Weaponry/Vehicles - 5/10
POSITIVES:
- 4 Weapons at once is AWESOME!
- Many new guns to play with.
- Most feel powerful enough to be worth picking up.
- Nearly all are implemented well and few have any notable bugs.
- New DetPacks/Throwing Knives are AWESOME!
- More destructible enemy vehicles, including those damn Spirits, is AWESOME!
- Dual Magnums are so much fun, and the Sniper Rail Cannon of Doom present on Two Betrayals was AMAZING to play around with! Its criminal its only on that 1 spot(as far as I know anyways!)
- I like that the basic Plasma Weapons have been made a little stronger, though the Plasma Pistol is actually borderline OP. It was dropping everything short of Spec Ops Elites(including Flood!) way faster than most of the mainline rifle options.
- Helicopter was fun but RIDICULOUSLY OP. New Warthog/Jeep thing was also fun to roll around in. I didn't really bother with the water jet ski on the silent cartographer.
- Other newly driveable vehicles are fun to play around with, though I would still rather have a Scorpion over a Wraith any day.
NEGATIVES:
- Switching between 4 weapons is painful when cycled 1 at a time. I'd like to recommend seeing if its possible to script in some kind of weapon wheel/list to make it easier to see what you have and pick the right gun in a split second.
- The Helicopter "dive" feature is ridiculously jank. I didn't even know it was a feature and thought it was a bug till I saw the discussion. I don't think any player would intuitively understand that they could dive out of the helicopter midair, people will probably land it properly as you would with a Banshee. If its gonna be there it probably needs work, maybe make the Helicopter destructible and have it as a special safety option, idk.
- The Combat Knife is hilariously, absurdly, ridiculously, deliciously, morbidly OP. Being able to walk up to a hunter and instakill them by slapping them with a knife is downright comical. It even 3 shots FLOOD COMBAT FORMS! I would say on the whole it completely outperforms the energy sword added, and the player starts most missions with it(afaik its meant to be all missions). Probably needs some tuning, since if the Energy Sword is available it should be the top tier melee option I'd assume.
- While the new throwing knives and detpacks are awesome you start with WAY too many of them, over 20 of each. They should be scattered throughout the level or dropped by human flood forms, and you should be limited to 4 detpacks and maybe 8 throwing knives.
- Removal of Smartlink Scope on the single Magnum is criminal.
- I personally didn't like the change to the Plasma Rifle making it like the subsequent rifles through the rest of the series. I totally understand the change, but the CE Plasma Rifle was more fun to use because it was so much stronger than it becomes in the sequels.
- This is a major negative for me. A significant majority of the guns added, the "Modern" suite, just do not belong in a Halo game. Master Chief rolling around with an M60 simply doesn't fit in the futuristic setting, too much of a style clash. I guess its mostly personal taste, I've had my fill of the CoD-ification(enshitification) of Halo after Halo 4. My only suggestion would be to include a plugin to turn them off, but keep any futuristic additions, other new guns from sequel Halo's, etc., if possible.
- Iron Sights feel absolutely awful across the board, both in terms of visual implementation and usefulness. I don't believe true Iron Sights belong anywhere in Halo, if we must have ADS, I'd recommend an approach similar to Halo 4 using smartlink scopes(I still wouldn't even much like that but that's just me).
- Pretty much every change implemented to the vanilla arsenal makes the game less fun. Assault Rifle no longer being for Spray and Pray. Global Vehicle Weapon Inaccuracy(!!) like the vanilla Scorpion Tank is NOT fun. Also, for the Covenant light vehicles, the random interruptions when firing plasma cannons on ghost/banshee are annoying and unnecessary. Vehicles should absolutely be OP since you don't get them very often. If the mod doesn't do this and its base MCC then somebody ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up.
- I think the best approach to somewhat fix some of this jank and culture clash would be to use some sensible power scaling. My approach would be to leave all of the vanilla weapons unchanged, except to buff their damage significantly, while also increasing their rarity. The new weapons added in from our current modern era could use the baseline power scaling following vanilla, and be used by the Marines, and the futuristic weapons could be made substantially more powerful, and only available for player(Spartan) use, rarely found semi-hidden throughout missions. I would still probably on the whole prefer not to have the modern stuff, and instead opt for new(to Halo CE) weapons from across Halo lore to be used.

Levels and Level Changes - 10/10
I have no negatives here, as the only levels changed significantly to my knowledge are The Library and Two Betrayals(and some flavor added to 343 Guilty Spark), all of which were the highlight of my playthrough, due to the great love and care put into the flood. By changed significantly, I mean alterations to the flow of battle, new enemies, new level events, sounds, music etc., not just the enemies using their new weapons. Fighting weaponless flood was something different and refreshing, but ended up a net negative for me, though I'll get more into that later. The new SFX in in particular on some levels were fantastic, as well as the surprise flood miniboss during 343 guilty spark which actually freaked me out enough to almost kill me. Not quite though!

