Until the first two screeners showed up in my inbox, I didn’t honestly think the TV adaptation of the long-running Halo series was actually a real thing. As someone embroiled in the gaming sphere in the early 00s, Halo was one of the properties that had so many false starts and tantalizing talent involved that I feel as if I’ve been waiting for its arrival for decades. It took creators Steven Kane and Kyle Killen as well as the need for streaming sites like Paramount+ to find their big people pleaser project, but Master Chief is finally here and the results are…cautiously optimistic?

Paramount+ only gave access to the first two episodes for this preview and given the scope the series seems to want to explore, that might not be the best choice. An adaptation of the first game, Halo actually begins before Master Chief lands on the titular Halo ring. This makes sense because the show needs to not only satisfy fans of the show who will be its bread and butter evangelists, but also the regular viewing public. So it begins on a desolate desert planet named Madrigal, where an outpost run by so-called insurrectionists who don’t believe the political messaging coming from the government. A young woman named Kwan (Yerin Ha) is out with some friends, finding a local root that will get them high when they spot a ship on a ridge and an alien force named the Covenant begin blasting her friends to pieces. Legs are disintegrated, followed by body parts as their pulse rifles shred the group until only Kwan is left, running back to the outpost.

The series begins with a nicely executed fight sequence of nicely CGI’s Covenant slaughtering the insurrections until a quartet of super soldiers fall from the sky. One of them is, of course, John AKA Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber), who sets forth destroying the covenant and discovering an artifact in the cave system they were excavating. The artifact reacts to John’s touch and opens what appears to be a chart to some location.

From here, the first two episodes slowly lays out the political situation and strife between the The United Nations Space Command (UNSC), the military and scientific agency of Earth’s government, with the insurrectionists and politicians who don’t think they have space’s best interests at heart. And it also begins to lay the groundwork for the Covenant’s story as the focus switches on occasion to High Charity, the Covenant’s headquarters, and introduces Makee (Charlie Murphy), a human who has been raised by the Covenant. In these first two episodes, the artifact acts as a macguffin that both sides, human and Covenant, desperately want to get their hands on.

After the frenetic opening battle, Halo slows things down immensely as it begins to establish all of the lore and political situations that will hopefully pay off later in the season. It’s slightly unfortunate, because these early episodes feel very Sci-Fi generic from the way in which UNSC utilizes the spartan super soldiers to the somewhat shifty Doctor Halsey (Natascha McElhone) who is working on something she’s not supposed to, to the military leaders like Admiral Parangosky (Shabana Azmi) and Fleet Admiral Hood (Keir Dullea) who want results to the scrappy Kwan as the viewer’s insight into this world…it’s nothing that hasn’t been explored in countless Sci-Fi shows from Firefly to Battlestar Galactica to The Expanse. And it’s littered with the same kinds of characters you’d see in those. So far, it’s missing that spark that made the first game iconic as it spends its time establishing the backstory and exposition that will ultimately–hopefully–lead to the Halo ring.

It does look expensive, though. The battle that begins the series is appropriately exciting as it shows off Energy Swords, plasma rifles and the power of the spartan warriors. Halo has a very bright, clean look to it that has dominated Sci-Fi TV recently (see: The Mandalorian) and while actual sets are used here, it feels a bit artificial and is missing that lived-in quality that the best world-building shows use. It’s obviously an expensive-looking project and is probably the nicest looking TV production I’ve seen in a bit, but it feels a bit sterile. And the generic characters stuck in a generic Sci-Fi story doesn’t help.

That said, it is laying the groundwork for the epic stories the games are known for and I have hope that all of this exposition and world-building will pay off for the intriguing stories yet to come.