it, a ramp. Drive off onto the ramp and get enough momentum to jump across the gap. Continue through the tunnel and drive into the next room. Drive over the Grunt in front, or kill it in some other way, to stop it from throwing a Plasma Grenade at your Warthog. Go back into the tunnel and recharge your shield. Drive into the room again. Get the gunner out of the gunner seat and take the position yourself. Clean up the Jackals on the right and the Grunts on the left. Then drive the Warthog along the ramp and leave it in the section that has walls on both sides. Your trip there should have lured the Elites out of their cover, so they should now be exposed. Get the gunner out again and use the Machine gun to kill the Elites. If they hide but you feel that you’ve done enough damage to their shields, come out and snipe them with the Pistol. Once the Elites are dead, snipe the Grunts on the same side. Go back through the passage all the way to the valley where the large structure was and use the active checkpoint to save your progress. Go back. Now look at the wall the Elites were guarding. There’s a passage going into the wall. Park the Warthog so that the front blocks the entrance and the wall blocks the gunner. Jump over the Warthog and go in there. Have a Plasma Grenade ready to throw and the Needler reloaded. When you get too close to the bend in the passage, a Red Elite will come out. Throw the Plasma Grenade and if it misses stick half the clip into the Elite. Then throw another grenade at the second Elite. If the first grenade hits, retreat back down the passage so that the Elite doesn’t charge at you. Then get ready for the second Elite and throw a Plasma Grenade at it. If it misses, use the Needler. Anyway, when the Elites are dead, go the rest of the way up the passage and activate the panel. A bridge to the other side of the chasm will appear. Go back to the valley with the structure to refill with ammo and health if necessary (you can actually go all the way back to the beginning of the level by parking the Warthog in front of the ledge that’s blocking your path, jumping on top of the vehicle, and using it to get on top of the ledge). Otherwise, go across the bridge and through the tunnels that follow. -Reunion Tour Once you come out of the tunnels, drive forward and cross the stream. Find the lifeboat and take the Sniper Rifle. Retreat a bit along the same side and at the top of a small rise will be an entrance to one of the three lifeboat crash sites. Leave the Warthog as soon as enemy building come into view. Snipe the Elites on the buildings and then go near the boulders near the edge of the drop off. There should be some Jackals nearby. Use the boulders as cover and snipe the Jackals. When there are only Grunts in sight, go back to the lifeboat and retrieve the Pistol. Snipe the Grunts with the Pistol, then go towards the small structure near the place where the Jackals had been. Look at one of the sides and you’ll see an entrance to the bunker. Have a Plasma Grenade ready as you go down the ramp. A Red Elite will come out. Throw the grenade at it and pray it hits. Assuming it does, get rid of the Grunt with the Pistol if it comes after you. Now go into the room below. Throw a grenade at the Jackals and they’re probably dead. If not, finish them off with the Pistol. The bunker has two entrances, but I would recommend using the one you came in through. If you use the other, you’ll come out smack in the middle of a number of enemies, who will probably kill you. When you come out, get on top of the middle structure (the biggest one) and use it to snipe Grunts and Jackals from. It’s also usable for throwing grenades at Elites. After the marines are killed, the Grunts, Jackals, and Elites will come after you. Hopefully you still have a Pistol and a Needler on your person. While the Jackals and Grunts are still on the ground, snipe them. The Jackals have a weakness for that, which is that they don’t realize that bringing the shield up helps. Anyway, dispose of the enemies the same way you did around the first structure. When they’re all dead, Cortana will start talking to Foehammer about something or another, and then you’re free to pick up the ammo from the dead marines and leave that place. Go to the Warthog and go through the entrance to this valley that you haven’t used yet. Go through, go to the lifeboat, take the Sniper Rifle, and go back to the valley’s entrance. Drive across the river and the entrance to the next crash site should be behind a stone wall. It should be pretty obvious. Go through the passage. Here the view should consist of another large structure and some enemies. Snipe the Elites and Jackals. Drive along the rock wall on the right toward the second entrance. Drive along the next wall and up the hill. There should be some marines there. Reload the Sniper Rifle from the one next to a dead marine and put the Warthog into position to repel a ground assault from over the hill. Now get into the gunner seat and wait for the Covenant to come. Kill all the Covenant that dares challenge thee. Now fill up at the lifeboat and go out the unused entrance. There will be some Covenant on the hill across the river. Kill them and proceed through the rock arch. Drive till you see the entrance to the third and last crash site on your left. Go through the entrance. Snipe the Covenant (it’s all right to waste ammo on Grunts- you won’t need the Sniper Rifle anymore). Drive down to the lifeboat and take a Pistol. Then get the Warthog to the wall opposite from where the lifeboat is facing and park the vehicle with its back to the wall. Get into the gunner seat yet again and wait for the Covenant dropship to arrive. Use the M41 LAAG to kill off the Covenant. Wait for the next dropship and kill off the Covenant again. Now the Pelican should come. Get inside. III. The Truth and Reconciliation Captain Keyes is now a POW and is held on a Covenant cruiser which gave the level its name. The cruiser is in the air, but there’s a gravity lift that you will use to get inside. In my opinion, this is by far the hardest level in the game. When the Pelican throws you out, go forward and toward the passage in front. Stay on the higher ground on the right. Use your Sniper Rifle to pick off the Grunt in the Shade (if it’s there) and the Jackals and Elites that will be walking around. Be very patient, and if some Covenant starts firing at you before you’re done with the bigger enemies, restart. When you’re done with anything Jackal-sized or bigger, go to the next opening on the rock barrier in front and kill the gunner in the next Shade. There should be an Elite somewhere there, but I’ve never killed it with a Sniper Rifle because it doesn’t seem to like leaving the rock cover. Anyway, when you’re done with anything that’s worth a bullet from the Sniper Rifle, drop down and kill anything that’s not worth a bullet from the Sniper Rifle (i.e. Grunts). Use a Shade to help the marines kill the Elite and mop up the Grunts. Some enemies should come from the path along the next drop off, so use a grenade once they come into view. When you’ve taken care of them, go along the path they once walked upon, and go to the next valley. Snipe anything you can snipe. Note that there’s a Blue Elite further up the path. Once you’ve killed it and the Jackals up on the hill in front if possible, go forward and turn right. There should be an Elite with a Needler there. One very well-aimed clip from the Assault Rifle at very close range and a melee attack should kill it. Now proceed up the path. Essentially, kill everything in your way. It shouldn’t be that hard. Once you’ve cleared the area, collect the ammo from one of the dead marines and go up the next path. Continue going until you reach the place where a fork leading upward comes out of the path. Wait for an Elite to come up the hill in front and use a Plasma Grenade to kill it. If it notices you or the grenade misses, restart. Once the Elite is dead, shoot the Blue Jackal further down the path if you can. Otherwise, go further down the path. Kill the Yellow Jackal and the Blue Jackal if you haven’t already and snipe the Elite to the right. Now get rid of the gunner in the Shade directly above and run toward the Shade concealed behind the rocks in front. Kill the gunner and get into the Shade. Foehammer will bring reinforcements and in the meantime, you can snipe the Covenant as long as you don’t let them get too close. If one of them does get too close, get into the Shade and kill them. A Covenant dropship will arrive. It should position itself very conveniently for you to shoot the Covenant while they’re still inside. Now proceed to clear up the Covenant. There’s an Active Camo in the trees nearby, make sure that you do not take it yet. Stay near the Shade and snipe the Covenant. When Cortana eventually says something, you know that the area is probably clear. Look at the Active Camo and past it. That’s where you should go. There should be a Shade above a passage in the rocks. Melee the Shade down into the passage and put it so that in case enemies come for you, you’ll be able to use it on them. Go through. Now kill everything you see, including Grunts, using the Sniper Rifle. Make sure that you’ve killed everything, then go take the Active Camo. Walk back through the tunnel, then toward the grav lift. Snipe the Shade gunners, then go get into the middle Shade of the ones guarding the lift. Now you’re on your own. The next part will consist of just gunning down the opposition. With the help from the marines that Foehammer will bring, use the Shade to kill all the Covenant you see. But eventually two Hunters will come down from the lift. Get out of the Shade and kill the Hunters using an Assault Rifle. When the Hunters are dead, collect the ammo lying near the foot of the grav lift. Take a Plasma Rifle or Assault Rifle (I recommend the Assault Rifle because it can carry 3.3 times more ammo than the Plasma Rifle), plus a Needler for Elites, but I strongly recommend leaving the Sniper Rifle on the ground. Anyway, when you’re all set, go into the gravity lift and wait for the cut scene. -Into the Belly of the Beast From now on, the walkthrough for the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation will be slightly unclear because I finished the game on Legendary a couple of weeks ago and had to pass it again to write the walkthrough. I tried, but couldn’t pass the level a second time. Hopefully you followed my advice and taken a Needler and one of the rifles because this is a part that I remember with awe and respect and consider it suicidal even to try to pass it unless you absolutely have to in order to pass the level. When you arrive in the grav lift’s bay, it will be empty. For now. In a few seconds a checkpoint will go off and an Invisible Elite will arrive through one of the four smaller doors. Kill it the instant you see it. When it’s dead, things will get hairy. With a long beard. There are only a few tips for this that I was able to squeeze out of my experience in this mess. First: kill the Gold Elites with the Plasma Swords the moment they come out. Second: when you see that the marines are almost dead, move toward one of the two entrances the Covenant are using that doesn’t have obviously closed (red) doors behind it. When some Covenant come out, get in. That gives you some cover from the Covenant and a place to recharge your shields. You can open the doors from inside, but not from the outside, so don’t come out unless you know that you’re not going to go back in. The two doors are connected by a passageway, so you can stage ambushes on enemies while they’re not looking. Third: near one of the exits of that passageway are some Com Boxes and behind one is an Active Camo. Don’t be in a hurry to use it because you’ll need it for later. Now just start a guerilla war out of the passage. When the Covenant’s not looking and when they stop coming out of the doors, get out and grab the Active Camo. Wait behind the Com Boxes for the camouflage to completely turn on. Time for some backstabbing. Melee everything you can in the back starting with the Elites first and continuing to kill the Grunts and Jackals. I’m making this sound easy, I know, but it’s really not. It took me a full hour and a half to get this right. I restarted I don’t know how many times, but finally was rewarded with a successfully achieved checkpoint. But since I completed all the other difficulties, I knew of the peril ahead... in the form of two Hunters. Once the checkpoint is triggered, one of those big blast doors will open. The Hunters will come out and the fight may be one of the hardest fights with Hunters in the game because of all that clutter in the grav lift’s bay. To level the odds a bit, grab an Assault Rifle and a Needler and lure the Hunters away from the opening they came through. Then go in there yourself. Hopefully only one Hunter will come in. But if both do, it’s all right too. Now evade its melee attacks and shoot it in the back with the Assault Rifle and the Needler if you can. Do the same to the other one. When you’ve disposed of both Hunters, take the Med pack near the place where the Active Camo was, and go up the newly opened passage. Go up that passage and turn right. Go forward until you reach a left turn. Don’t go around that turn, though, due to the particularly painful Elite there. Kill it with a Plasma Grenade. If this fails, needle it to death. Proceed to start the “Grunt cleanup routine”. Once the Covenant are dead (although some will regularly appear behind you), go down the corridor and look through the door on the right. There should be a hard to see Elite next to one of those columns near the edge of the ledge. Throw a Plasma Grenade and hope it hits. Otherwise kill the Elite some other way. Once it’s dead, kill everything else on the ledge one way or another. You can use the columns for cover. When everything’s dead, go through the next door. Now go down the passages, kill anything that moves, and go to the storage bay you already saw from above. There should be some Comm Boxes directly in front as you enter the room and to your right should be some ammo and a Med pack. Don’t come out of the passage unless you’re really low on ammo; it can provide a good place to recharge your shield and to take on the enemies one by one. Now lure some enemies into the tunnel and deal with them. When they’re all dead, don’t come out yet because some reinforcements will arrive. Deal with them in a similar fashion, or you can go back upstairs and use the advantage of higher ground. Anyway, when the enemies are safely disposed of, go into the storage bay and I think a nav point should point out that you have to open the door at the end of the corridor those long-dead Hunters arrived through. When it’s open (assuming you have to open it- I ventured to pass the level again on Easy to save time, which is why some details might be a bit off), go through the doors the Covenant reinforcements came through. Go left and continue down the passages until you emerge into a shuttle bay. This will be a really tight spot. But for now you have the element of surprise, so execute the Jackal and Grunt in front. There’s an Elite on that platform in the middle, so don’t come out into the open. Instead, go to the furthest exit (the rectangular hole in the wall covered by a shield) and camp out in the corner (oh, and for those who are used to Cortana bringing extra marines at this point, she won’t). That should prevent the Elite on the platform from firing at you and the separator between the two shuttle bay exits should block the rest of the enemies’ fire. Now leave the cover temporarily to shoot at the enemies and retreat. But at some point, those enemies will get onto the ledges around the room and your cover will be fried. Now it’s time to get another cover. There are some Com Boxes on the side of the platform in the middle of the room on the side where you entered. The closest ones to the exit should form a stack and that will provide you with sufficient cover. Now temporarily come out of that cover again to damage the enemy before retreating. Do this until Covenant reinforcements arrive. Now go all the way to the door on the opposite end of the room from the one you arrived through. There will be some more Com Boxes in front of it. They can form a very effective barrier against enemies on the other side. When you get a transmission from Cortana telling you something about that door, hide behind those Com Boxes. Wait. Eventually some Covenant should come for you. Use guerilla tactics to kill them. When they’re all dead, I think that two Hunters will come out. Now be careful because if those Hunters kill you, you’ll have to start from the last checkpoint. And that won’t be fun. Use your Assault Rifle (if you still have it, although you can pick one up in the shuttle bay) to kill the Hunters, preferably one at a time. Once they’re dealt with, Cortana will open a door. Go through the door. Carefully look down the passage. You should see a Grunt. Wait for it to arrive and kill it. Now go down the passage yourself. I’m not sure, but I think there should be a couple of Grunts at the end. Kill them. Now there should be an Elite in the passage on the left. Lure it out. Use your Needler and Plasma Grenades to kill it. Now it should just be a task of getting rid of the Grunts follow the same routine as you go down the passages until you arrive on the second level of the shuttle bay. It’s no use running in there and killing everything that moves, so you need to hide. There’s that alcove in the wall with pipes in it. Hide in its corner. This will keep the door to the ledge open and block most firepower that the enemy chooses to use. Now bombard the Covenant on the ledge with plasma and/or bullets until they’re roasted enough for you to come out. Finish them off. If you’re low on ammo or health, it’s safe to drop down to the first level of the shuttle bay to collect that ammo and health. There will be a couple more waves of Covenant, so be ready. When the way to the next door (to get there, walk along the part of the ledge that’s perpendicular to the shielded shuttle bay entrances) is clear, walk toward it. It will probably open when you get too close, and Covenant will come out. Throw a grenade at the door and use the alcoves in the walls as cover. Not all you have to do is kill the enemy. When you can safely go through the door, do so. Suffer your way through the subsequent passages until you reach the third and last level. When you come out of the passage, you should be able to see an open door to your right. The fact that it’s open suggests that there are enemies in front of it, the fact that they’re not running at you suggests that they don’t know that you’re there, and the listed facts both suggest that a grenade should do the job. So lob a grenade into the doorway. There will probably be some survivors, so clean up ASAP before the Elite there has time to recharge its shield. Run the rest of the way down the platform. Before a turn you’ll see some Com Boxes. Stop before you reach them. Look past them and you should see some Covenant. Kill them off and proceed through the door there. Navigate the passages until you arrive in front of a door and hear a weird ambient sound. That’s a sign that you’re next to the entrance to the control room. Go through. Just don’t charge in with guns blazing because the element of surprise can make the task much easier. Walk in and punch the sleeping Grunts. But don’t go too far away from the door- you’ll need to quickly run away when the Elites see you. When they do, run out the door. There’s a Med pack and Frag Grenades on the left (assuming you’re facing the door to the control room). Use those if desperately needed, otherwise save them for later. Use guerrilla tactics to slowly kill the enemy one alien at a time. You can also use the brilliant stratagem called flanking. Still facing the door, turn 90 degrees to the right and go down that passage. Then go left and there should be another entrance to the control room. Switch your position between the two doors a few times. The enemy AI is not as bright as it seems, and appears to expect you to use only the door that they last saw you use. When the enemy’s not in any condition to fight, don’t run into the control room- enemy reinforcements will hit you from all sides. Wait for them in the corridor and use the same tactics you used to clean up the original Covenant in the control room. A nav point will point you to the door you should go through next when the enemy is neutralized. Go through. Turn left and down the passage. When you reach the left turn, throw a grenade around the turn. Clean up the Grunts and Jackals and go down the passages that follow. Do the same thing until you reach the place where there’s an open door to the left and a sloping corridor to the right. Go through the door into the detention station and collect the Active Camo behind the control platform in the end of the room. Go out and down the sloping passage as fast as possible. Turn left and go down the passage, killing the Jackals there with a melee attack in the back. Turn right into the detention station. Go along the right wall and pause for a second. There will be an Invisible Elite in front of you. Carefully go around it and melee it in the back. Then go onto the control platform and kill the Gold Elite with the Plasma Sword. Go along the wall opposite from the one where you killed the first Invisible Elite. There’s another Invisible Elite there. Kill it with a melee attack if you can. Then kill the sleeping Grunts. Turn off the shields guarding the cells using the holographic panel on the control platform. Watch the cut scene. -Shut Up and Get Behind Me... Sir Keyes, armed with a Needler, and other marines, armed with Plasma Rifles, will be very useful when you have to move out, but Keyes will provide you with another pain, namely keeping him alive. When the cut scene ends, go to the middle of the room (pick up a Plasma Rifle if you haven’t already) and get ready to throw a Plasma Grenade through the door. When it starts shimmering, throw the grenade. Two Invisible Elites will come through. If it doesn’t hit one of them, restart. Otherwise kill the remaining Elite. Fill up at the cell that’s closest to the door (the one on your left). Now look at the faces of the marines. They all have the same skin! Go out the door. There should be Jackal in front of the door kill it and then the one on the right. Turn around. Throw a grenade down the passage in front. Wait for the marines to start firing at the enemy and just camp out in an adjacent passage, helping with grenades when necessary. Now continue to go the way you came. You can also refill at the first detention station, in one of the cells. Go till you reach the control room. Get just close enough to the door to open it and be able to see inside. If you don’t have a Plasma Rifle, get one. And it’s probably a good idea to fill up with grenades if possible. Now throw a Plasma Grenade at the Invisible Elites in front. If it doesn’t stick, throw another one. Use your Plasma Rifle to kill the Elites from far away. When it’s safe to proceed, stay where you are. Reinforcements will arrive (Covenant reinforcements, of course) and you’ll have to fight them off. Then go to the door on the opposite side of the control room and through it. Continue down the passages and to the third level of the shuttle bay. When the door to the ledge opens, throw a Plasma Grenade at the Elite walking around there. If it’s not killed, use a Needler. Clean up. Then go to the holographic panel nearest to the door. Activate it and sit back with the knowledge that you just completed one of the most challenging levels in the game. Oh, and if you know where the marine's voice in this cut scene came from, tell me. IV. The Silent Cartographer Apparently, now you need to find Halo’s Control Room. To do it, you need to find a treasure map that will lead you to the place. So you need to find that. Fortunately, Cortana knows that there’s something called the Silent Cartographer, which is the treasure map I mentioned. And you have to take it by force. The Silent Cartographer is on an island. What I like about the island is that it’s filled with active checkpoints. This makes most mistakes you make reversible without losing too much progress. The mission starts in a Pelican, where you have very few means of... well, everything. All you can do is look around, and that’s limited to the 180 degrees in front of you. When you get out, you have two options. One, fight. Two, run away to get some heavy guns. Number one is too suicidal, so I prefer some drastic means of combat. Of course, this will kill all your marines, who will stay behind to fight. To get the better guns, turn around and run around the island. Eventually you’ll get to a place where there’s an overturned Warthog with ammo and health around it near the water, plus some Covenant on the hill to the right. For fast cleanup, stop next to one of the big rocks near the wall so that you’re just within sight of the Jackals there. They’re so closely packed that a single Frag Grenade should take care of the entire formation, so throw a Frag Grenade into the middle of the Jackals. If it doesn’t land where it should, restart and try again. When the Jackals are done with, run in a wide arc to the Warthog to avoid enemy fire. Flip it and get into the gunner seat. Clean up (you might have to go up the hill and kill that Elite manually). When the enemies on the hill are dead, Cortana should announce that the area is clear (something she usually reserves for the time when you clear the landing zone) and Foehammer will deliver a Warthog (to the LZ). Go there and, from some distance, use the Machine gun to clean up the Elites and Jackals. There are some Grunts and one or two Elites on the other side of that structure. Mop them up and go to that hill near which you got the first Warthog. I think that Foehammer’s Warthog will come with two marines, so position the vehicle so that they will provide backup firepower for you and then go toward the tree barrier. Snipe the Grunts so they don’t throw grenades at the Warthog and then an Elite will come out. Snipe it too and when its shield is down as much as possible, come over and finish it off with a weapon of choice (rapid fire, probably). Snipe the Grunts further up the path and when you think they’re all dead, proceed. Do it carefully because there’s an Elite at the end of that path. Kill it and go further and into the small valley beyond. There will be Hunters down there, but as long as you stay covered by the trees, killing them will be pretty easy. Get out your Pistol and when one of them is not looking, shoot it in the back. When they’re dead, go to the opposite end of the valley and close enough to the passage there to trigger some Jackals to come out. Quickly run back and hide behind the structure in the middle of the area. Snipe the Jackals with your Pistol. Proceed into the passage. Keep far away from the next valley and take shots at the enemy. Kill off the Grunts and Jackals, and then the Elite. To get rid of the latter, weaken its shield with the Pistol and finish it off from close range. Go down the next path. Kill the Grunts there (it would be easier to snipe them from long range- even Grunts can be dangerous in large numbers). Then refill the Pistol from the ammo stock in the valley where you killed the Hunters, take an Over Shield, and then go into the structure where you killed the most recent Grunts. Go down into the hall with the Com Boxes and hide in the nearest of those areas in the walls (to the right). Peek around the corner and snipe the Hunters there with the Pistol. It shouldn’t be that hard. If you don’t manage to get one of the Hunters on the first try, you can always restart. When it’s safe, proceed. There won’t be any more enemies, so run down the passage that follows and deactivate the security system using the holographic panel. -It’s Quiet... Don’t know what the title of the section is about, but it probably has something to do with it being quiet due to the absence of enemies... But in this case the title’s not going to be true for long. Go the way you came and you’ll come to the end of the passage and stop in front of the engraved wall. Go slightly around the wall and when you hear an Elite, withdraw to the passage and hide behind one of the parts of the wall that are jutting out. Wait there for an Elite to come out and use the Pistol to kill it. Rinse and repeat until they’re all dead. Then proceed up and into the open air. Now use the Pistol to snipe the bad guys down on the ground. Don’t forget the Grunts on the mesa. Now technically you’re supposed to go exactly the way you came (all the way to the valley where you killed the first Hunters), but there’s a shortcut. Take an Over Shield next to the Com Box and go to the nearest place where you can jump down on the ground. Notice that the slope is kind of less steep and that there’s a rock down there. Drop down and use the angled part of the slope to slow your fall. Try to land on top of the rock or at least use it to soften your fall too. When dirtside, go over to the downed dropship and trade your Pistol (and no, it’s not a mistake) for a Rocket Launcher. Take the Warthog and drive to the place where you left the Warthog with the marines. If you need to refill anything except, probably, a Needler and the leftover space for a rocket that you should have, go to the place where you found the first Warthog and do so. If worst comes to worst (no ammo for whatever you need to refill), go past the tree barrier, up the path, and sneak past the enemies to the ammo cache in front. Then go back to the Warthog and drive in a counterclockwise direction around the island. When you arrive at a big area with Jackals blocking your way and a ramp leading upward in the distance, park your Warthog so that it’s more or less facing the enemy (a respectable distance away) and get into the gunner seat. Kill the Jackals. When the Jackals are dead, go toward the ramp and get into the same position as the one you used to clean up the Jackals. There should be some Covenant near the ramp, but they’re no match for the Machine gun. When you’re sure they’re dead, proceed up the ramp. There will be some Jackals there. Run over them or shoot them with the Machine gun. Now leave the Warthog and go toward the platform further up the path. There will be Hunters there, which are disposable of with one or two rockets each. Go back to the Warthog and drive it onto the platform so that it has a clear view inside the structure and room for a gunner to get out without getting killed by falling off the platform. Get