Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 4, the first new entry in the series by 343 Industries! I’ve heard really mixed things about this game over the years. On launch, it was lauded, but with the disappointment surrounding subsequent entries, it has retroactively been considered to be shit by Halo fans. Then again, ODST and Reach are loved by Halo fans, and I found them to be fairly disappointing, so maybe the disdain for this game is just complaints about it being different? Now that I’ve finally gotten the chance to play it, read on to find out what I thought…

Love

• Graphics and Presentation – If there’s one area 343 Industries have undeniably improved over the previous Halo games, it’s the graphics and presentation. The CGI cutscenes are almost film-quality and the in-game cutscenes are more cinematic than ever. The graphics are also really good for an Xbox 360 game, to the point where I had to triple check that this wasn’t an Xbox One launch game. This game also makes you feel more like you’re seeing the world through the Master Chief’s eyes by having bits of helmet on the fringes of the screen and HUD projected onto his visor. I initially thought that this was going to be distracting when I started the game, but it ends up being really immersive and I stopped noticing it almost immediately.
  • Okay… I say “undeniably”, but this is also, apparently, a pretty controversial opinion. Turns out that people complain that the environments don’t look good and that there’s the early-2010s desaturated filter applied to everything – I did not notice this even once and I can only assume that this is just a symptom of the “343 can do nothing right!” complaints.
• Improved Driving Controls – The driving controls have been refined once again, making vehicle-based gameplay more enjoyable. This is especially true for the Ghost, which is just buttery smooth to drive now.
• New Weapons – As usual, Halo 4 introduces several new weapons to try out. Some are certainly better than others, but I particularly love the Binary Rifle, it feels so good to snipe people with it. I also quite enjoyed the Rail Gun for similar reasons, and the Storm Rifle is a cool upgrade to the Plasma Rifle.
• Cortana – Jen Taylor is absolutely acting her ass off in Halo 4. Cortana has always been the best character in the previous games, but she’s especially relevant here. The entire emotional core of the game revolves around getting you to care about (and then be worried for) Cortana as she slowly succumbs to Rampancy (a condition in the Halo universe that causes AIs to “die” after around seven years as they become too complex to sustain themselves). Does she feel somewhat different compared to the previous games? Yes, but she’s also reckoning with her impending, inevitable death, and is realizing that she has so much that she still wants to live for. When Cortana’s facing down her mortality and says “They’ll pair you with another AI. Maybe even another Cortana model if Halsey lets them. It won’t be me… you know that right?”, Jen’s performance broke my fucking heart.
  • Also: call me a gooner if you want, but I actually quite like the redesign Cortana received in this game. It’s not very faithful to her design from the first couple games, and she’s been sexualized in a blatant attempt to try to get you to fall in love with her… but I’d be lying if I said it was not appealing. Hell, one could even argue that, as Cortana has come to develop a legitimate love for the Master Chief, she’s intentionally choosing this design to deepen their relationship to one another.
  • On that note, a bit of a side-tangent: I think my favourite Cortana design is from Halo 3. After that, I think I’d have to go with Combat Evolved‘s more sassy, punk-looking version of the character, just because of how different it is from the rest of the series. I guess that means that Halo 2‘s design’s my least favourite; it just feels like a half-measure on the way to the Halo 3 design.

Mixed

• Prometheans – The new enemy type, the Prometheans, are decent. They may have been introduced a bit too early though: the Flood weren’t introduced until the sixth mission in Combat Evolved, which allowed them to shake-up the gameplay significantly, whereas the Prometheans show up at the end of the third level in Halo 4. The other issue with them is that they aren’t nearly as differentiated in their roles as The Covenant are. Each Covenant unit is very distinct and needs to be approached in a particular way. In comparison, the Crawlers and Watchers aren’t particularly different to fight – they’re both very weak and mobile, with the Watchers occasionally spawning in new enemies and flying away when shot. The Knights are the most differentiated and threatening. Some people really hate them for how they can teleport away from danger. This can be annoying, but I didn’t have too much trouble with this during my playthrough and typically killed them before they could escape. Maybe they’re worse on legendary difficulty, but I can’t really speak to that myself. All-in-all, the Prometheans are fine – I don’t enjoy fighting them as much as I do the Covenant, but they’re still passable FPS enemies.

