When the HALO Encyclopedia first arrived it was so large that I had to head to the post to get it. Carrying it home I had to switch arms several times due to the weight. That’s just how big this massive tome of all things HALO is.

Alright, I might have been exaggerating about the switching arms, but it really is a book that you will be hard-pressed to put on a bookshelf. At 350 oversized-pages you could proudly display it on a very sturdy shelf above your Xbox 360 of PC monitor or plop it on your coffee table and it will certainly draw attention to itself.

The book brings together the vastness of the HALO universe into an easily readable, highly illustrated visual masterpiece. Concept art freely mingles with actual character models and screens from the games and the text flows around them with ease.

The book contains information on every Covenant race, Flood Forms, the Forerunners and of course the Humans. It tells the history of the Spartan project and how John-117 would become the saviour of humanity.

Eleven chapters cross the expanse of time and space to tell the whole tale of the Covenant, the Flood and their clashes with each other, the Forerunners and Humanity itself.

Need to know, for whatever reason, who invented the Translight Engine? Curious about Cytoprethaline, how the UNSC creates AI or the details of all of the Forerunner tech seen so far? It’s all here and more. Weapons, planets, ships, round out the information in this must-have compendium of HALO universe knowledge.

Though I must say, they could have done a better job on some of the images. At times these seem haphazardly thrown together. Low resolution models of items have been blown up to show just how shoddy their design was in game. Jagged lines, low-detail designs and blown up images mar what is otherwise a stupendous aggregation of knowledge and images. It will certainly make you a HALO trivia master and be a nice addition if you’re a collector of all things HALO.