Grenades never got better than in Halo: Combat Evolved

When I heard that grenade-spamming was becoming a dominant strategy in Marathon, I was shocked. Mainly because, for the first 50 hours or so in Bungie’s extraction shooter, I’d forgotten to use grenades at all. In a desperate situation, I’m much more likely to reach for the stick that shoots death - the one that’s onscreen at all times. Grenades are relegated to bumper buttons and distinguished by icons I haven’t bothered to learn. Let them sit in their inventory and listen to muffled gunfire.

But it wasn’t always thus. Halo: Combat Evolved was born in a time before aim-down-sights. Which means, when I play it on the Steam Deck, the whole length of the left trigger is given over to grenades. Even when I plonk the machine down on the couch to go grab a drink, there’s a reasonable chance I’ll accidentally throw a hot potato. That’s just how easily accessible grenades are on the ringworld.

They’re also a highly visible part of Halo’s combat sandbox. When I get the jump on an Elite, and the lanky alien goes down with a growl of anguish, a small cluster of ‘nades drop along with him, like apples from a tree in late summer. Then, once the Grunts panic and start waving their arms around, they begin to lob little plasma bombs in my direction - sticky ones that spell doom if they cling to my master-pants or chief-sleeves.

...marbles in a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where everybody’s full.

It’s a habit-forming setup: they throw plasmas, I throw plasmas back. And let me tell you, those Grunts hate the taste of their own ‘nade-icine. Velcro a bomb to their flanks and they’ll run in circles until detonation, in a fashion that’s both fraught and funny.

The most marvellous part, though, comes when there are too many grenades to pick up. At that point, they start to roll around the floor - marbles in a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where everybody’s full. Then the chain reactions occur: an explosion will set off another grenade, blasting a Covenant goon and their hoverbike into the air as physics takes its rightful seat at the top of the pecking order. Every time this happens, I feel as if I’m a gleeful participant in a truly reactive combat arena, where even the outcome of familiar fights is highly unpredictable. It's the world I want to occupy all the time, but one the FPS genre rarely arrives in.

Small wonder that Halo’s grenades inspired - and enabled - one of the great gaming videos of the pre-YouTube era: Warthog jump. A physics experiment set on The Silent Cartographer’s shores, it’s nominally a test to see whether a grenade-propelled jeep can be flipped over a steep bluff. But with that goal achieved, it quickly becomes a victory lap. Screaming squaddies are punted into the sky to the tune of Fly Me To The Moon; the Chief himself enjoys a fatal bird’s eye view to the accompaniment of Purple Haze. Scuze me, while I kiss the sky. Thank you, grenades, for giving us this dose of unadulterated joy.