into the gunner seat and gun down the Covenant inside the structure. When it’s safe to go inside, drive the Warthog into the structure. It will be a tight fit, but it’s possible. You can go all the way to the door you saw open when you deactivated the security system. Now leave the Warthog and go inside. -Shafted (And where’s that Elite that you saw come out of there?..). Anyway, you have the choice of whether to go right and watch a completely pointless cut scene or go left and jump headfirst into the action and plasma. When the passage on the left ends, you’ll see an Elite standing in front of a Com Box. Melee it in the back for one easy kill and go up the ramp on the right. Kill the sleeping Grunt on the ledge there and ambush the next one. Now get out your Rocket Launcher and use it on the Elite on the ground. Then dispose of the smaller infantry. There’s a shortcut to the next level of the place, which is when you go up that ramp, drop off the opposite side of the ledge the ramp ends with, and go left along the wall. On you right there will be an alcove in the wall. There will be a hole in the floor that will lead to the next level. But I prefer the normal way of going there, namely going through the door in the opposite wall and down a series of ramps. Either way, go to one of the “windows” through which you can see the inner part of the room. Shoot the Hunter there with a rocket. Some Jackals or even the other Hunter might come for you, so be ready. Now look at the wall of the inner section of the room that’s facing the chasm. There should be an alcove there. That’s one of the many examples of the fact that this place is literally saturated with secret tunnels and shortcuts. Use that and the more obvious ways of getting into the area to kill the Jackals and the remaining Hunter. Now if your Rocket Launcher ammo’s not depleted, trade your second weapon (not the Rocket Launcher) for a Pistol from the ammo and health cache next to the chasm. Go into the inner section of the room and go to the far end. There will be a ramp leading down in a very obvious part of the wall. Go down and kill the Jackals that will almost certainly be there. Then when you reach the ramp leading down onto a ledge, drop off the right side and turn left. You’ll see a wall with two doors in it. Facing the wall, the right door will take you to the next level and the left will take you to a small room with an Active Camo. Go there, take the camouflage, come out, and go through the right door. Run and jump down the following ramps and go through the passage. Melee the Grunts there fast and jump off the left side of the walkway. Run toward the edge of the chasm there and kill that Elite. Now dispose of the awakened Grunts and when the Camo fades, kill the sleeping ones. Go toward the chasm and down the ramp. Turn right and throw a Plasma Grenade at the Elites there. Aim it carefully because there will be some issues with your health if those Elites survive and start fighting. Kill them off and activate the Silent Cartographer. Pick up the Over Shield next to the Com Box outside the map room. Go to the previous room and up onto the walkway. Walk along it and use your Rocket Launcher, grenades, and Pistol to clear the ramps of Jackals. Be careful to take cover whenever possible because a single overcharge can take down your entire Over Shield. When the way’s clear, go up the ramps and just close enough to open the next door. When a Jackal comes into view, use the Pistol to kill it. Continue to use the door as cover and sniping the Jackals until your way’s reasonably clear (you don’t have to kill all the opposition). Now simply proceed the way you came until you reach the place where you meleed the first Elite in the back after the Shafted section began. Go back into the dark passage and carefully look around the corner of the intersection. Hopefully you had a gunner in the Warthog, who will kill the gold Elite there (ah, so there it is). If not, use the fact that that particular Elite will not see you until it’s too late to award it with a Plasma Grenade for “superior spotting skills”. One grenade will be enough. Drive your Warthog back up to the structure you originally entered the complex through and park your ‘Hog so that the gunner has a clear view of the final passage. Get into the gunner seat. A Covenant dropship will dispatch some Invisible Elites (that’s why you had to get into the gunner seat- the marines are AI, so they won’t see or fire at the Elites, which will be a complete waste of the big firepower that the Machine gun provides). Gun down the Elites and get onto the Pelican that will arrive shortly. Watch as the Pelican descends into yet another chasm through the structure in the valley where you killed the first Hunters, which also doubles as a door. V. Assault on the Control Room -I Would Have Been Your Daddy... Have a good long laugh at the Grunt in the cut scene. Then turn around and get behind the structure you’ll see. In a couple of seconds some Elites and Grunts will arrive through the door. Snipe a Grunt or two with your Pistol and reload. Then aim at the Blue Elite that will probably be charging at you and empty a clip into it. That should be enough to put it down. Snipe the rest of the Grunts so that they don’t use the Shades. Then turn your attention on the Red Elite. If you can, use the Pistol to weaken its shields and then use the Assault Rifle to kill it. Frag Grenades won’t work very well because any Elite will be able to dodge in time to put enough distance between itself and the grenade. When the Elite is killed, go through the door. Notice the arrow pointing toward it on the floor. Bungie has been nice enough to almost lead you by the hand to the Control Room using arrows pointing at each door you need to go through. Plus you can use this to tell if you’re going forward or backward (it’s phenomenally easy to get lost in some places). Now I won’t get into the specifics of the kind room you’re about to enter because most of the time it follows one routine: get into that room, kill everything in there, and go through the next door to another room. Level tips? One: be careful to look in all parts of a room because there may be some pre-dead marines there, like in the first or second room, can’t remember. Note that these don’t stay around forever. Once I went forward about two or three rooms and came back for some ammo, and it was gone. True story. Two: carry a Rocket Launcher for Elites and a Pistol for everything else at all times (unless you’re using the Sniper Rifle for some long-range jobs). Three: save ammo if possible. You’re going to need it. Four: look through doors first instead of running through them to a standard 21-gun salute, which is almost guaranteed to get you killed on Legendary. Besides, it might save you from getting the attention of that absent-mindedly walking Elite, which you will be able to melee in the back once it passes. Five: always completely clean up rooms that you pass. Say you’re severely hurt in one room and are running to the previous one to get some health. Just as you’re about to get it, a nasty Elite you didn’t notice runs by, whacks you, and then finishes you off with its gun. That won’t be fun, believe me. The first change will be when you pass through a room and onto a bridge. Don’t open fire because that’ll wake up the Grunts. Melee them until something spots you and then use that wall you saw when you came onto the bridge as cover. Man one of the Shades and mow down the Covenant infantry and the Banshee when it comes close. Then manually kill off the rest. Be careful not to step onto the glass because it’s the first and last bridge where there’s breakable glass. The fall won’t hurt you, but it won’t feel very good to land in the middle of even a couple of Grunts. Clean up the two levels, constantly going downstairs and back upstairs to make sure that no one managed to flank you. When you get within about 30 meters of the exit, it will open. Now throw a grenade into the door, retreat as fast as possible to the furthest point of the bridge where you have a clear view of the bad guys, and snipe the smaller Covenant. Then I would recommend taking a Needler because there’s a Gold Elite with a Plasma Sword next to the exit. Lure it out and use the Needler to finish it. A clip will do. Then dispose of the smaller Covenant and move on. You’ll pass through another room (if you go clockwise about 150 degrees around the room you’ll find supplies) and then into an elevator. Use the control panel (if you can’t realize from the instructions on the screen that you need to press X, then probably can’t read this guide, either. That’s why I never include instructions for what to do in front of holographic panels). You can come up again using the panel, but only to refill. Leave the shaft and you’ll emerge in a room different from all the rooms you’ve been to so far. Look around and melee the Grunts nearby. Then go down the hall and I think there should be a Grunt on the left. Kill that and go right. When you see a very small passage going through a wall in front of you and a bigger standard-sized passage on its right, inch around the wall and look into the bigger passage. There will be an Elite there and hopefully you can retreat fast enough for it not to notice you. It should be walking in your direction, so retreat into the smaller passage and wait until it reaches your position and turns around. Then wait a few more seconds for it to pass, and then run around the corner. Melee it in the back and go further counterclockwise around the room. You’ll meet some Grunts and Jackals on the way, so use grenades and the Pistol to clear the way. You’ll eventually reach a door. I recommend cleaning up the center of the room, so it would be safe to go back. To do it more or less safely, look at those large alcoves that tend to appear on your right. On both sides of each of them is a ramp leading to the inner section of the room. Some are blocked, but most are passable. Use them to get the advantage of higher ground. When the room is clean of anything that would open fire the moment it sees you, go through the door. After going through a passage, you’ll arrive in a very large open area. Immediately go right and execute the Grunt sitting in the Shade. Then go past it and to the Warthog. Flip it and use the Machine gun to mow down the infantry until a Ghost arrives. Kill the driver (but if you have to, you can also destroy the vehicle) so that a marine could board the Ghost and provide an awesome distraction for the Wraith in the distance. Mop up the remaining Covenant behind the trees and use your Pistol to take out the Shade gunner on the cliff. Go back to the Warthog and trade the Pistol for a Sniper Rifle. Use that to pick off the small Covenant near the Wraith. Then get up close (not for point blank range, but close enough not to miss with the rockets and far enough not to get killed by the tank) and take down the Wraith with the Rocket Launcher. Then use the Sniper Rifle to get rid of the Jackals further down the valley. Go back to the cliff where you killed the second Shade gunner and somewhere in the area you’ll find a Ghost. There will be some Rocket Launcher ammo behind a small rock near it. Then go down the valley and off the small drop off (keep the Sniper Rifle, by the way). You can still get back up by jamming your Ghost between the nearby tree and the wall, pushing it against that drop off, and holding the A button. The Ghost will eventually heave itself up onto the higher level. Anyway. There will be a battle going on and in the center of it all will be a completely unused Scorpion. Get in as fast as possible and blow the Covenant where they deserve to be. Wait for the marines to get on (four’s the limit) and drive into the canyon that should be clearly visible. And I’m not talking about the hole in the wall. That will get you to the next area, but that will allow a lot of Covenant to jump on top of you en masse. So go through the canyon. A Ghost or two will come out of the canyon, so hold both triggers to pour out the biggest amount of firepower possible on the Ghosts, which should be your first priority. Then take care of the Grunts and Elites in the canyon and move on. You’ll arrive in a large valley. Try to take out the Wraith or one of the Shades near it with the Cannon before a Ghost will arrive. Destroy it and kill any Jackal that dares come near the tank. They’re dangerous with their overcharges, so use any opportunity you get to get rid of them. They’re an even higher priority than the Wraith. There will be a Banshee flying around, so kill it on sight. And you have to kill the Wraith. The Banshee will come pretty late, so don’t concentrate on the skies while the Wraith is bombing you freely. When the way’s clear, go toward the underground entrance on the other side of the valley. There will be a couple of Hunters down in there, which can be killed with a couple of shells. Get rid of any enemies in the area (including a Wraith above the entrance) and go underground. When you get near the entrance you might see some Com Boxes to your right. Near one of them will be an Active Camouflage. You won’t need it, though, because when you get to the next place where you do need it, it’ll be long gone. When you get to the bottom of the entrance, there will be a big blast door. Use the panel on the left to open it. Go in your tank through the passages until you reach a room. Kill the Elites in front of you and turn right. Use the Cannon to take down the Shade on the edge of the chasm and then kill the Grunt nearby. Go to the bridge crossing the chasm and use the Cannon to wipe it clear of Jackals. Then clean up any resistance there may be on your side of the chasm and get out of the tank. Use your Sniper Rifle to kill the Hunters on the other side. If you can’t kill both, then kill at least one because when you get there they’ll be a pain. Go across and kill off the remaining Covenant. Then open the next door and go through. -Rolling Thunder You’ll eventually reach a place with some Ghosts, Elites, and a bunch of Grunts. A couple of shells should be enough to wipe out most of the Covenant there and it’s even possible to do the job just with those two shells. Then move around the turn and use the Cannon’s very long range to kill the Jackals up in the rock tunnel. When you get up through the tunnel, some Ghosts will come at you. Get rid of them, wait for the dropship to leave, and take down the infantry it deposited. The go counterclockwise around the massive tower in the middle of the area and take down the Shade on the “hill” near the tower. Then turn to the door in the tower and when it opens, put a Cannon shell into it. Jam the left trigger for a constant downpour of bullets and fire the Cannon the moment it reloads. Once the way is clear, notice the supplies near the Shade. Take a Pistol and go further counterclockwise around the tower. There will be a Ghost on your left shortly after you clear the hill where the Shade was, so destroy that. Then focus on the Wraith. A couple of shells and it’s down. Easy. Now go closer to the canyon that the Wraith was guarding. Two Hunters will come out (if they haven’t already), so take them down as carefully as possible because some more Covenant will come out later and it will be very easy for them to kill you in that Scorpion. Get rid of them and