Halo: The great Journey – The Art of Building Worlds Published by Titan books to celebrate 10 years of Halo. A book so good it needed to be titled twice! When the book landed on my desk I was amazed at the quality of the book, the cover art on the book is of the Master Chief standing with his assault rifle on top of a burning wreck in an iconic stance. Opening the cover you take your first steps into this amazing book, you will be treated to 189 pages with over 400 images. As a player of the Halo franchise and having followed the art direction from the original Xbox game to present day, the art style has been outstanding and this book is no exception. It really is a bible of all things Halo!
The minute you open the book and peruse the contents page you know you will be in for a great ride. You’re met with a double page picture of a human base set into a cliff top, with a Pelican on the landing pad, from this one vista you begin to understand what you are in for inside the pages of this book.
The book is split up into 7 chapters, each chapter taking a look at many different aspects of the universe. Some of the things covered in this book are clothing, vehicles, and much more. It’s really nice to read this book or just flick through it, with each page you turn you are greeted with even more pictures and designs, and to complement this you get a few paragraphs of what the person had in mind when he started to come up with this idea. It’s also a great look into the design process of how an idea first comes to life and how many transitions it goes through until you recognise the final design that we have been playing in the game. You can best see this process when you look at the steps The Pelican went through.
As you go from to chapter to chapter the information you get really links well with the game; like from Halo , how the Master Chief’s armour has been upgraded to the Mjolnir Mark VI. It was the little things like this that I liked. The book just gives you these titbits as you go along.
Overall
If you have ever played Halo you will understand how rich the world is. This book is a great added extra and opens the world up even more and gives you more details, buildings and even the clothes and armour and much, much more. Even if you are not a Halo fan and just love a book full of science fiction pictures and a world that’s full of back story then this is the book to buy. The detail in the art work is phenomenal. There are so many stories to be told on the planets and even on earth. This book is a must have! It’s a really high quality book that will not look out of place on your book shelf.
