Halo: The Flood

In my review of the first Halo book, I joked that I would have rather read a book about Halo than played the game. Unfortunately, I need to eat those words. Halo: The Flood by William Dietz takes all the drudgery of the game and translates it, nearly verbatim, into a book of equal drudgery.

Whether by choice or by command from Bungie, Dietz takes you through a very literal retelling of the computer game. He does add several perspectives to the tale, however, giving you parts of the story from the eyes of Captain Keys, a Covenant Elite, and other Marines. In this regard, there's more to the story than what the game covered.

Unfortunately, I can't say the extra bits of the story were compelling. When I played Halo, my mind swirled with questions: "who exactly were the Forerunners who built Halo? What was their motivation for creating the Flood? Was Guilty Spark operating as designed, or had he gone mad? How much did the Covenant know about what they were messing with? Did they unleash the Flood on accident or on purpose?"

You won't find the answers in this book.

The action, as in the game, ground down to meaningless repetition of gunning down bad guys. For example, the gunfight after retrieving Keyes' CNI transponder near the end of the game: "The horde really came