Bugs:
I had what I can only assume was a severe reoccurring bug, in that I would only spawn with the standard 2 weapons, and stuck with only 2 weapons max for the entirety of the level. I tried both level restarts and game restarts, but I'd still have 2 guns. This happened to me on The Pillar of Autumn, The Library, Keyes, and The Maw. The severity of this happening that many times when having 4 weapons is one of the mods selling points means that I am docking 2 entire points from my final score for this reason alone. I hope that others do not experience this, or if its not a bug, that the mod author can get round to adding in support for these levels soon, because this was a major drag on the experience.

Smallar bugs worth noting:
- The crazy assault-cannon style weapon with the machinegun and underslung explosive launcher found on Halo will absolutely obliterate vehicles with its explosive launcher, something goes haywire with the physics and causes them to practically just despawn.
- Related to the above, I sequence broke one of the covenant dropship sequences and got stuck while rescuing one of the Marine squads, and had to either restart the level or massacre all the marines. I chose the former, since I only lost about 20 minutes of progress.
- The m60 seems to have really notably low damage.
- Humorously, during the final cutscene with Master Chief and Cortana on board the longsword, the camera centers and zooms in on MC's codpiece instead of his visor. Master Cheeks anyone?

Difficulty:
This mod makes the game incredibly easy compared to vanilla, purely because the player receives a significant power boost, while the AI receives nothing, or a nerf(in the case of the flood). Even the Marines are quite a bit more competent now, fighting alongside the player. The only power increase for enemies I came across were some elites and a jackal using what I think was a kind of one-handed Beam Rifle that managed to kill me a few times.
Across my playthrough, I died 3 times on Halo to the aforementioned handheld beam rifle thing carried by elites, once during The Silent Cartographer, once during Assault on the Control Room, several times on 343 Guilty Spark, about 5 times on The Library(kept getting sandwiched by reviving melee-only flood), and probably 30 times to each major batch of Spec Ops Elites/Grunts during Keyes and The Maw. To any wondering, they're still among the hardest enemies in any Halo game, the bastards.

Melee Only Flood:
This is an interesting idea, and I can understand the desire, but I ultimately ended up not enjoying it by the end. It makes them pathetically easy to fight. You can dodge, bob and weave through them very easily, you still match their speed for backpedal shooting, and having no ammunition drops at all does force you to adjust your playstyle somewhat, which disrupts the flow of battle. Furthermore, this makes the flood completely useless in their fights with the covenant, and in sections where they're meant to be on ledges shooting down or across, they now just stand there(menacingly) and do nothing. The only way to match their threat with weapons would be to approximately double their numbers, which I don't think would be fun, intense as it would be. It also on the whole just makes them less scary, part of their terror is that they are a hive mind that actively learns to use technology. You're telling me they can fly a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ star cruiser but can't shoot a gun? Its a huge immersion break. My honest take on this is that if the mod author really wants weaponless flood, the best way to do it would be to implement that as the default, and include some kind of plugin to just turn the flood weapons back on for players like Red Hood and myself who prefer them not be simple rage infected zombies.
- The Grunt flood forms, while cool, are a bit jank. What I'd suggest doing with them is having their explosion radius be like a quarter of the Carrier form, but make them way more plentiful even than the Carriers.

My final rating for this mod as of 1.0: 6/10.
2 points docked because for 4 missions I only had 2 weapons.
1 point docked because I dislike the realistic "modern" weapons very much, along with some of the music and a few VFX changes.
1 point docked because at the end of the day the flood are much less fun to fight if they don't have guns.
I will go into more specifically detailed thoughts now, but this mod is definitely worth your time and at least 1 playthrough if you want to give it a try.

General Thoughts now, firstly, a response to Red Hood's review.
I never experienced any significant ammo scarcity in the latter half of the game. Where I did was because I had my weapons limited to 2 only, but there are plenty of good weapons laying around on 343 Guilty Spark, The Library and Two Betrayals which I cycled between with no issues. I think the hardest mission in terms of ammo was Keyes, until I learned how strong the Plasma Pistol is, and then the mission became extremely easy. That isn't to say that I was unaffected by the changes, I adjusted my playstyle to be more mobile and aggressive on The Library to keep up the pace of progress, and picked my battles more carefully, quickly pushing through the swarms to avoid getting stuck fighting endlessly respawning enemies. Two Betrayals was extremely easy across the board but also still super fun to play through, still(imo) the best and certainly my favourite level in Halo CE. Keyes was tricky while I was still trying to avoid using plasma weapons, but they actually work just fine against the flood now, and the Plasma Pistol is really strong, better than the Rifle! In either case, if I had 4 weapons Keyes wouldn't have been half as troublesome.

I also did not personally experience any buggy textures, and only had a little bit of missing sounds during some gunfire at one point towards the end of Keyes. IMO, the current ammo/weapon scarcity would be completely fine to keep, and makes the experience more authentically desperate in line with what is actually happening from the Master Chief's PoV. Perhaps it could remain only on Legendary Difficulty, and for heroic and lower, make it so The Flood are able to drop Ammo packets to keep your guns locked and loaded.