go counterclockwise around the tower again. A Banshee will come at you sooner of later, so be prepared. Kill any resistance (including a Shade on top of another hill opposite the second door) and when you get to the actual door, it will open and let loose some more Covenant. You know what to do. Then go through the door and stop when you reach the entrance to a room. Get out your Rocket Launcher and aim to the right of that column. When you see an Invisible Elite come out (assuming it’s not already out), shoot it. Then get your other gun out, which is probably still the Sniper Rifle, and if the second Elite survived your rocket, use the gun to kill the Elite. Then go behind the column and take the Active Camo. This is the place where I first discovered a certain glitch with the camouflage, read more about it in the Secrets section. So when you take it, go up the ramp leading up and outside. Satisfy the desire to kill you must have by now by meleeing the Elite that should be there in the back. Then go back to the Scorpion and drive it through the canyon the two Hunters came through. Mow down the small infantry when you get through the canyon (be careful to kill the Shade on the rock wall on the opposite side of the area) and go down the twisting ramp. Pick up some marines and go around the ramp. You’ll meet two Hunters, so get rid of them. Then get out (and this is the last place in the campaign that you’ll be allowed to use the Scorpion, so enjoy) and take the Active Camouflage next to the ammo, refill your Rocket Launcher, and go through the tunnel. Melee the Invisible Elite near the end of the passage in the back, then go the rest of the way, wait for the marines to come, and get out of the way. You see, in this case the theory “you can’t hit what you can’t see” turns precisely the wrong way. The marines can’t see you, so they can’t avoid you, either. It’s okay to open fire because the marines will blow your cover anyway. Go to the ramp leading upward, put your back against the wall, and turn around. There will be a Shade on top of the rock wall above the tunnel you came through, so take that down with your Rocket Launcher. Then go up the ramp and open fire on the Covenant there. Once the way is reasonably clear, go out and wait for some Ghosts to come. Then retreat back down the ramp. If you don’t have a Pistol yet, go back to the nearest place where there is one and take it. I think that there’s even one to the left of the tunnel you came through. When you have it, go back up the ramp and peek out. The Ghosts should be calm enough by now, so aim at one and take a shot with the Rocket Launcher. Do the same with the other one. One time they decided to park literally side by side, so the rocket took out both. Go past and take down the Shades. I’ll point out that there are a couple of Elites in that trench-like construction, but those are probably there only to startle anyone curious enough to go down there. Then go toward the door. I recommend going back to the place with the massive tower in the middle and taking a Ghost (if there wasn’t one in this area) because two Elites will be waiting on the other side of that door. Do what you want. Just get rid of those Elites. Whatever you do, however many marines you have left will stay there, so continue you lonely trip into the next room. No comment for this one. When you get to the next door, go through (oh, and you can’t bring a contraband Ghost with you past this point because the door’s too narrow for a Ghost). Take a ride on the elevator. There will be a Jackal waiting for you, so kill it. Melee it fast enough and you won’t even have to use any ammo. In the next room there will be two more Jackals. You can use a grenade, but be careful not to throw it too close to the ammo there. Don’t want to lose those Frag Grenades. At least one will probably survive the explosion, so kill it with the Pistol or something. Then just toss grenades through the entrance to the next room to get rid of the Grunts and Jackals. Not that it’s bad to kill Grunts that get in the way, but I recommend focusing on the Jackals first- they have a tendency of firing overcharges, which often prove to force me to restart because of the loss of health. After three or four grenades, it should be safe to venture out. Again, if there are any Jackals left, kill the them first. Then kill the Grunts. There’s a Gold Elite in this room somewhere and hopefully it’s not in sight yet because you’ll probably need to recharge your shield. If it is, find some cover you could jump behind in case of an emergency. Then get its attention if it happened not to notice you and fire a rocket at it. If the rocket hits, you can finish it off with the Pistol. If it doesn’t, use another rocket and then use the Pistol. And if the Elite wasn’t within sight in the first place, go around the inner section of the room and find it. Then go through the same process to kill the alien. It’s another place where it’s all right to lose some health because the Elite is hard to kill without losing some health if things start going against what you planned. Anyway, don’t get the Med pack in the room with the ammo, because there will be some more Elites which could take some more health. Then go into the center section of the room and snipe the smaller Covenant. Then dispose of the Elites in the area. Go through the door and onto the bridge (again???). Go along the bridge to the first block-like thing standing perpendicular to the bridge. There will be a couple of Elites on the other side. A couple of rockets and grenades later, go further along the bridge (use the blocks parallel to the bridge as cover from the Grunts on the other bridge) and snipe any Grunt and Jackal you see with the Pistol. Use the Rocket Launcher on the Elites. If the Grunts on the other bridge get too annoying, use the Pistol to take them down. It’s easy, really, mainly because the bridge’s border is just low enough to expose their heads... that felt good! Now, you have a chance to skip a few rooms and get onto the other bridge directly. To do it, notice the glass screens on both ends of the bridge. Run up to either end. Then you’ll see that where the glass ends there will be lumpy stone things on the edge of the bridge just a bit further along the bridge. Jump onto the very low barrier that runs along the entire length of the bridge. Then jump onto the lumpy thing and then onto the glass. It might take a few tries, but it’s not that hard. Then jump across to the other bridge’s glass screen and down onto the floor. But if you choose to remain innocent, get to the end of the bridge, pass the next room and you’ll see a relatively long corridor with a bunch of Grunts and Jackals in it. Snipe the Grunts and use grenades on the Jackals only if necessary. The next room might be a bit tough to pass, because the center area contains an observatory or something, which will give a couple of very annoying Elites the advantage of higher ground, which they use very effectively. Use rockets to weaken them and when they’re dead, use the Pistol to snipe the Jackals and Grunts on the other side of the room. If you want, you can climb into the observatory and get the advantage of higher ground yourself. When the room is clear, go through the next door and onto a bridge. The catch of this one is that there are two Hunters on the opposite bridge. To kill them, I’ll point out that there’s a glitch you can exploit. I will leave it in the Secrets section, but I’ll just say that it makes the enemies forget that you’re there in some places. Snipe the Hunters while they don’t know that you’re there. When they do, use the glitch and continue sniping until they’re dead. Or you have the option of killing them with the Rocket Launcher. Then go across the bridge. I’m doing this part from memory, so I won’t give any details on the next room. In the end you should reach a hallway identical to the one where you saw the Grunts and Jackals. There will be a couple of Invisible Elites in it. Use the Pistol the moment you see a ripple in the air- no point in wasting the element of surprise by waiting for them to notice you first. So kill the Elites. Then look into the half of the corridor that’s slightly recessed into the floor. Look at the lamps on the wall and you’ll probably notice that near one of them will be an Active Camouflage. Take the Camo and run into the next room as fast as possible. Once in the room, quickly turn right and run into the central section of the room. There will be two Hunters there. Shoot one in the back with the Pistol, then wait for your Camouflage recharges, and shoot the other. Finish off the remains of the Covenant in the room, fill up where you killed the Hunters (there’s some ammo near the square tower-thingy and some more on top of the useless-looking ridge-like thing), and go through the next door. There will be some bad guys on the other side, so throw a grenade through the door as soon as it opens. Finish them off. -If I Had a Super Weapon... Here you have two options: try running toward the Banshees and jacking one of them or stay in the tunnel and take shots at the Covenant outside. The first is easy and enjoyable, but somewhat insane and suicidal. If you’re moderately (un)lucky, you won’t even make it to the Banshee. So on later difficulties I prefer the second option. Don’t move until the section title disappears (you kind of need the reticle) and open the door. Immediately fire a rocket at the Elite. If it wasn’t quite killed, use the Pistol to finish it off. If you missed, restart. Then use the Pistol to pick off the Grunts and Jackals. If you get a chance, fire a rocket at any Elite that tries to get into a Banshee. Stay in the tunnel and take shots at the infantry. When the Banshees come after you, then (assuming you have more than one rocket) use the Rocket Launcher to take them down. Watch your stock of rockets because you’ll need to have at least one when you finish with everything on the bridge. When you’re out of rockets and the Banshees are still there, you can use Plasma Pistols. When the Banshees are down, pick up the Rocket Launcher and go across the bridge. When you get close enough, the door at the opposite end of the bridge will open. Fire a rocket in there as soon as it does. Then run behind the nearest rock. Get out from behind the rock and use the Pistol and rockets if you have them to finish off the Hunter(s) that survived. Then refill in the last room you visited if there’s anything left to refill with and get back onto the bridge. Look down and you should see a Wraith down there. Assuming you still have rockets, use them on the Wraith. Otherwise, bomb it with Plasma Grenades. Be careful because they have a bit of a drop on them. Go through the door at the opposite end of the bridge. Fight your way through the next room and down an elevator. Then go through the next room. Be careful to go into the center because there will be some supplies up in the observatory thing. Go though the next door. Now you have to scale that large pyramidal structure and get to the Control Room. It’s not going to be that easy, though. You’ll have to use the walkways on the surface of the structure to go up, and that’s going to include four more Hunters, hordes of Grunts, and a Gold Elite with a Plasma Sword. Back to the present, when you get back out into the open air, grab the Ghost that should be to your left. Use it to kill all the bad things nearby. Now look at that thing resembling a very large support strut in the middle of the valley floor. It goes all the way into the ground and there’s a hole around it. Go down there and refill on almost every human weapon you could imagine. If you tossed your Rocket Launcher, get one. Swap your Pistol for a Sniper Rifle and get out. Use the Sniper Rifle to kill the Hunters on the first steps of the pyramid if possible, otherwise you can use a certain trick with the Rocket Launcher: use the Sniper Rifle to zoom in on a Hunter, then fire with the Rocket Launcher. That allows you to kill a Hunter without it even being aware that you’re there. When the Hunters are dead, swap the Sniper Rifle for a Pistol and go up onto the Pyramid. Now it’s just the simple matter of killing everything in your way. Use the Pistol to kill Grunts and the Rocket Launcher to kill Elites. When you reach a second Shade, things might get nasty because sooner or later a Hunter will get onto the thing sticking out of the middle of the middle of the platform above you and is going to make your life a lot tougher. Hide behind something (other than the Shade) and when it stops firing, shoot rockets at it. Eventually it’ll have to go down, and when that happens, run through the tunnel under it and use the Pistol to kill off the Grunts. If the other Hunter happens to be in the way, use the Rocket Launcher on it too. Then go down onto the valley floor and refill in that hole in the ground. Get on top of the pyramid. Notice the three ledges with a ramp leading up opposite the blast door. Then open the blast door with the holographic panel next to it- and run up the ramp. Go up as high as possible and hug the wall when you’re on the blast door’s side of the ledges. When you reach the top ledge, use the Pistol on the Grunts and the Rocket Launcher on the Gold Elite there. Clean up the Covenant below, but don’t be in a hurry to run through the door because there will be a couple of Elites there. Go back down to the ground and take a Ghost. Climb up the pyramid in it. It may be tough as Ghosts usually get stuck in places where it’s very hard to get stuck, but it’s certainly possible. When on top, use the Ghost to kill the Elites. Open the next couple of doors- and there’s the Control Room. VI. 343 Guilty Spark -Well Enough Alone Keyes disappeared. Again. So it’s up to you to find him. This swamp is not my favorite level, but it’s not the hardest (except for its very end), so it’s bearable. There’s a cheat at the very beginning... look in the Secrets section. When the dropship dumps you out, go toward the downed Pelican. On Easy, you’ll get a Shotgun right there, but on Legendary you’ll get one 75 percent of the level later. And it’s kind of annoying- three Med packs that no one will ever use. So go past the Pelican and past the Covenant corpses. This is one of the emptiest levels too. Use the radar to tell if there are Covenant coming at you before you actually see them. Then use the Pistol to snipe the Grunts with headshots and Jackals wherever you can. Always have cover because Jackals really like to fire overcharges, which could hurt. When you get to a place with a few Jackals and a large root going up onto a ridge, kill the Jackals and jump onto the end of the root. It may take a few tries, but it’s possible. Then go along the root and, though it doesn’t seem possible, run up the ridge and to the Shade. Jump into the Shade and do as much damage to the Covenant below as possible. Don’t stay in the Shade too long- if a Grunt throws a Plasma Grenade at it, it’s done for. And you don’t want that. Don’t get out and start sniping with the Pistol, either. You’ll need the ammo and there’ll be a shortage of it. Instead, go back down to the root and wait for the bad guys to calm down. Then get back into the Shade and smoke the leftovers. Rinse and repeat until done. Then go through that large doorway and ride the elevator downstairs. You’ll see a barrier