Halo: The Master Chief Collection is easily one of the best remastered collections to have been released - for the price of one game, Xbox One owners are able to replay some of the greatest first person shooters ever made. Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3 and Halo 4 are all included in this single package and come with enough improvements and reworked content from the get-go to make The Master Chief Collection an essential purchase for almost every Xbox One owner...

...That's what I would have enthusiastically told you last week when this review would have gone up had the multiplayer servers been functional. For how good the collection is - and it is indeed a great collection - the online multiplayer matchmaking has been an absolute mess since launch.

In this review I will not be focusing on, or heavily critiquing, the gameplay mechanics of the four titles. As a remastered collection left fully untouched on the gameplay front, each game in The Master Chief Collection plays exactly as it did when originally released. Some of the mechanics are therefore naturally dated by modern standards and you will immediately notice that the mission structure can get god awful by today's standards, but as a package it achieves exactly what it was set out to accomplish on a gameplay front. If you're looking for modern shooter gameplay then, aside from Halo 4, these are unlikely to be games that will appeal to you.

By far the most impressive improvement made to the games in The Master Chief Collection is the jump to 60 frames per second. The graphical hike up to 1080p (on all games except Halo 2 Anniversary's campaign, which runs at 1328x1080) is certainly not to be sniffed at, but the impact a higher frame rate has on Halo's gameplay is not to be under-estimated. Once you play Halo at 60 FPS there's really no going back. Gunplay and movement in general are both immediately more satisfying; the increased responsiveness makes the act of taking on Covenant forces noticeably more enjoyable than before. If you thought the Halo series was already smooth and responsive then you're in for a treat here. It's a truly transformative experience that makes playing through each title in The Master Chief Collection well worthwhile.

Since Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a package that contains four titles, it seems appropriate to cover each game individually, starting with the key game of the collection: Halo 2 Anniversary. It's clear from the moment you begin playing the Halo 2 campaign that this is a true remaster and not simply a cash grab. Just like Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary runs on a new graphics engine that looks pretty excellent. Elements of the game do still look somewhat dated despite this graphical leap, but to be fair there's only so much that can be achieved while preserving the core of a 10 year old title. When quickly swapping between the original graphics and the new graphics, it's clear that a lot of work been put into remastering the title; this ability to swap between the two also serves as a brilliant and immediate illustration of how far graphics technology has come in those 10 years.

This effort extends to the brilliantly-crafted CGI cutscenes that have been completely overhauled and recreated by Blur Studios. The cutscenes on display in Halo 2 Anniversary are some of the best you'll find in the industry today, rivalling blockbuster summer movies in their cinematic flare. The animation is outstanding and the level of detail mind blowing. These scenes breathe new life into Halo 2 and turn the narrative into a much more epic and cinematic experience than I remember from 10 years ago. The gameplay also shines through. Halo 2 Anniversary plays exactly the same as the original release, as noted earlier, but it remains a fantastic shooter. If you enjoyed Halo 2 back in 2004, you'll love it here.

My personal favourite campaign of the series is contained in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Even 13 years after its original release on the Xbox, Halo: Combat Evolved is still incredibly fun. The campaign is completely untouched here, with the exception of the graphical overhaul introduced in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for the Xbox 360. 

Halo 3, while not receiving the anniversary treatment, has also received a minor facelift, but for my money it's the worst looking game in the collection despite the resolution bump and improved lighting. However, this definitely doesn't dampen my opinion on Halo 3 which still remains my favourite in the series due to an excellent multiplayer component and a solid campaign that wrapped up the original trilogy tightly, so it still holds up fairly well despite now looking the most dated of the four games in graphical terms.

Finally, Halo 4 is something of the black sheep of The Master Chief Collection. As the only title not developed by Bungie in this pack, the drastic shift in both tone and gameplay is somewhat jarring when compared with the original Halo trilogy. Don't misunderstand me - it's a high quality game that is still enjoyable to play through - but it feels a little out of place despite being consistent with the running theme of Master Chief.

The Master Chief Collection is far from flawless. Across all of the games (and particularly Halo 4), I encountered noticeable framerate drops during gameplay. While these drops are rare and not particularly jarring when playing Halo 1, 2 and 3, Halo 4 suffers from framerate drops on a much more frequent basis (and especially when loading new areas). It's understandable that the most recent game in the collection is also the most technically demanding, but it's an Xbox 360 game running on a new console, so such issues shouldn't really be occurring.

There are also some strange graphical glitches throughout the collection, particularly in Halo 2 Anniversary. Enemy character models occasionally fade for no apparent reason, becoming washed out or even completely invisible. There's also a glitch in Halo 3 that causes everything on screen to generate a blurry white outline. The game also sometimes crashes for no apparent reason; you can be browsing through the menus and will get kicked back to the dashboard inexplicably. These issues were all rare, but noteworthy nonetheless.

Regardless, what is offered in terms of single player value is hard to complain about. The four campaigns combined will take dozens of hours to complete, not including the potential replay value offered by the additional difficulty levels, skulls, and hundreds of achievements. It's certainly a huge plus that each game in The Master Chief Collection offers highly rewarding single player component, in stark contrast to a lot of today's first person shooter offerings.

As a Halo release, though, the main attraction is of course the multiplayer. Multiplayer is just as fun as it ever was and I found that playing some old school arena shooting was surprisingly refreshing. Map control and tight aim are far more important than sprinting around the map with a shotgun or exploiting unbalanced perks and killstreaks. One thing that deserves major credit is the huge amount of multiplayer content on offer here. The game comes with every single Halo multiplayer map, as well as 6 remade multiplayer maps based on Halo 2 classics such as Lockout and Zanzibar. There are also a number of solid playlists to choose from, though some have been removed for matchmaking stability.

Speaking of which, now comes the major bug bear that absolutely crippled the collection at launch and still leaves a bad taste in the mouth to this day. Halo: The Master Chief Collection has had an absolutely disastrous launch, rivalling the launch of SimCity and Diablo III in terms of awful network stability and an inability to consistently find matches. For example, I've found myself stuck in matchmaking queues for as long 30 minutes and still been unable to find matches. Even when able to find a match, you'll as often as not find yourself kicked from lobby or put on a team of two against a party of four. Hit detection is also awful on these unstable servers and very rarely could I play three matches in a row. 

Even up to this day, more than a week since launch, matchmaking is a total mess. The recent 1.5GB patch that was released by 343 Industries more than a week after launch has fixed some of these issues, but matchmaking is still operating ineffectively and has a long way to go before it will make for a satisfying gaming experience. Waiting times are lengthy, the game often crashes, and you'll still get kicked from matches or get stuck in empty lobbies. The patch has certainly improved things, but persistent network stability problems like these are absolutely unforgivable for a triple-A launch.

The value of Halo: The Master Chief Collection is unparalleled. Very few collections offer this much content and so much incentive to jump back into playing some classic titles. In terms of single player and multiplayer gameplay, Halo is better than ever at 60 FPS and still holds up strong when compared with today's shooters, and the anniversary treatment has brought new life to Halo 2 that few will have genuinely expected. That said, jumping back into some good ol' Halo was made difficult by the simple fact that multiplayer didn't work for over a week and even now isn't working as efficiently as it should be. The majority of players are now able to find matches, but matchmaking is far from fixed, with some users completely unable to play the game to this day.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection is brilliant on paper and will likely be fantastic once the matchmaking issues are truly fixed, but as it stands The Master Chief Collection is an amazing package held back by a dreadful launch and ongoing matchmaking issues.