Halo: Evolutions, Volume II

Halo Evolutions Volume 2 is the second half of the now split Halo Evolutions, an anthology set in the Halo Universe.

For this review, I'll be doing some mini reviews of each of the entries in the collection, with the exception of The Icon and Connectivity, as I feel like those are too small for me to really have a full opinion on. I'll be giving each story it's own separate rating, and at the end, giving a final overview of the book, with an average rating of the stories mentioned below.

Blunt Instruments - 3 Stars

Blunt Instruments is the opener to the book, and has us following Black Team, a squad of 4 Spartans, who are on a demolition job, the target of which is a Covenant mining rig. With the help of a drone, they execute their plan to take down the Covenant's position.

This was a pretty okay story. The dynamic between Black Team was really enjoyable, with each of their personality's jumping off the page, and the overall throughline of the story adds some fun lore tidbits to some of the Covenant species, primarily the drones, my opinion of which has now shot up due to how cool they were in this story.

That being said, at times, the prose is really murky, making it difficult to fully picture the environment that the story is taking place in. This is most notable at the end, as the Spartans are making their way from the demo site to their exfil point. I was thoroughly let down by this, as it took me straight out of the story at multiple points.

Overall, thanks to this story, I'm looking forward to seeing more of Black Team, as I know they appear in the Glasslands trilogy of books, but I was glad to move onto something else by the end.

The Mona Lisa – 4.5 Stars

This was the standout story in the collection in my opinion. It's really easy to forget that you're playing an unstoppable monster of a human in most Halo games, so seeing a story from the perspective of normal marines is always going to be interesting, especially when you add The Flood into the mix.

This story was fairly predictable, but in a manner that made the horror of the plot all that more tangible, as it allowed the tension to build to a crescendo before everything went utterly tits up.

The Flood were phenomenally written throughout this, likely being at their most terrifying across all of Halo's expanded media. The setting of the Mona Lisa, the titular ship, made a for a really intense atmosphere, similar to the library from Halo: Combat Evolved, but again, from the much more terrifying PoV of bog standard marines.

The expansion of certain aspects of the lore is really cool, such as being one of the earliest glimpses into the sheer depravity of ONI, and the lengths that they would go to in order to get a leg up on the Covenant, seemingly betraying every single moral that the UNSC strives to maintain.

The cast of characters is also extremely strong, with my favourite being Lopez, the matriarchal sergeant who leads the squad of marines throughout the book. Watching her slowly lose her hope of returning home was genuinely heartbreaking, and seeing her have to continue ever on, despite the losses of soldiers that she viewed as as important to her as children, was extremely tragic, and I loved the imagery the author used for it, with each soldier being one of her “rosary beads”.

The relationship between Rimmer, a prisoner on the ship, and Henry, a Sangheili prisoner on the ship, was a really stark way of contextualizing just how menacing the flood were as a threat, as this book is set before the events of Halo 2, so the Elite's were still their enemies.

My only gripe with this book, is that it ends on a really weird, unsatisfying note, where we don't get closure on a couple of characters, who in the 13 years since Evolution released, have never reappeared in the franchise.

Overall though, this is one of my favourite pieces of Halo media, and I'd likely find myself recommending Evolutions to people just for this story alone.

Palace Hotel – 2 Stars

Palace Hotel was a really weak entry into this anthology. I've never read anything by Robert Mclees, and I think I'll be making a point to avoid anything his names attached to, because oh my lord, his writing style is horrible.

This story takes place between the second and third missions of Halo 2, and follows Master Chief as he escorts a squad of Marines to the rest of their unit.

This is a pretty cool setup, let down by the fact that Mclees switched the PoV of the story twice, without any form of indication whatsoever. There was a point in it where you're reading from

Master Chief's perspective, and a few sentences late, with nary a page break to be seen, you're in the head of one of the Marines. As I read this, it genuinely jarred me to the point where I nearly put the book down, or skipped onto the next story. This happens again later in the story, but wasn't anywhere near as jarring.

The prose during action scenes is also really inconsistent. In anything longer than half a page, Mclees has a total inability to write interesting combat, but when he writes some that's short, it's generally fantastic. There's a point early on, where Chief 1v1's a Jackal, which lasts maybe a paragraph or two, but was the only moment that I genuinely enjoyed a fight scene during the story.