Hate

• The Covenant – Imagine being there for Halo 4‘s release and speculating about where the story would go next. Humanity won the war against the Covenant. The Prophets were dead, the capital city of the empire was destroyed by the Flood, and the Elites were now an independent faction. Sure, there’d probably still be some remnants of the Covenant continuing to fight, but surely we’d be facing off against some other threat, right? Well… minutes into Halo 4, you fight the Covenant as if literally nothing ever happened. They’re even led by Elites again! It’s just so underwhelming to see them dive back into the ol’ status quo for several reasons:
  • For one thing, Master Chief says that these Covenant seem “more fanatical”, but that does not come across in the slightest. The Covenant we had faced in the Bungie games would literally send suicide bombers at you, I daresay that these ones seem less fanatical in comparison. Like… they couldn’t do something to differentiate them? Even Halo 2‘s Arbiter missions had heretical Covenant who were clearly distinct from the rest of their kin. You’d think that they could make them stand out like that? Or, hell, since their empire is now shattered, maybe their weapons and gear are more ramshackle, or they have less access to heavy weaponry? Literally fucking anything but more of the same…?
  • They also redesigned the Covenant in this game, and I kind of hate what they’ve done to them. Elites have been bulked up massively, but the Grunts and Jackals especially just look wrong to me, ditching their previous designs in favour of something more reptilian. It makes them look less like a conglomerate of unique, unified species and more like a bunch of lightly-differentiated, scaly, alien bad guys.
  • Also, I don’t think the game ever explains why these Covenant are fighting us? This could be entirely on me missing some line of dialogue, but they just show up on your drifting spaceship and attack you out of nowhere. It’s not like they were even trying to link up with the Prometheans, because they start slaughtering the Covenant when they first encounter them, only to turn them to their side moments later. Again, maybe I just missed something that explained this, or didn’t read some novel about this faction, but that kinda leads into my next problem with this game…
• The Story – Halo 4 has a different tone compared to its predecessors. Combat Evolved and 2 were written like grand, sci-fi military novels. 3 was written like an a blockbuster action movie. In comparison, 4 is written to be this blockbuster, sci-fi space opera. It has a much more melodramatic tone, is more focused on the emotional drama between the characters, and has way more focus on the lore of this universe. This is different, which is not necessarily bad. In fact, I rather like that 343 Industries are trying to put their own spin on Halo: Lord knows that these games’ stories weren’t so good that they couldn’t do with some narrative experimentation. However, the way that they’ve gone about this made Halo 4‘s story more frustrating than enthralling for me…
  • Put simply, the biggest issue with this game is that way too much of the dialogue boils down to Cortana throwing around lots of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. Rampancy, Requiem, Infinity, Terminus, the Didact, the Librarian, the Mantle, the Composer… you might get a context clue or a single line of dialogue to explain what these things are, and then you’re expected to keep track of that for the rest of the game, or until the game bothers give you another context clue several hours later. I remember Rampancy from the Halo novels, so at least I understood that part, the Didact is the bad guy, and I eventually figured out that Requiem is the new Forerunner installation we spend most of the game on, but so much of this game’s narrative is utter nonsense if you cannot keep all these terms straight. Hell, even when we find out what things are, I still couldn’t tell you what these things even do. Like, Halo is simple: it’s a location to contain the Flood and, when it fires, it will kill all sentient life. Requiem, on the other hand, is… a prison for the Didact, maybe? I literally do not know why it exists or what the fuck is happening in this game. The Composer is probably the most egregious example of this. I guess it genocides people and then… digitizes them into Prometheans or something? How many people did it kill at the end of the game? Hell if I know.
