These are pretty long cues, too, with most of them considerably over the two-minute mark. Gameplay would change this, of course, but in this "frozen" format the whole comes off rather like a suite. Disc 1's (1:01:46) movements, "Arrival," "Sierra 117," "Crow's Nest," "Tsavo Highway," "The Storm," Floodgate" and "The Ark," vary in number of segments from one to three. The five movements on Disc 2 (57:09), "The Covenant," "Cortana, "Halo" and "Ending," have two segments and four segments, arranged four-two-two-four. The bonus section is comprised of four tracks.

Most of the music here is martial: stirring and compelling. Some of it, however, is quieter and more pensive, and forms a nice underpinning to the main themes and motifs. There's too much music here to allow much focus on individual cuts, but there are notable standouts. Disc 1, Cue 1 (D1 C1) brings Jerry Goldsmith's wonderful score for Alien to mind without being derivative. D1 C2, "Released," starts with a slow build that segues into two percussion lines that play off each other and are followed by a nice sequence underpinned with phased trap drums, rather like what the Beatles did with "Rain."

Plenty of bang for your buck

Other arresting cues on D1 include: "Last of the Brave," with its whispery voice patch and bumbling Kodo drums; "Brutes," which has a spacey tone-poem intro that moves into a brooding synth-drum passage followed by dissonant-sounding strings and choir, and "This is the Hour," Cue 10, which has a different statement of the main theme rendered with piano and orchestra, along with a nicely dark string section. It sounds more like a selection from a big-budget movie than a video game.

There are, as might be expected, additional highlights on Disc 2, among them the delightful piano intro to Cue 1, "Three Gates" (Disc 2 makes rather more use of piano than does Disc 1, as a matter of fact); Cue 3, "One Final Effort," a lyrical piece with a rolling orchestral rendition of the main theme with some interesting Celtic fillips to the cadences; the elegiac "No More Dead Heroes," Cue 5; and the satisfying, full exploration of the main theme as presented in Cue 8, "Greatest Journey," which trickles out very nicely on the piano.

The bonus cuts are a bit of a mixed bag; they range from quite short (0:27), to the Enya-esque "Never Forget" and the unlisted Cue 17, "LvUrFR3NZ" by some thrash band named Princeton, sort of doing a Smash Mouth imitation. Jeez, Princeton—they might as well have named themselves Chatsworth Osbourne Jr.