A few years back, a game was released for the X-Box. You may have heard of it. This guy in green armor who everyone thinks is the badass to end all badassery crash-lands onto a ring-looking device that has atmosphere and terrain on the inside surface, and then races against multiple alien species that are bent on the destruction of humanity to discover the device’s purpose. There was a sequel, too, and maybe another one coming out? Anyway, relatively popular.

Apparently, a tie-in prequel novel was written along about the time the game first came out, providing some valuable backstory on how this Master Chief guy and his cool armor came to be present on the Halo in the first place. And, okay, it’s a video-game novelization, so how good could it be, right? Answer: perfectly serviceable! There are some glaring editing problems wherein the numbers of Spartan students fluctuate unexpectedly and wherein the amount of time that passes between the start and finish of the story might be ten years off depending on which section you believe. But those aren’t actually bad, just dumb. The plot itself flows pretty smoothly, borrowing here from Ender’s Game and there from Starship Troopers (not the satirical movie version, though) and generally providing enough information to make the first game a lot more full of sense than it was when I initially played it. I’ll probably read the two game novelizations as well, though that will be a mistake: one of this book’s biggest strengths is that it has a much higher plot density than descriptions of fights against aliens density.