blocking your view of the exit. Edge around that and throw a grenade behind it, preferably a Frag Grenade. Mop up the survivors with the Assault Rifle. Then go through the door. Use the Assault Rifle again to kill the Jackals. Then take a Plasma Pistol and use overcharges on the Grunts and Jackals below your ledge. They should home in from where you are. There will be enough Plasma Pistols for probably 50 overcharges. You can use grenades if necessary, but they don’t work very well from this distance. When you’re out of Plasma Pistols, don’t panic. Just jump down and use the Assault Rifle to mop up the leftovers- there shouldn’t be too many left. Ever watched the Resident Evil movie? This place gives me the identical feeling. Go through a square tunnel. You’ll arrive in a room with several Jackals in it. Kill them with the Assault Rifle or Plasma Pistol. Go through another tunnel and you’ll emerge in another one of those rooms with a ditch running along the entire center. Go right and stand near the ditch. You’ll see a ledge above the ditch with a Com Box on it (and there’s the Needler ammo below the ledge- the only Needler ammo in the game. Completely unnecessary, but at least I know that ammo for the gun actually exists). Walk through the door and you’ll be into a tunnel with Jackal and Grunt blood covering a good part of it. Oh, that’s sooo satisfying... Then go forward a bit more and you’ll see a green-lit room... with a marine sitting against a wall and shooting at you. You can take some cover and listen to his raving, or you can melee him and take the ammo from his Pistol. Or both. Then jump onto the collapsed ledge on the other side of the room and go through the door above the one you entered through. Activate the “light bridge” with the holo panel and go across. Then go through the door, run around the big barrier in the center of the room, go down the ramp inside the barrier. Gather the rest of your guts and go toward the door. -The Flood Watch the very long and eerie cut scene that has “maintain a safe distance” written all over it. It’ll be peaceful at first, but in a couple of seconds you should hear a wrenching sound and one of the doors in the walls will fly open. While you can, refill from the guns in the pool of blood near you and get an Assault Rifle if you’ve thrown it away. Then go toward the door. If Spores haven’t come out already, they will once you get close. They’ll start massing up in the doorway, which is when you should open fire. Hopefully that will set off a chain reaction and make your life a lot easier. They will pour out by the hundred, so once you finish with one wave, have a full clip of the Assault Rifle to deal with the next one. Don’t use the Pistol, though. The ammo’s way too valuable for Spores. When you hear a somewhat unsettling music, be even more careful: Converted Flood will start arriving. Once you see one, it will become your first priority because even one can be a much bigger pain than a hundred Spores. So when you see a Flood human/Elite, use the Pistol to kill it no matter how many Spores are in the area. Just run and jump to avoid getting hit by Spores while firing at the big and bad things. And yes, I mean running away. Get the eerie feeling that music gives you? When I passed this particular part for the fifth time, even doing it on Easy left me shaking. When the Flood is dead, collect more ammo if you can from the guns lying around and go toward the entrance to the room. Now that you know about the Flood, there’s not much you can do except just get out of there. The door will be broken out, which will be your ticket outside. Carefully take a few steps outside just far enough to let the Flood know that you’re there, maybe take a shot or two at one, and retreat. Kill the ones that follow you. Do this until you’re done. Then go outside and refill the Assault Rifle from the ones outside. Go back out into the next room. Kill the Flood on your ledge. Now you have the advantage of higher ground. It’s going to be your primary goal, though, to keep the Flood off the ledge- they can jump onto it. There will be a door to your right. Go though. Clean up the Flood, drop down, and go through another door to your right. Go through the square tunnel and use the Pistol to kill as many Flood as possible. Then run across the room and jump up the stacked Com Boxes. Now you can use the light bridge to go across to the original elevator you entered through. When you kill the Flood and are triumphantly press the button on the holo panel... Oops! The elevator’s down. So you have to find another way out. When you go up those stacked Com Boxes, you’ll have to go through a door in the center of the ledge you’re on. You’ll arrive in a room with a barrier in the middle and a door on the left. On all the other difficulties, you could get a Shotgun in front of the door. Now you can’t. so proceed till you reach an elevator room. Clear the area of Flood and go down in the elevator. Reload everything because yet another bunch of Flood is waiting below. Kill those and make sure you killed them. Then climb the Com Boxes blocking one side of the exit and take the Over Shield. Then exit the elevator room through the door. Now you’ll be in another one of those ditch rooms. The light bridge will be broken, so you can’t cross to the other side. Kill as many Flood from above with the Pistol and drop down. There will be a door on the far left. Go through that, but be careful when you go through the square tunnel. Unlike others, the doors on the sides will be open and the rooms will contain Flood. Clean up those and go toward the next door, but stop in the entrance to the next room. Snipe as many Flood as you can. They’ll eventually come after you. Hopefully by now you swapped your Assault Rifle for a Shotgun from one of the dead Flood. When it’s more or less safe, run to the other side of the room and climb onto another collapsed ledge. Go around the ledge and exit through the door above the one you entered through. Pass through another square tunnel and onto the ledge on the other side of the broken light bridge. Get rid of the Flood there and go through the door on the other side of the ledge. Kill the Flood in the next room and move on. The next square tunnel will have open doors on its sides again, so be careful. The next room will have Flood in it as well, so snipe them with the Pistol and kill the ones that come after you with the Shotgun. Now you might notice that there will be an open door on your left above the ditch. It’ll lead you to a square tunnel with three door opening into those small square rooms with Flood in them. If you feel like wasting ammo and health, you can go in there, otherwise go through the door opposite the one you entered through. You’ll come out in a room with some Flood in it and, to your right, a block with some corpses on it, complete with some ammo and health. Clear the way so it’s more or less safe to go toward the block. By now you should be low on Shotgun and Pistol ammo, so jump on top of the block (it might take a few tries) and take the ammo and health if necessary. Now look around. You should see one of those ledges leading to the center of the room that’s slightly belt down. Jump on it and kill all the Flood on the ledge. Then go across the room and through the door. All you have to do now is to kill the Flood in the area. Activate the light bridge and go across. The next door will lead to the last elevator room. Kill off the Flood around the elevator and go up. Take all you need from the ammo and health cache near the exit. Then run. Just run. Don’t stay in one place for any amount of time because the Flood here seem to get spawned into the battle indefinitely. Don’t try to protect the marines because they’re a good distraction for the bad guys. Your health doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t get below two health bars. You’ll eventually arrive near a big and pointless-looking structure, where Sentinels will take over, or at least provide some support. Avoid getting meleed by the Flood because if you don’t have more than half of your shield, a melee attack will take down at least half of your shield and leave you open to Spores. A second melee attack will kill you. In the end a cut scene will start. VII. The Library You’re teleported to a facility called the Library (without a single book in it) and you have to fight through hundreds of Flood to in the end retrieve the Index. No explanation on what the Halo the Index is or why you so desperately need it. No specifics on this level because I could as well copy “kill those Flood, go onto that elevator and wait for it to go up” a hundred times. It’s very straightforward, but some aspects deserve an explanation. At one point you’ll go through a partially opened door and walk up to another closed door. The Monitor will say something like “I will go and deactivate the security lock. Wait here” and fly away. Now the Flood will start pouring out of pipes in the walls and kill you. I fought this battle to the point of exhaustion and I finally realized that I don’t have to fight them at all. And yes, it’s possible. Go back to the entrance. See that alcove between the entry door and the closest pipe? Wedge yourself in there. Now the Flood won’t know that you’re there. Yes, Spores will find you, but they never get the Converted Flood’s attention, so as long as you don’t fire your guns and melee the Spores only, you’ll be all right. In a couple of minutes, the door will open and Sentinels will take care of the situation. That’s why you have to hide in the alcove next to the entrance door- if you hide in the one closest to the exit door, then when the exit opens, all the Flood will run past you and it’s easier just to leave them to the Sentinels. Another thing, if you’ve reached a dead end, look for a ramp that goes down into the floor. That may be a tunnel to the next part of the level. Lastly, when you reach a door with another elevator behind it, but this one with a glistening column on it, use Frag Grenades to take care of most of the Flood that will come out. Get behind one of those things coming out of the wall. Wait for Flood to come after you and mop them up. Then use the Pistol to take care of the sentries on either side of the door. Run through and don’t shoot unless you’re being shot at. Run onto the elevator platform and take the Index. Hooray! VIII. Two Betrayals Now you’re teleported back to the Control Room. Just as you’re about to put the Index into the holo panel, Cortana leaps up out of it and the Monitor will for some reason fall out of the air. There will be a heated argument where Cortana informs Master Chief that he almost killed all humanity and Covenant, including himself. The Monitor will call up some Sentinels to kill Master Chief and retrieve Cortana, who Master Chief will continue to carry. So there it is. Once the cut scene ends, you’ll have to duck behind one of the transparent screens around the walkway to recharge your shield. Then use overcharges from your Plasma Pistol to take down the Sentinels. One overcharge per Sentinel and you’re good. If even one misses, I recommend restarting because you’ll need the ammo. Once the Sentinels are down, go toward the door. -The Gun Pointed at the Head of the Universe Open the door. Now use overcharges and grenades to hurt the Covenant. Save some Plasma Pistol ammo for medium-range fighting the Shotgun is useless for. Then wait for the Covenant to deal with the Sentinels and run in. Use one of the alcoves in the walls as cover (they work very well if you crouch) and dispatch of the closest Jackals and Grunts with the Shotgun first. Follow them up with the Elites. Replace the Plasma Pistol with a gun of choice. Then open the next door. The room after that will be empty, but when you go outside there’ll be some very painful Grunts, Jackals, and Elites. Open the door and hide behind one of the stationary shields. Use grenades to clean up the first Covenant you see. Then, they’ll probably start shooting at you, so the shield will go down fairly quick. When it looks like it’s about off, duck into an alcove in the wall, preferably one that you can’t see from the outside. Use Plasma Grenades on the Elites. When it’s safe, go outside. Use a Plasma Rifle or something that’s good for the job to kill the Covenant below. If you need some more ammo for the Shotgun, go up onto the series of ramps and ledges you used to take care of the ambush when you first came here on Assault on the Control Room. There will be some ammo at the top, including a Pistol and a Sniper Rifle. Don’t take those because if you drop them again, they’ll disappear soon. Go down the pyramid. Use the Shotgun on any Covenant you see and the other gun on... well, it depends on the gun. When you go down from the level of the pyramid that contains the door to the Control Room, went across the lower level, went down to the level lower than that, and went to its opposite end (staying with me so far?), you’ll have a ramp in front of you going down again. To avoid confusion, if you face directly away from the door leading to the Control Room, it will be going down and right. There will be a couple of Elites and Jackals there. Throw a Plasma Grenade at one of the Elites and another one at the second Elite if possible. If it comes up or you, kill it with the Shotgun. Proceed down the pyramid. When you reach the lowest level, go across. There will be a Rocket Launcher near a pile of Flood corpses. Take that and the ammo. Go back across the level and use the Rocket Launcher on the Wraith. Then go back to the place where you found the gun. The piece of rock or metal there that’s sticking up out of the ground will make an excellent cover from the Covenant down on the ground, especially because they include a Gold Elite. Focus on him first, then use rockets on the other Elites. If you have any to spare, you can even fire them at Jackals and Grunts. Swap the gun other than the Shotgun for something plasma-firing, probably the Plasma Rifle would be better. Then take the Banshee near where the Wraith was. Fly up to the nav point. If you’re low on ammo, go up to the ammo cache near the Control Room entrance. When you see the nav point start pointing down a bit, keep going up to get some altitude over the Covenant that will be on the generator’s platform. Clear the landing zone with the Banshee’s guns. Land and go through the door. There won’t be any enemies there, so don’t worry. When you get to the room, go into the central section, and jump into the column of light in the middle. It will explode, but just with enough power to drain your shields (according to Cortana, the shields were used to make the generator explode, but I can’t see how you could survive this without taking damage without them). Don’t rush out the door because of the Sentinels that just happened to come by in time to catch you off guard. Use the gun you got down on the ground to kill the Sentinels. -Breaking Things to Look Tough For some strange reason, there will be a brand new and sparkling Banshee on the platform. Use it to go to the ammo cache and take the Sniper Rifle. Now, look up and you’ll see that far above the Control Room entrance there are kind of half-rings protruding out of the wall. Fly up onto one and land the Banshee carefully on it. Hop out and use the Sniper Rifle to snipe the Covenant on the bridge