HateKill rated Halo "worth buying", as opposed to Worth Playing. While they liked the AI and the "classic gameplay", they decided to "leave out the storyline and get onto the important stuff" in their review, which didn't bode well for the game from the start.

They didn't like what they termed "repetitious" level areas, and didn't like the Flood as much as the Covenant as enemies, calling them "annoying" (hey, I agree, a bit). They also didn't like the fact that you have to force a pixel shader selection at the command line to get good performance in some cases. Thanks Shacknews.