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  • Subject: ROE: Everything Can Be Beaten
Subject: ROE: Everything Can Be Beaten
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  • last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT

I play coop mode (a lot) with a friend. In the further attempt to extend the life of this game, we came up with 'Rules of Engagement'.

Originally, it was 'only human weapons', 'only covenent weapons' or 'just two weapons' (such as ONLY pistol+needler for the whole game). We tried 'no vehicles', (but gave it up, at least for long distance travel).

Maybe some of you have a fun and challenging form of ROE?

Now we're into 'Everything Can Be Beaten' or 'Techno-Club' mode.
1. Wield all weapons as clubs only. Shooting is forbidden.
2. No vehicle weapons may be used.
3. Vehicular homicide is allowed (and encouraged).
4. Grenades are fine (because I like them so much).

You'll probably want to back off to 'normal' difficulty the first time you try ''Everything Can Be Beaten' ROE. You are exposed to very heavy fire, and having shields that actually WORK (and marines who don't instantly die) helps.

Be liberal with the grenades, employ different (alternately highly aggressive, sneaky, even craven) tactics and cheat wherever appropriate. A lot of 'impossible' things can be done by just hiding until a prompt, sneaking around bad guys, properly balancing the odds between Covenent/Flood or Covenent/Human battles with well placed grenades, getting tanks to overturn and/or blow up their own troops (which can leave ghosts upside down ready to be stolen), or jumping onto a ghost or warthog and dashing around/through the big hordes of bad guys, and then running through a door or jumping onto a banshee, or starting the elevator. Exploit the respawn, 'irritating beam ups', buddy-boosting and sometimes quirks in the game's enemy spawning, taking turns attacking as one player or the other gets wasted, unabashedly using the 'spank of life' to heal and exchange grenades, climbing up over or down from heavily defended places, using one chief as a shield/target to get the other one through, that sort of thing. Keep in mind that when you run away from a battle, that all those baddies will still tend to be back there if you try to retreat from the next one.

For instance, it turns out one of the most annoying spots, the place full of rocket launcher flood where you walk into the white beam and it drops your shields and flood comes pouring out of everywhere, for this one guy can stand near the front door 'beam up' point, while the other one runs straight in behind a frag grenade and hits the beam, then the player near the door simply walks out and both players get away free and clear. All of these shield-droppy rooms have exploitable quirks. The first can be run into, broken and run out of, the third can just be run straight into and ends with a non-interactive sequence that destroys all the sentinels for you. The 'control room' door can be breached easily using the ghost-door trick, and the outer door defenses never spawn if you simply jump off the bridge and onto that middle protrusion, then walk towards the control room and clamber down the side, or just grenade and steal the banshees.

Hunters can't be clubbed to death, but are pretty easy; you can get them to run off cliffs (and they hilariously fall through moving elevators), or you can almost always simply run away from them. There is one place (in the 'Rescue the Captain' level) where you will probably just have to break the ROE and kill them to carry on. The outside ones near the 'gravity lift' can be coaxed over the cliff, but the first ones you meet inside the ship don't have a convenient cliff to stampede them off of, and it won't open the door until they're both dead. In the 'Map Room' level, the outside hunters can be run over, and the inside ones should be run away from first, then attracted toward the pitfall on the way back up (they don't die from the fall, so if you coax them to fall off the stairs first, they'll be waiting for you below).

This isn't very fun on the library levels in some places, but you CAN get through them without breaking the ROE, even on the highest difficulty (though very time consuming). Flood can be beaten to death, but it's tedious work, they hit back harder, and there's usually another one to a hundred flood beating/eating on you at the same time. What you have to do on the floody levels is run away a lot (running through places without engaging any enemies will get you through a LOT of hairy situations), and rely on the 'respawn' your buddy gets to bring you back. Mostly you run, run, run.

We haven't played the WHOLE thing through this way on 'Legendary' (it takes hours to play through a level), but we did get through many places we thought would be utterly impossible without 'breaking the rules'. On Easy or Normal, this is abundantly do-able. Heroic is challenging and gets tedius, but we beat it. If all else fails, drop the ROE temporarily (quitter!).

Another mode we tried and had some fun with was "Karma", or "Eye for an Eye". Basically, you can grenade and beat, but you can only shoot the bad guys with exactly the same thing they're shooting at you. This allows you to shoot back at floody things and out-of-reachy things, assuming you can get your hands on EXACTLY what each individual is carrying. Unfortunately, this mode is awfully easy to 'fall off the wagon' on, as once you start spraying that machine gun at flood, the other ones around him tend to 'accidentally' get hit a lot.

  • 10.22.2005 11:24 AM PDT