in the middle of the valley below. It’s almost too far away, but the Rifle should be able to reach. Go down to the ammo cache and take the Pistol. Keeping track: you’re supposed to have a Pistol and a Shotgun right now. Fly up to the right side of the bridge (facing away from the pyramid), not too far but just close enough to fly up and land on it very fast. Do it and go through the door. Then you’ll have to fight in closed rooms again. I won’t give any details on this part as it’ll be remarkably monotonous. When you reach the next bridge, use the Pistol to kill the Flood from a distance and the Shotgun to do it from close up. Be careful not to let any Flood jump across to your bridge and catch you off guard with a smack in the back. When you reach the next bridge, things will get rough and bumpy. There will be a number of Rocket Launcher-wielding Flood. They’re a pain, but if you take them out you’ll be able to use the Rocket Launcher against a bigger pain you’ll see later. Then there’s a rather nasty Banshee flying around. Take it down first if possible. Kill off the Flood (focus on the ones with Rocket Launchers) and clean up the Spores with melee attacks. Then you’ll arrive in a room with a bunch of Spores eating and Elite that I can guess from the armor was once Invisible. This is the only place in the game where it’s completely safe to use Plasma Grenades on Spores. Enjoy. Make your progress through the room. When you get 45 degrees around it, you’ll hear an explosion from the center of the room. Turn around and run at top speed back toward the entrance. Kill some Flood from a distance if you can, otherwise do it with the Shotgun. Then go into the elevator and ride it down. While you’re going, a lot of Spores will drop onto the elevator, so once it gets to the bottom, quickly use the holo panel to go up again. Some of the Spores will get to you, but some will get trapped in the elevator floor (very glitchy). Kill them off and go down again. Go through the tunnel. When you get to the brightly lit hallway after that, go just far enough to trigger some Flood that were about to ambush you. Kill them off one by one with the Shotgun. Proceed through the room. You can use the ramps in those alcoves in the walls to stage ambushes on the center of the room. When you exit through the next door you’ll be outside. Quickly kill the Covenant in front of you and retreat all the way to the last bridge you visited. Take one of the Rocket Launchers and aim for the Wraith (you had to go down to the ground to actually trigger the appearance of the Wraith- if you noticed, it wasn’t there when you cleaned up the bridge). Watch it for a few seconds to learn its moving patterns, then fire. Hopefully you took out the Banshee before, otherwise you’ll have to waste a few precious rockets. When the Wraith is down, go back to the ground and use the Ghost in front of the entrance to get rid of the other Ghost. Then go down into that trench with pipes above it. Look in the doors on either side of it and you’ll see some health and a Rocket Launcher. Take the latter and fire it at the Shades near the place where the Wraith was. Try to shoot at the legs so they’ll turn over. Then take the first Ghost you used and use its Plasma Cannons to take care of the resistance. Just circle them and fire incessantly. After that, go toward the other side of the valley and down into the hole in the ground. Then go through the tunnel and kill the Jackals on the other side. Go up the twisting ramp and dispose of the Grunts on the top. Then go back to the trench and take the undamaged Ghost. If you haven’t already, take a Pistol. Go back to the foot of the twisting ramp and take the Warthog there. Use it to go up the ramp and through the canyon. See those Hunters in the distance to the right? Go toward them slowly and watch the sky all the time. When a Banshee starts coming at you, run back to the Warthog and man the Machine gun. The Banshee will go down very fast. Then go back to the place where you took the Warthog, take the Ghost, and get back up the ramp. Go through the canyon again and quickly fly across the ice field to the Banshees. Take one and fly away. Go up to the generator platform and take out the Covenant there with the Fuel Rod Cannon. Try to land on the platform without being blown out of the sky by the Grunts with the Fuel Rod Cannons (who are very accurate in this particular place for a change). The Banshee’s health doesn’t really matter as long as you get there in one piece. Oh, and make sure that your Shotgun and Pistol are completely reloaded and that the Shotgun is carrying at least its full clip and 10 to 20 rounds in reserve. Hopefully the Pistol is completely full. A couple of grenades would be nice. Go through the tunnel and into the generator room. There will be a battle going on there, so use the Pistol to even the odds a bit between the Sentinels and the Flood. The Sentinels are inevitably going to go down, so when it happens clean up the leftover Flood. Don’t stick around too long because some Spores will come at you if you do. Make sure you have at least one grenade (pray it’s a Frag Grenade) and jump into the generator. What happens next won’t be pretty. Run toward the barrier separating the interior of the room from the exterior part and get just close enough that you have a clear view of the doorway. Toss the grenade through the doorway, wait for your shield to recharge a bit, and run through the doorway. Now just run through the Flood there (be careful; one of them has a Rocket Launcher) and onto the platform. -The Tunnels Below Take the new Banshee and fly down. It would be easier to take out the Wraith first, but it’s not going to be easy. Fly over it a few times and fire constantly. It will take a while, but eventually it’s going to explode. Fly back to one of the ammo and health caches. Refill on everything. Go into the tunnel near the Wraith. There’s going to be a battle between the Covenant and the Flood going on there. Use the Banshee’s guns to kill them. Oh, so that’s what they mean by “fire in the hole”. I see... So. Where was I? Right. The winning side varies, so it’s not certain what you’ll have to do once the winner notices you. It’s probably better to have the Covenant win because I think there’s a very nasty Converted Flood there with a Rocket Launcher. Proceed through the tunnel and kill everything that stands in your way. When you’re within a Rocket Launcher’s shooting distance from the metal part of the tunnel, get out of the Banshee. Proceed on foot and kill the Flood with the Rocket Launcher from a distance. Don’t have your back against anything because if the rocket hits that object you’ll still take damage. There will be several Flood there, so don’t relax if you’ve killed the first one. When the Flood are dead, take the nearby Ghost and ride it to the next door. Open the door and get back on the Ghost. Looks like you won’t be able to take your ghost any further. A few Flood Bombs will probably waddle at you through the door, so mow them down with the Plasma Cannons. Clean up the Spores and run through the door. Kill the rest of the Flood on the other side. Go onto the bridge. Get a grenade ready because when you pass about a quarter of the bridge Spores will start pouring out from behind two of those barriers on either side of the bridge. Throw the grenade and run away. Some Converted Flood will come after you in a couple of seconds. Take most of them down with the Pistol from a distance and then with the Shotgun. Try to save the Pistol ammo because by the time you get past this place there won’t be much left. Go across the bridge. There will be converted Flood running around on the other side. Pick them off with the Pistol. There will be some with Rocket Launchers, so swap the Pistol for one and head through the next door. I noticed that this is the only door you can open and close. You’ll eventually reach the exit from the tunnel. When you get halfway up the ramp you’ll be greeted by a mournful music and the next section. -Final Run Get up onto the left wall and run back so that you’re above the ramp but about ten meters from the cliff the entrance to the tunnel goes into. Fire a rocket at one of the Shades in the battle going on further up the valley. A Banshee should come after you. Try to shoot it down with a rocket. By now some Flood may have noticed you, so dispose of them is possible. If your health is in the red, go back to the previous room and take a Med pack from behind one of those rectangular prisms to your left. For some reason the door keeps closing behind you. Is it a magic door or what? Go back outside. If you haven’t already done it, try to kill the Banshee again. Go toward the battle. There may be some resistance on the way, so kill it. Now the tough part. There should be a whopping two Gold Elites there. Now, if you can’t kill one from a distance with the Rocket Launcher, there should be a Shade on the other side of the battlefield. It may be tough, but you can use it to kill both Elites. When you’re done, take one of the Ghosts on the small hill nearby (you’ll probably need health, so you might need to return to the last Med pack you passed). Then go through the canyon on the farthest end of the valley. There’ll be a battle in progress between the Covenant and the Flood. All you have to do is circle the enemies and fire at them with the Plasma Cannons. Beware of the Flood with the Rocket Launchers. When those are killed, look for a caved-in cave entrance that used to lead to the previous valley. There will be some ammo, guns, and health near it. Take the Rocket Launchers from the Flood and take them to the cave entrance. How do you do it? Well, as you might have noticed, when you swap for a gun, Master Chief will throw the one you throw away a meter or so forward. So that’s a good way to move guns. Just run at a gun in the direction you want to carry it and continuously press the A button every half second or so. That way you can say that it’s possible to carry two and a half guns. Ha-ha. When you have the Rocket Launchers all in one place (or it would be wiser just to take one Launcher and take the ammo from the others), take one and keep your Shotgun. Take your Ghost and return to the cave entrance. Turn right and go along the wall. You’ll see the entrance to the next valley. The problem is getting the Ghost up there. Look at the left side of the entrance. There will be a lowered part of the barrier and a tree. Squeeze the Ghost in between the tree and the wall and push against the barrier while holding the A button. The Ghost will heave itself onto the barrier. Go a bit further and stop just at the edge of the ice. Some Flood will come out ahead of you. Wait where you are until the Flood get killed- one of them has a Rocket Launcher and might destroy or damage one of the Wraiths. Then go right and hide behind the big rock near the wall. From there, snipe the closest Wraith with the Rocket Launcher. Keep it up until the Wraith is down. Then go around the other side of the rock and aim for the Shade (I’m not sure, but I think there’s only one). It would be better to aim for the legs, as that’s more likely to turn it over. Then take out the other Wraith. It won’t be as easy because this one will be far away. But you have a very large supply of rockets, so it’s not too bad. Try to keep your Ghost close because occasionally an Invisible Elite will sneak up on you and there’s not much point in wasting ammo when you can fire constantly at anything with the Plasma Cannons without having to use your own guns. Besides, if your shield is too far down, you can use the Ghost’s maneuverability to stay out of reach while the shield recharges. When the second Wraith is out of the picture, go back to the cave and swap the Rocket Launcher for the Sniper Rifle, and get health if necessary (it probably will be). Then go back to your favorite spot behind the rock and look through the scope at the two Banshees that you suffered so much for. There will be a rock by it and by the rock there should be a couple of Hunters. Take them down first. Then concentrate on the Gold Elite(s). I’m not sure how many there are, but I think there’s more than one. After that, if the ammo allows it, kill the smaller Elites. When you can’t see any more Elites and still have ammo, you can use it up on the Jackals. The toss your Sniper Rifle, replace it with a Pistol or a gun of your choice, and get back on your Ghost. Ride out onto the field that you’ve been busily cleaning up for the last half hour. Again, use the Ghost stratagem of circling the enemies and firing at them with the Plasma Cannons. When it’s safe, get out of the Ghost. Swap both your guns for something plasma-related (Plasma Pistol and Plasma Rifle, to be precise) and get onto a Banshee. Fly up to the Nav point, but don’t get too close. Instead, fly higher up and then above the generator platform. Drop down and quickly get inside- you don’t have a chance against those Sentinels. There will probably be a Sentinel in the corridor too, so kill that. Go into the generator room and kill the Sentinels there. Jump into the generator. VIII. Keyes -Under New Management You’re searching for Keyes again. Apparently this place is soaked with Flood, so the Covenant sent in a strike team to fix that. The strike team consists mainly of Grunts. I don’t know what they were thinking, but that’s just what happened. The Master Chief is yet again teleported to some far away place, in this case the horrible and dreaded Truth and Reconciliation. If you return to the last saved checkpoint (in this case to the beginning of the level) and go along the tunnel, you’ll see an Assault Rifle in the doorway to the left, balanced and apparently ammoless. Go a bit further and you’ll hear Keyes. A few more steps and a Grunt will run out, followed by a Flood Elite that apparently had its arms shot off- the Grunt doesn’t seem to realize that, though. Although it seems that it’s a good idea to go right, go left instead. Go through the door and you should see a piece of an Active Camouflage behind a Grunt corpse. Or you might not- some people don’t and they tell others to skip this place altogether. But now you know that it’s there. If you somehow manage not to notice the Camo in a few seconds, it’s in the far right corner. Go toward the Active Camo. On the way you’ll probably pick up the three Plasma Grenades that are lying around the place. Then, when you’ve picked up the Camo, run the way the Grunt and Flood Elite went. Turn left at the turn and left again. Jump over the enemies there, being careful not to touch any of them. Then turn right as soon as possible. There’s no point in wasting the perfectly good, not to mention very rare, Active Camouflage, so jump directly into the hole directly in front of you. A cut scene will show the Chief landing in the leaking coolant (the green goo). Double, double toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble... Never mind. But the witches in Macbeth have a point, though. Back to Halo, don’t do anything for the moment. You should have a considerable part of the Camo left, so wade forward just far enough to see above the coolant, and wait. Toss in s few grenades if you want to. When both sides are KIA (not talking about your side) the Camouflage should be gone. Then there’s going to be another wave of Flood. You can stay in the goo, but