geekspasm 's review for:

Halo: The Flood by William C. Dietz

4.0

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It seems like a difficult task, to take a first-person shooter and translate it to the page while still making it interesting to an audience unable to interact with it's environment. Dietz executes this well, not only taking the story and gameplay of Halo's debut entry and putting it to paper, Dietz makes the correct choice and gives us multiple concurrent storylines, not all of which featured in the video game plot.

Spoiler

Jumping from the perspective of the main playable character of the game, we also get to see in the minds of other characters. To see what it's like for a soldier to lose their minds to the flood plague slowly and painfully, an experience we don't see while playing the game. We also follow Yayap, among the lowest ranking soldiers of the enemy faction, while he desperately tries to keep himself alive against the humans he's fighting, and the rest of the covenant army he was born to serve.

While this book is the only one of the Halo books to be a direct novelization of the events of one of the games, Dietz works to make it succeed in it's own right, making it worth the read whether you play the games or not!