I don't usually quote books in my reviews, but there's a line I want to highlight here, because it's one of the worst things I've ever seen a character say, so if I had to suffer, you should too.

“I believe I can honestly say that even though you are an honest-to-Buddha one-man death squad, and that if you were to ask nicely I'd give up my lucrative career in the Corps and start pumping out your babies as fast as you could put them in me”

This is said by a marine corporal, who only a page or two before, had been cursing Chief out, and the only thing that had changed in that time, was they went up some stairs. I think that quote and context does enough to show my issues with Mclee's writing style

The only reason I'm not rating this 1 star, is because there's an amazing moment at the end, where Chief meets a childhood friend of his, and his this moment of realization that he's not the person he was when he knew her.

Overall, this story sucked, and I would recommend that if you do read it, skip towards the end of it for the only amazing moment in it. I am genuinely of the opinion that when they split evolutions into two volumes, they should have just done away with this story in it's entirety, allowing it to be forgotten.

Human Weakness – 4 Stars

I really enjoyed this story, and thought that it was a really well thought out deep dive into the psyche of Cortana, and the need to deal with your own mortality from the perspective of a character that's never had to feel pain.

Watching her have to come to terms with the reality that she, like every other human, has an expiration date, was really intriguing, and added a lot of layers to her character that's enhanced her arc in Halo 4 quite a bit for me.

I really engaged with the parts of the story where she was battling with the Gravemind's offer, and the temptation that that created within her, especially since it was framed as a way for her to forever stay with John, her one and only friend.

Seeing her lose hope throughout the story, as the Gravemind broke her will, to the point where she genuinely believed that Chief was just a hallucination the Gravemind created to toy with her was fantastic, as it really added to her rescue in the game, something that I thought had been mishandled there.

Overall, it was really good, but nothing phenomenal. It's a perfect piece of supplementary material to an already fantastic game, serving to enhance it further. It was definitely pallete cleanser following the train wreck that was the last story, so I give it props for that.

Wages of Sin – 4 stars

This one is interesting. I can see it being a story that people might glance off of because of the framing off it. This is the final confession of a member of the race of Prophet's, where he outlines how his species failed the Covenant, and deserve the fate that they're now reaping.

It's one of the more beautifully written stories in the anthology, having prose that is far beyond any of the other stories.

And again, like a lot of the stories in this collection, it adds a lot to the expanded lore of the Covenant, giving a degree of sympathy to the one race the games don't portray as victims of an unfair religion.

I'd probably rank this one as the third best in the collection, just behind The Mona Lisa and The Return.

The Return – 4.5 Stars

This is one of the most intriguing bits of lore Halo's ever had. This story follows a Covenant Shipmaster 7 years after the events of Halo 3, as he returns to a planet that he glassed twenty years prior to the story.

This story deals with the guilt and doubts that plague the shipmaster after learning of the Prophet's betrayal of the other races. He relives the memories of his assault on the planet as he sees the destruction that he wrought in the name of false prophets, and this forces him to tackle the meaning of his existence, now that he's played such a key role in the perversion of his people's religion.

The structure of the story is really cool, since whenever the shipmaster sleeps, he has vivid dreams of the events of the war, ranging from his glassing of the planet that he's on, to the day he executed his ship's prophet in front of his crew during the Great Schism.

This is a very short entry in the book, but in my opinion is the most effective at getting a message across to the reader. It's tied as my favourite with The Mona Lisa, as I just don't have the heart to pick between either of them.

From the Office of Dr. William Arthur Iqbal – 3 Stars

While interesting, I think that this one could have been left on the cutting room floor. This is a letter from a member of ONI informing Xenoarchaelogists that they'll now be working on understanding the Forerunners in order to get a leg up on the potential future threats the Covenant may still pose.

It adds some new lore tidbits to the excession, and shows that ONI are still acting on the assumption that the Covenant are the enemy, but other than that doesn't really do anything all that interesting.

Overall rating – 3.5 Stars

Halo Evolutions was a solid read, and despite being let down by a really weak story at one point, almost everything in the collection was well worth the read, especially if you're a fan of the expand Halo mythos. I can confidently highly recommend this to almost any fan of Halo, if just for The Mona Lisa and The Return alone, as they're well worth the box price of the book.