it’s going to limit your vision but won’t help in any other way, for example slow down the Flood. Using the Assault Rifle on the Converted Flood will be tough, especially as you don’t have much ammo. If you happen to find a Shotgun from one of the dead Flood, take it instead of the Plasma Pistol. At least now you have two guns that are more or less good against the Flood. If not, then there’s not much I can help with. And if you got this and come across a Pistol later, swap it for the Assault Rifle. Anyway, throw away the Plasma Pistol first and then the Assault Rifle. There will be a passage to the next area in the left wall. There should be a few Flood in that passage. Clean those up and proceed. Once you make too much noise or proceed too far, I’m not sure which, infinite Flood Spores will drop down from the walls, but in very small doses. They won’t be a big nuisance, but they may well stop your nearly-down shield from recharging back. It’s hard to describe exactly where to go now, so I won’t. Main things you have to know: when you arrive in an area, use your most long-range guns to kill the Flood on ledges and then rush through unless you can clearly kill the Flood there. I wouldn’t recommend trying to kill them because they seem to be present in infinite quantities wherever I go. A couple of areas later you’ll come to a drop off and a Sniper Rifle. There will be a couple of Hunters some distance in front of the drop off, but they’ll be slightly too busy to notice you. Eventually they’ll die from “Spore-ism”, but you can skip the fun and finish them off quickly with the Sniper Rifle. There will be a couple on Elites some way further away. You can kill those too, or again, you can watch them die. There will be a rather annoying Flood on top of the bridge, so if you can, get rid of it with the Pistol. There will also be Flood Bombs wading out of the coolant each time you kill the ones that are above the surface. Jump down and run in an arc around the things to avoid accidental detonation. Once you’re past them, they will stop reappearing. Then go further and through the tunnel. By the way, there’s another Med pack near one of those shallow pools of coolant. Once at the end of the canyon, the first thing you’ll see is a Shade. Now just wait for the occupant of the Shade to get killed. Don’t do anything except, maybe, a couple of grenades. Try not to get the Shade turned over because you’ll need it later. When the immediate threat’s dead, get into the Shade and turn toward the exit ramp (about 90 degrees to the right from the hole in the wall you came through). Some Flood should be coming out, so the Shade will make quick work on them. Then you’ll have to go up that ramp, pass some more Flood (it would be a good idea to return to the Shade to save ammo- there will be a severe shortage of that in this level). When you clear the ramp of Converted Flood and reach the end, some Spores will come out. Then proceed through the next tunnel. Drop down from the drop off and go further up the tunnel. Then you’ll reach another Shade guarded by a few minor Covenant. Take care not to turn that over or at least not to get it too far away from its original position. Note that there will be some Flood on the ledges in the walls, so get rid of those and proceed to the gravity lift. There will be a messy battle going on between the Covenant and the Flood. Run along the right side of that pillar/tower-like thing and take the Over Shield. Then run through the hole to your left and once through, take the right. You’ll arrive at the beginning of the ramp. Run up and kill all the enemies on the grav lift with a couple of grenades and a few well-placed shots from the Shotgun. Then run up onto the lift and stand there until it reactivates. -Upstairs, Downstairs... You get to go back into the ship. You’ll emerge in the cargo bay you arrived in during the Truth and Reconciliation level. Now there won’t be hordes of Covenant pouring out, but a few pathetic Spores scurrying around. Get rid of those and go through the only open one of those smaller doors that has proper lighting behind it. Run through the next few hallways without pausing because there will be infinite Flood Bombs dropping in for a visit. Kill the ones near the Converted Flood for maximum damage to the enemy. A couple of turns later you’ll come out in a cargo hold. Cortana will inform you in a shocked voice that “the Flood are gathering bodies here”. Go toward the door on the opposite end of the room. Kill the Flood guarding it and walk through. Two choices now: go through the door, kill the Flood there, and descend down to the lower level of the cargo hold; or you can clear the lower level of any Flood that are already there and jump down to kill off the new arrivals. I prefer the second choice as running through the tunnel verges on being suicidal. Use the Pistol to kill off the Flood at the bottom of the room and hopefully one of the blast door will open (according to my experience, I think this will happen if you stand on the top level too long or kill all the Flood on the bottom level. I’m not sure which), letting some Flood out that you would have had to deal with manually. If it does, kill those Flood too, otherwise you don’t have much choice but to jump. Then you’ll have to kill a number of Flood while down on the ground. After that, collect the Over Shield near the door the Flood came through. You can go through that door, but there will be only a few Spores to greet you. Go through the open door (I think the one you have to go through is permanently open). Now you’ll have to go through a series of hallways and hordes of Flood. Important to know: don’t stop for anything unless it’s clear that you’re not being followed; if you’re not followed, stop in those alcoves in the walls with pipes in them to recharge your shield; and if you run into a part of a tunnel and some Flood appear, you clear them, run into the same place, and the same Flood reappear in the same place, it’s a good sign of one of those places where the Flood reappear indefinitely. Run through those at full speed and keep the ones that pose any immediate threat off with the Shotgun. Don’t despair if you die too soon- this is a matter of luck as much as skill. A Flood noticing you a second too late might mean the difference between you being slaughtered and making it through without a scratch. Soon after you leave the cargo bay you’ll come to a fork. Take the right exit (the closest) and run through. Sometime after that you’ll reach a hole in the ground. Jump down and kill the Bombs nearby. Soon after that you’ll get to the shuttle bay. Camp out behind one of the pillars on the edge of the ledge to hide from the Elites in the center of the room. Some enemies will come out the door at the end of the ledge. Wait for them to get to the center of the shuttle bay and while they’re busy, run past to the other end of the room. Go through the door there. There will be a lot of enemies there, so be careful. Use grenades as needed, usually to clean up a full passageway. When you suffer through the passageways, you’ll come out on the third level of the shuttle bay. Look right and toss a grenade at the wall above the door there. It should get rid of many of the Flood there. If they still haven’t noticed you, use the Pistol to snipe them. Now they’re guaranteed to notice you. Mop up the Flood running at you. Go through the door. When you pass through a second door, reload your guns and get ready to meet Keyes. -The Captain One more door later, you’ll find out that there’s a battle between the Covenant and the Flood, and Cortana will hysterically beg you to hurry up. Use grenades to kill the Covenant and then get rid of the Flood with grenades and the Shotgun. Run through at first chance- there will be infinite Flood coming out of the control room and you’ll need the ammo anyway. When in the control room, run up onto the control platform and meet the thing that was once the captain. Now that’s a warm welcome... Master Chief will have to rip the neural interface chips out of the captain in order to blow the Pillar of Autumn. That will be pretty ugly (guess Bungie didn’t use good graphics on this to avoid a higher age restriction). Now you have to get out of there. Problem is, there’s a Covenant ambush behind the only exit. On the Easy and Normal difficulties you could run straight through the Covenant behind the door without taking too much damage. On Heroic and Legendary you can’t do this- it’ll be a miracle if you survive more than five seconds. Instead, run just close enough to the door to open it, and then run left and into a far corner of the room. Wait for the Flood to come out and kill off the Covenant. Level the playground a bit with grenades and then kill the Flood (who will probably win) with you guns. Then you just have to go the way you came. Not a big problem. There will be a Med pack near the control room entrance if you need it, and another one in one of the passages branching off of the passage outside of the control room (the one with the burning piece of a wall in it- you started the level on the other side of it). At one point you’ll see a cut scene showing a convoy coming into the shuttle bay. Complete with escort Banshees. When you’re on the third level of the shuttle bay, jump down onto the second level and onto the first level. Get into the nearest Banshee to end the level. X. The Maw -... And the Horse You Rode In On The last level. This is going to be tough and it’ll certainly make you apply most of the skills you learned throughout the game. After the spectacular view on the Pillar of Autumn, Master Chief’s Banshee will crash at exactly the right moment to land in one of the lifeboat openings. The first time you start it (if you restart, it won’t work), turn around and inch toward the edge. Directly below there will be the burning remains of the Banshee. Turn around and head inside. Turn left and go along the hallway. Eventually you’ll reach what looks like a dead end, but look right and you’ll see a maintenance hallway entrance. Or you can stay behind and fight the Sentinels that will arrive shortly. In the maintenance hallway, turn left twice and you’ll reach a hole in the floor. Some Spores will come out, so mow them down with the Assault Rifle or just melee attacks. Drop down. Detonate the nearby Bombs (there always have to be Bombs around whenever I drop through a hole in the floor- nasty things) and run toward the support strut-like thing further down the hallway. Hide behind it and kill the Sentinels on the other side with the Plasma Rifle. Then run past and get rid of the Flood in the way until you reach a door. It’ll be closed, but the Flood will break it out. Toss a grenade into the door and wait for them to come after you. When they’re still some distance away, use the Plasma Rifle, and when up close, use the Assault Rifle. Get a Shotgun as soon as you can. Once the passageway behind the door is more or less clear, run through and the Flood will stop coming. Open the door at the end of the passage and go through. There may or may not be Flood there, but there should be at least one Hunter. Kill that and look around for a Pistol. There should be one. If not, look again because it’s very, very bad if you don’t find it. Swap your Pistol for the gun other than the Shotgun and look through one of the two doors leading into the mess hall. Hey, I’ve been here! Run forward and take cover in one of the corners formed by the walls in front of the doors. Now take shots at the Grunts. Try to save ammo. If you’re short, you can run back to the passageway and see if there’s ammo there. Continue sniping. When there are only the Black Elites left, take cover and slowly approach them. Use the Shotgun from short range for some easy kills. Then some reinforcements will arrive. This will be trickier. Retreat back to the safest place possible and start sniping the Grunts. Take care to have some enemies around the Fuel Rod-wielding Grunts when the Fuel Rods detonate. Then concentrate on the Elites. Swap the Shotgun for a Plasma Pistol and go back to the mess hall. Use overcharges in the Elites and then finish them off with the Pistol. Both are more or less long-range and can slowly do the job. When possible, sneak up to the metal shield on the other side of the room and use it as cover against the Elites that should be running around on the other side of the exit door. Take back the Shotgun. Then go through and pass the arrow marked “Bridge”. Just as you’re about to reach the bridge (the place where you have to turn right to get to the Bridge) you’ll have a useless-looking room in front of you, complete with an Elite. A couple of point blank Shotgun shots will kill it. Now kill off the Grunts in the Bridge. Some will have Fuel Rod cannons, so concentrate on them first. Now take some kind of Plasma weapon and approach the glass sheet at the front of the room. A cut scene will show Cortana rigging the ship to blow, but the Monitor will stop the detonation. Then the thing will call up some Sentinels to kill you. They’ll shatter the glass, but the almighty Master Chief will duck behind the control panel. Then you’ll have to use the Covenant gun you picked up to kill the Sentinels. Take the human weapon you threw away and go outside. When you reach the hallway outside the Bridge (the one where you have the mess hall door just across the hallway), go left. A door will be open there. Toss a grenade through the door and wait for the Flood to start pouring out. Then take a few shots, a grenade maybe, and retreat into the Bridge’s hallway. They should come after you, so bottleneck them in the narrow entrance and win. Go through the door they came out of. Sweep the armory for stray Flood, because you’ll have to make a stronghold out of it and it’s not very pleasant to have Flood sneaking up on you from behind. There will be a battle in progress on the other side of the exit door, including a couple of Hunters. Don’t wait for the battle to end, but snipe the Hunters with the Pistol if possible. Then, when the battle is over, kill the leftover Hunter(s). Don’t run through yet- just behind those Hunters should be a Black Elite. Try to sneak up on it, or at least weaken it with grenades and then finish it off from a distance. Go through the next door. There will be some Sentinels and a lot of Spores. Kill the Sentinels and crawl under the half-closed blast door. There will be some more Sentinels in the passage leading to the Cryo chamber, probably guarding it. Take those out and go into the passage outside the Cryo chamber. See those burning pipes on the left? Jump over them and go left to eventually arrive at a partially broken out door and a Med pack if you need one. Go back to the passage outside the Cryo and wait for the enemies on the other side of the door to calm down a bit. Then go inside and take care of the enemies. Take the ammo from them and use a ladder to get up onto one of the two ledges running along the walls. Once the weird music starts playing, another wave of Flood will come. Kill those (which was rather hard for me- that music seems to affect my fighting ability). Then go along the ledge and to the Cryo chamber’s observatory. There will be some Sentinels on the other side of the glass. To save ammo, I would recommend going in just a bit to trigger some Flood to arrive. They will kill the