Regarding Flood revival, it is definitely MUCH more common now, each combat form should be expected to need killing twice, however, I can say with absolute certainty they only revive once each 99.999% of the time. I only witnessed a single Marine Combat form stand up a second time across my entire playthrough, and trust me, I pay attention when I'm killing flood. I always stop to blow their claw arms off of their bodies, since, to paraphrase a great quote by a great man in a great film: "The enemy cannot slap you, if you disable his hand!". If my game hadn't bugged, and I had access to the godlike combat knife across all the Flood missions, I can say with certainty I'd have had no hassles making my way through them.

Final point, I actually agree with Red Hood that shotguns are very scarce compared to all the other new toys available to play with, especially against the flood.

Moving on, I want to suggest nerfing the covenant Spec Ops teams. I died more to them on Keyes alone than the entirety of my playthrough up to that point, and that was just on heroic! I'm not sure if the mod made any changes, but it was a real grind to push past them either way, even if they're still completely vanilla. Not to say they shouldn't still be a huge threat, but maybe you just encounter more teams through the levels, but smaller in size, since the main threat they pose are the sheer numbers of them combined with their shield strength and weapons(Fuel Rods, Grenade Spam).

If possible, adding in some new setpieces to levels to change them up a bit would be fun. As an example, maybe there could be some miniboss sequences on The Library to break up the monotony of that level, like the one already put into 343 Guilty Spark. Maybe the Flood Juggernaut? More setpiece battles on Two Betrayals would be excellent too, on the scale of Halo 2 as an example. Anything like that would be tons of fun to play through.

With the Helicopter as OP as it is, I think it would make more sense to put it on Two Betrayals, than on Halo. For the big sky fight in the middle of the level against the banshees and plateau where the covenant have fortified, followed by the tunnel. Would mix up that section in a good way, since Halo is already a lot different with the new weapons and new jeep added.

Destructible human vehicles would be interesting, if possible with CE's engine. Was always weird to me that only covie stuff can blow up.

For some weapon highlights, the Hunter Fuel Rod Cannon being so inaccurate renders it completely useless. I'd suggest reducing its accuracy penalty to like 25% of its current setting, because otherwise there isn't a situation where I wouldn't drop it for a normal fuel rod or a SPNKR.

The minigun is one of the only modern weapons I think fits with Halos setting, and its implemented wonderfully. It would be awesome if the minigun spawn on The Library was moved to right before the main/final big wave fight against the flood on the last door 343 Guilty Spark needs to go unlock.

One of the scoped assault rifles(like the AUG) can't actually scope in for me, I don't remember which one it was though.

Another thing that could help any ammo scarcity, if possible in engine, would be to have all of the assault rifle options share ammo. The player could find their rifle of choice and recycle the ammo from the many other options scattered around.

I could suggest a million other things but it sounds like the mod author has plenty of planned work already so I won't go overboard any more here. I think that’s plenty for now. Hope it helped somebody!

Author's note: Sorry for all the replies, it wouldn't let me post as one entry, so I split it up, I wasn't sure of the allowed character limit.

Holy cow!!! @Elite_KryPtik You outdid yourself writing this... 😳 I read some of it last night when I discovered it. I'm so appreciative of a highly detailed review, but also overwhelmed with the amount of feedback I have. It will be extremely helpful for improving my mod, however.

The mod is far from complete, and I had ZERO play-testers to tell me what was wrong. There's no way I could respond to every single detail listed, but I will make sure you know I will eventually go through it all, and consider what changes to make.

There are some things listed as issues that I never changed from their retail counterparts. I'm sorry for any problems encountered throughout. But that is why it's listed as a Work In Progress (WIP). I knew there might be issues, but I had no idea to what extent.

It's impossible to know how the game is going to play for each individual person. I have people telling me about bugs I cannot reproduce. Strangely, not everyone experiences the same things.

But anyway, thank you so much for writing this! I'm sure others will appreciate it as well.
I hope you have a lovely day, and that I can eventually improve on all of the aforementioned bugs and balance issues. 🙂

This is a completely fair response tbh,I got nothing else to say on the matter considering that I only primarily used UNSC weapons and not covie weaponry (which explains why I was running low on ammo but still proves my point on some areas needing ammo caches around in the flood missions to allow for more use of UNSC weaponry since you can get ammo consistently from the flood in the Vanilla campaign so I dont see why it would be a problem.)

I do also want to correct a mistake and that is the fact that the flood can outrun you.. they dont, it turns out that I was stupid enough to walk into their jumping angle to get sideswiped by their attacks in the air.. I really did not want to suffer on the library sooo yea..

No problem TropicThunder, had a blast rolling through the CE campaign modded(my first modded campaign besides cursed halo, which doesn't really count tbh). I'll be curious to come back and try it out again in the future. And Red Hood, I'd recommend trying the campaign again, but give the plasma weapons a go this time, they help a lot especially vs flood. Wouldn't be much help on The Library though, just gotta keep it moving to outpace the endless hordes there.