This page is out of date.

This page was created on April 8, 2000, and remains here for historical purposes. Current Halo weapons info can be found in the Weapons Section of our Frequently Asked Questions list.


Weapons in Halo

A couple of days ago, Xero dropped us a line and suggested that we'd missed a covenant weapon in our faq. We checked... and realized he was right. This encouraged us to dig deeper... and we discovered some interesting facts about Halo's weapons.

We now believe that (not counting vehicle-mounted weapons), we've seen 11 human weapons and 4 covenant ones. Let's start with the Covenant... the list is smaller.

Covenant Weapons

First up is the Covenant Energy Blade... much like a knife. It has a handle, with an energy beam which starts at either end of the handle, and meets around the hand. We couldn't find an instance in released media that showed this blade in its unactivated state.

Second on the table is the Energy Pistol. This is a weapon that's rounded on the front, with points behind the handgrip... and a handgrip very similar to that of the energy blade. It fires a pulsed beam at its target, and glows to show it's activated. (Incidentally, can you do this with your legs?)

We wondered, actually, whether these were the same weapon... and whether the blade simply forms around the body of the pistol (as seems to be happening in the inset image below). However, in the official trailer (the one found on Bungie's Halo site), you can see that the large flash is simply a firing effect. Only a firing frame is shown, but it's surrounded by non-firing frames.

Bigger Guns Nearby

The other two covenant weapons are larger. For a while, we thought they were the same gun. We're pretty sure they're not, though.

First up is the "Fuel Rod Gun", the large plasma weapon that's shown up in several different places. It fires bolts of plasma, and has a gauge or reservoir that drops as the gun is fired.

The second gun looks a lot like the first held backwards. We have only one shot of the rear end of the gun, and it's not a very good one... but it seems to have a circular magazine, with the fuel source visible from underneath. On the front, there is some sort of shielding (lowered in the smaller inset picture). This gun has not been seen in any movies (that we know of), so there are no instances of the gun in use.

Update 9 April 00 Kudos to both Xero and Brehan Crawford (whose detailed explanation helped us find this) - it seems this gun HAS been seen in a movie. (Still not actually being fired, but it did show up.) It appeared in about 4 frames of the Incite video, in a mode that will almost certainly not be possible in the actual game (we see later in the same video the marine cycle through human weapons, in what is most likely a debug mode). Unfortunately, it comes during a fade to a different shot, so the gun is obscured by the faces of Charles Gough and Doug Zartman... but you can see the fuel reservoir just over the marine's shoulder.

Continue to Human Weapons