Sentinels and it’ll be safer for you to proceed. Well, not that it’ll make a big difference, considering how dangerous this place will be. Kill off the immediate Flood and run to the left. This is one of the ugliest parts in the game, so I recommend stocking with ammo from the floor of the Cryo chamber. Don’t stop for anything, just run. It helps to blow the Bombs when you can. Run through the passage and the Flood will eventually stop coming. If you run through far enough, you’ll reach a dead end and an Over Shield. Take that and proceed. You’ll eventually reach a maintenance tunnel. Follow the tunnel till you reach an exit. There are actually multiple exits, but if you face one and go right, you’ll arrive at a blocked exit with a couple of Frag Grenades and a Med pack. If you go left, you’ll arrive in a room with a couple of bodies of evidence suggesting that a massacre took place there, and a very good opportunity to bottleneck the enemies that decide to come after you in the maintenance passage entrance. Once it’s more or less quiet, I recommend just running through the exit closest to the Med pack and Frag Grenades. When you do, run to the right and keep on running. Use the Pistol to pick off any Flood that followed you. Somewhere in that general area should be the Armory. Go inside. There they are, the only Invisible Flood. Get rid of them and any other Flood that venture into the Armory. Then take ammo for the Shotgun and swap your Pistol for a Rocket Launcher. Go outside and find the door marked “Engineering”. Go through. -Light Fuse, Run Away At the fork, I recommend turning right. Now that the Monitor’s stopped the detonation, you have to blow the ship manually. To do so, you have to destroy the ship’s fusion reactor’s shielding, which will overload the reactor and make you happy. And to destroy the reactor, you’ll have to draw back the manifold that covers the shielding. Then you’ll have to fire a rocket or throw a grenade at the shielding. When you arrive in the Engineering room, go up the ramp on your right and then go left along the ledge. Notice the Med packs hanging on the control panels on your left. Whenever your health is in the red, come here. Go through the door at the end of the ledge. Walk up the ramp and along the narrower walkway. When you reach the end, you’ll probably see some Flood. Clear those with the Shotgun and if they’re bunched up, with the Rocket Launcher. Run past and onto the platform. Run through the next door before you do anything else because if you stay and kill the Spores, a Flood will arrive through the next door. Run through and onto the next platform with the manifold control panels on it. Run up to one of the panels, activate it, and jump onto the retracting manifold. Then turn around and look into the shielding the manifold was covering. If it hasn’t already, it should open to reveal a red glow just behind the shielding. Use the Rocket Launcher’s scope to target the red glow and fire. One rocket should be enough. Repeat this four times. If it’s too confusing where the control panels are, use the nav points, which, if you didn’t force any glitches, should point to each panel. The armory will be open for you to take ammo, but it will close once you destroy all four reactor shields. When this happens, go back to the top where the manifold control panels are. There will be a door that you haven’t tried yet somewhere on that level. Go though and you’ll go though a couple of rooms and lots, lots of doors. At some point you’ll reach a closed door, which will quickly get broken out. Be careful not to stand close to it. Then you will see an elevator shaft and an elevator coming up. Throw a grenade onto the elevator and fire a rocket at the Covenant. Then kill off the rest and swap your Rocket Launcher for pretty much any gun. Get onto the elevator. While you’re riding down, Cortana and Foehammer will start talking about pulling you out of the Pillar of Autumn. -Warning: Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Convicts Once the elevator stops, run forward, turn right and run thorough the circular gate. Ah, Warthogs. Many Warthogs. Get behind the stick of the much used and abused LRV and drive out the gate on the other side of the room. Turn right and ride straight through the fight there. If the Warthog gets flipped by a grenade or Fuel Rod cannon, I suggest restarting. This part won’t be much different on different difficulties. The Warthog moves too fast for most weapons to hit it, so your Legendary shield won’t make much difference. Another change is that the ship is scheduled to go boom in five minutes instead of six. But you’ll just have to drive. Drive through the tunnel, staying at about the center if possible. In the next room, you’ll just have to go into the tunnel entrance straight in front of you. About when you reach the end of the tunnel, turn in any direction and if done right, you’ll jump out of the tunnel and drive around the pillar in front of you. When you’ve passed it, go back to the center of the room and drive onto the ramp below the bridge. Drive through the tunnel and into the next room. Keep the Warthog straight and don’t stop. If you have enough speed, you should be able to jump over the gaps in the bridge in the center of the room. Drive through the following tunnel. The next room will be tricky. There will be some annoying Sentinels there and obstacles stopping you from going through the center of the room. Drive around the perimeter of the room until you get to one of the sides. There will be a narrow ledge that you should follow. Continue on to a bridge where Foehammer was supposed to get you. Don’t stop there, or you may not make it on time. But if you want to witness a bit of the story, stop in the middle of the bridge and wait till you see Foehammer’s Pelican crashing into a wall on the right. Ride on through some more tunnels. Some time later you’ll get to a point where Cortana will tell you that there’s a jump ahead and if you have enough speed you should be able to make it. Just as she said, gather as much speed as possible and drive though the door at the end of the hallway. Depending on the speed of the Warthog and the angle at which you crossed the doorway, sometimes you’ll survive and sometimes you won’t. It’s really hard to miss the place you’re supposed to land in, but problem is, the Warthog will probably turn over if something is done wrong. Anyway, if you make it in one piece (ouch- that must have been really hard on the suspension), drive on and past another jump. When you near the Longsword bay, you’ll meet some barrels that are blocking the way. Get out of the Warthog and run. If some Elite or Flood stumbles into you path of destruction, gun it down with the Shotgun. Sprint in a straight line and up the ramp toward the Longsword interceptor. Congrats! You’ve just beat Halo, one of the hardest games I’ve ever come across. If this is the first time you’ve passed Halo at all, enjoy the cut scene. If this is the first time you’ve passed Legendary, enjoy it too (I won’t spoil it for you). Anyway, enjoy! ______________________________[ 11. Secrets]______________________________ This is not necessarily Easter Eggs and intended secrets, but every cool and sometimes slightly cheat-related thing I could find. -New ending After literally weeks of hard toil, trouble, and suffering in Legendary I get this: a new ending. It’s not actually a new ending, but the cut scene that served as the ending to every other difficulty, only slightly lengthened to fit a rather humorous segment out of Sarge’s life on Halo. Don’t believe me? See for yourself. -Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a Ghost? There’s a cool trick you can do in a Ghost. All you need is a wall and a Ghost. As Master Chief gets out of the right side of the Ghost when X is pressed, turn your right side to the wall and drive the side of the Ghost straight into said wall. Just as you’re about to hit the wall, press X and if timed right, the Ghost will push the Chief through the wall. I’ve never tried it with anything other than a door, but I suppose it’ll work with any wall. The best of this particular secret is hidden on the Assault on the Control Room level, where you have to climb the pyramid. Take one of the Ghosts from the ground and ride up the pyramid all the way to the door leading to the Covenant ambush. Use this trick to go through the door... and the Covenant will be frozen. In other words, they'll be acting as though you're wearing an Active Camo- they won't notice you whatever you do. -Stay in the Pelican Some missions begin with a Pelican flying to some place, dump you there, and fly away. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could stay in it when it takes off? In two of the levels, you can. The first is Assault on the Control Room. When you can move, turn around so that you’re facing the interior of the dropship. Just when you jump out of the Pelican, you’ll see the notice saying something like “Press X to get into the side seat of Pelican”. Or something like that. Just when it appears, press X... and you’re inside. The short flight will end in your inevitable death, seeing that the Pelican will be going for too fast for you to survive. The second place where you can stay in the Pelican is the next level, 343 Guilty Spark. Just as you’re able to move, start pressing the left trigger. It doesn’t matter if you run out of grenades, just keep pressing it and you’ll stay in the Pelican. When the dropship crashes, you’ll be able to have some fun around the props at the top of the level. Somewhere in that general area will be a weird marine who won’t move or react unless you shoot him. But otherwise, it’s boring. -Homemade fireworks As you probably noticed before, a Plasma Grenade can be moved by another Plasma Grenade detonating near it. If you throw a Plasma Grenade and then, without moving, throw another one at exactly the same spot, the first grenade will explode and send the other one high in the air. If you threw the second grenade as soon as possible, it will detonate at the highest point of the flight. Cool. -Up, up, and away! For this you need a Rocket Launcher, a Frag Grenade, some more grenades in your pocket, and some flat ground outside. Throw the Frag Grenade directly at you feet and fire the Rocket Launcher at it. If done right, the rocket will kill you and the grenade will detonate all the other grenades that fell out of the Chief. That launch will be as high as you’ll ever go without a Banshee. -Get into chasms Ever wanted to go down to the floor of the Control Room or another chasm? Now you can. There’s the everyday way of jumping down there and watching Master Chief flying down, but there’s a method that doesn’t involve dying. There are two places where you can do this: the Control Room in Two Betrayals and the chasm you pass just before hitting the Final Run checkpoint (on the same level). It’s simple, really, just grab a Banshee and fly there. It’s just that there are only two places where there’s a pilotable Banshee and a chasm. You get the Banshee necessary to get to the Control Room floor just after you get off the pyramid. When you pass that Final Run checkpoint, fight your way through until you reach the Banshees you’re supposed to use to fly up to the third and final generator. That’s the ones you should use to fly back to the chasm. -Magic door Two Betrayals. When you enter the cavern with the chasm in it (the one I talked about in the previous entry) and fight through to the other side, you’ll be expected to go through the next door. Do so and walk to the holo panel outside the door. You’ll be able to use that panel to open and close the door, as well as the one on the other side of the door. If that wasn’t enough, that particular door closes automatically once you walk into the cavern through it and not the other way. -Three guns on the Pillar of Autumn This is the only place where you can really have three guns at a time. When you finish talking to Keyes on the first level, turn around and run out of the Bridge as fast as possible. If you sprinted fast enough, you won’t take the Pistol ammo. Go through to the mess hall, pick up the Assault Rifle, kill the enemies there to get another gun, and return for the Pistol. You’ll take it and have three guns you can swap and pick up ammo for them as usual. This effect lasts only on this level, though. -Immortal computer operator on the Pillar of Autumn When you enter the Bridge, turn right and look at the computer operator guy there. Shoot him, punch him, and grenade him as much as you want, he won’t react. And Cortana won’t raise the alarm. Strange- there was a lot of blood around the guy last time I tried this. -Immortal marines on the Pillar of Autumn Kill someone on the Bridge and Cortana will raise an alarm. Some marines will arrive, and as you’ll probably see, they’re immortal. -Carry two and a half guns Sometimes it’s very inconvenient to go back half a level just to get more guns. So I’ve devised a solution. First I noticed that when the Chief picks up a gun, he throws the other one forward. So you can run at a gun, pressing the X button every half second or so, and you’ll repeatedly swap the guns while moving. Very effective way to move weapons. -Active Camo glitch I don’t know if this is possible to do only on my Xbox, but I guess it’s possible to do every else. And it’s probably possible to do everywhere you have a Active Camo, but I’ve done it during the Assault on the Control Room level, so this is where I’ll describe it. When you start the Rolling Thunder section, you’ll have to go up through the tunnel and into a valley. Proceed as normal until you have unrestricted access into the tower in the middle of the valley. Go inside. There will be some Invisible Elites there, so kill them. Now go around the pillar in the room and take the Active Camouflage. Before it completely activates, run straight into a wall. I think you should be able to kind of go about a foot into the wall. After that, you’ll be able to go into walls the same way once you take an Active Camo, but you will also reflect everything around you. this is permanent and I wouldn’t recommend trying it unless you really want to do this. ______________________________[ 12. How to contact me]_____________________ Send me a message to anton_bovin@yahoo.com. I’d prefer no hate mail about how bad this guide is, how you wish you never read it, etc. ______________________________[ 13. Legal]_______________________________ Some FYI’s about how I don’t like plagiarism for those who have never read a game guide before: This guide may not be reproduced in any shape or form, whether physical (magazine, book, printed on a printer) or electronic (website, some other way of electronically storing data) without my consent. To get my consent, send me an e-mail to anton_bovin@yahoo.com. If you get it, you may publish this guide on a website (which should be stated in the e-mail), but with full credit given to me. Exceptions to these guidelines are the following websites, where you may publish the guide without my consent, but with full credit given to me: GameFAQs- www.gamefaqs.com Gamefly- www.gamefly.com ______________________________[ 14. Final word]___________________________ Well, I hope you enjoy Halo. I’ll be writing a guide for Halo 2, so hope you read that too. Have fun! Copyright 2006 Anton Bovin