  • I’ve heard people accuse 343 Industries of being a studio that makes Halo games, but hates Halo. I really don’t get that impression after playing Halo 4. The way that they’ve written this game, it screams passion for this universe. However, the way it has been written puts emphasis squarely on “the lore”. The world-building and lore were important to the success of the earlier games, but they were not the most important thing, whereas here it feels disproportionate to your enjoyment of the game. If you are obsessed with the lore, read the dozens of novels, and can actually follow all the gobbledygook they throw at you, you might have a really rich experience. If not… man, you are in for a rough time. Halo 4 just feels like an example of “fans do not know what they actually need”: a lot of the time, it’s retreading Halo‘s greatest hits, while obsessing about the finer details that only the biggest Halo nerds would get excited about. As a result of all this stuff, playing through Halo 4 feels like you’re reading through a fucking Fandom wiki.
  • Also, this probably seems contradictory to my last point, but this game makes some pretty major retcons to the Halo lore. In particular, the Bungie games had heavily implied that the Forerunners were humans (or human-related). 343 Industries have instead elected to make the Forerunners a completely separate species who were at war with humanity at one point. They destroyed human society and bombed us back to the stone age. Then, when they annihilated themselves to contain the Flood, they seeded knowledge into the human genome to eventually create the SPARTAN program and take over the galaxy… which is just fucking insanity, holy shit. It can be easy to miss or gloss over this stuff because of how nonsensical the narrative is, but when you piece it all together, it’s pretty baffling and an awful change to the series’ lore. Like… I still think that 343 Industries are passionate about Halo… like any fandom though, they have a particular way of viewing that lore, which they’ve expanded and pushed in their preferred direction, and that’s rubbed fans who have their own interpretations the wrong way.
  • On a completely different note, the game’s writing is ham-fisted beyond belief. At one point, Cortana says to Master Chief “Before this is over, promise me you’ll figure out which one of us is the machine.” This is a pretty cool line, but it just comes out of nowhere. There’s never been any concern between them about the Chief being too machine-like; it just feels like it was written for the trailers. Then, at the ending, one of the characters awkwardly mentions that soldiers aren’t machines, which was already making me roll my eyes for how unsubtle it was, but then Master fucking Chief himself goes “She said that to me once. About being a machine…” I slapped my fucking head in frustration. WE GET IT, your theme isn’t nearly as clever as you seem to think it is.
  • Oh, and then there’s the grating melodrama. The most egregious example of this is Captain Del Rio. Why is this guy such a fucking dick to Master Chief every time we see him? He’s being confrontational and screaming at the dude who literally won the war for him only five years earlier. It’s a cheap way to add some stakes, but it just comes across as dumb and lazy, especially since most Halo characters to this point have acted professionally and intelligently at all times (except for you, ODST…).
  • All that said: the game does start getting good in the last couple levels. When the third act kicks off, they’ve finished introducing new gobbledygook, so we’re able to focus on the actual important shit: Cortana, Master Chief, and the existential threats they’re facing. I might even be open to the argument that Halo 4 has the strongest finale of any Halo game, because a solid emotional core and strong characters trump all the lore in the world. And this is despite me having no fucking clue what is even happening for most of this finale: it doesn’t matter that I have no idea how Cortana somehow magically saved Chief from nuking himself, because I can understand the emotional stakes between these characters, which are far more interesting than anything else in the game.
• Sound Design – I’m not really someone who notices or properly appreciates the sound design in a game. Take that how you will, but that tells me when I do notice it that they’re either doing something amazing, or they’re doing something really bad. I had a few issues with the sound design in this game, but many of the guns in particular just sound wrong. There’s also this weird difference between a gun’s sound when you’re using a scope vs hip firing it… like, are you sticking your fucking head into the scope? Why does the Lightrifle sound so weird in ADS, but normal in hip fire?
  • That said, I will give them credit for the good ol’ shotgun though: that thing sounds explosive when it fires.

Halo 4 was… fine. I didn’t dislike it nearly as much as some people did, but it certainly didn’t deserve the high 8s and 9s it got from reviewers on launch either. I honestly think that most of the distaste for the game is a combination of retroactive sour grapes after being disappointed by 343 Industries in latter entries, and for being different from the Bungie games. It’s fine, which isn’t exactly a glowing endorsement, but it’s better than some people give it credit for.