Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 5: Guardians. I’ve been well aware of this game’s reputation long before I played it: stories about the marketing being deceptive, the game being full of repetitive boss fights, being downed constantly in co-op, and a despised story. Honestly though, I didn’t dislike Halo 4 as much as some people, so I’m going into this with an open mind. Maybe it can shake-up the series formula in some interesting ways? Maybe all the shit people sling at 343 Industries is unwarranted? Read on to find out…

Love

• Meridian – Halo games haven’t really bothered to explore the wider cultures of humanity. That sort of thing is generally relegated to the EU novels. As a result, it was fascinating when the game heads to the human frontier world, Meridian, and we get to see the tension between the UNSC and the colonists. In the Halo universe, the SPARTAN program was developed to crush dissent from separatist colonists. The animosity that the people of Meridian hold towards the SPARTANs is palpable, and the way that the SPARTANs have to be extra polite to avoid pissing them off makes for some legitimate tension. Perhaps the most interesting thing here though is that Meridian’s governor, Sloan, is an AI. This took me by surprise, but it’s kind of brilliant: of course humanity would have AI politicians, it makes so much sense to implement. Making this even more interesting, Sloan is in the early onset of rampancy, making his actions somewhat erratic and making the whole situation even more tense, since he could go off the deep end at any moment.
• Quality of Life Improvements – In its efforts to modernize the franchise, Halo 5 has some nice quality of life improvements. One that I particularly liked was that you can now swap seats in a vehicle by pressing A instead of having to go through an animation to leave the vehicle and then manually move to find the seat you want. The game also allows you to give simple commands to your squadmates, which they will follow fairly reliably.
• More Movement Options – In line with Halo 5‘s QoL improvements and modernizations, movement has been overhauled to be much faster and more in-line with the FPS games of the day. You can now grab ledges while jumping, do a charging attack or a ground pound, do a quick rocket thruster dodge, aim in mid-air to float momentarily… oh, and you can just sprint endlessly now too. As you would expect, this shakes-up the series’ core game feel and pace substantially.

Mixed

• Modernized Controls – When I was playing through Combat Evolved, I kept getting tripped up by its old-school control scheme (R1 to reload and pickup items? L3 to crouch? B to melee? L2 to throw grenade?). FPS control schemes have become so standardized that it’s weird going back to an older game and trying to get acclimated. However… I just played through six Halo games that all retained that control scheme. Going into Halo 5, I was used to that traditional scheme and was completely thrown off when it played exactly like a modern shooter (B to reload/pickup items, L2 to aim down sights, L1 to throw grenade, etc). I didn’t like this at first… but, honestly, this is just me complaining about the game being different. Changing the controls to be more familiar to modern gamers is fine and does not take away from anything. It’s not even like Resident Evil‘s tank controls, where you’re being nostalgic for a fundamentally different way to experience those games: you could remap the controls if you wanted to and it would play the exact same.

Hate

• Fucking Loot Boxes – This game has paid loot boxes in it. Do I even need to say more than that? That, by itself, should give you an idea of the sort of bullshit you’re going to be subjected to in this game. Strap in, we’re just getting started here…
• It’s a COD Clone – The back half of the PS3/Xbox 360 era was a graveyard for FPS games trying to emulate the success of Call of Duty. Every franchise was bending over backwards to change or dilute its core tone and gameplay systems in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator COD fan. Here’s the thing though: every one of those games that went all-in on mass appeal failed. By the time that the new console generation was rolling around, this was pretty well known and we were getting far less COD clones. Hell, with the dawn of the PS4 and Xbox One, even COD had outstayed its welcome and was facing some pretty heavy backlash. So, I can only imagine that 343 Industries looked at all these failed COD clones and said “We can do worse”. I could feel the influence of Call of Duty on this franchise since at least Reach, but in Halo 5 it is blatant (even down to the aforementioned modernized controls, which basically just bring the franchise into parity with Call of Duty). Nearly every bit of gameplay that was distinctly “Halo” has been stripped away in favour of appealing to the Call of Duty crowd.
  • The biggest impact of this approach is that the combined arms, open sandbox structure that most Halo games employ (to varying degrees) has been largely eliminated in favour of much more linear shooting galleries. In their place, 343 Industries have instead inserted several bombastic, scripted set-piece action moments that Call of Duty campaigns are famous for. These moments just feel vapid, the sort of noisy light shows that we had largely tired of years earlier. Meanwhile, the linear levels are painfully mediocre, with every level being a series of “kill all enemies in this room to unlock the door, then move onto the next room and do the same, etc”. These moments were always the weak, filler portions of the previous Halo games, so seeing that be the core gameplay loop here is pretty dire. That said, if this was the only problem, then Halo 5 would just be mediocre. However…
• Co-op Focus Screws the Game Design – Halo games are famous for their campaigns which can be played through entirely in co-op. I actually was unaware that you could play up to four-player co-op in these games as early as Halo 3, but you honestly would never realize it: the campaign was clearly designed for single-player and is balanced as such. Halo 5, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up with four players in mind, which means that things have changed quite a bit…
  • Pity Halo 5‘s level design: not only is it getting fucked for being a COD clone, but then the four player co-op comes in to fuck it from an entirely different angle. To accommodate entertaining four people at once, combat encounters are far less focused. Each area feels like a miniature multiplayer arena, where you start the encounter by picking a lane and then clear out all the enemies there until everyone has cleared out their zone. You end up getting swarmed by enemy forces from all angles, including occasions where you have enemies spawning behind you. The game ended up reminding me way too much of Operation Raccoon City, although the core gunplay was good enough that it’s not quite that bad at least.
  • Since you can be revived now, Halo 5 is simultaneously more forgiving and more punishing than other Halo games. Sure, you can get revived by your partners if you play sloppily, but you also get a lot more overpowered enemy attacks that will either one-shot you (such as the Eternal Warden’s melee attack), or which have splash damage which is difficult to negate (such as incineration cannons, the Hunter fuel rod cannon, etc). Naturally, you are going to hear “I’m down, need assistance!” a lot.
• The Story – Halo 4‘s story was a mess, but at least it had a solid emotional core that you could latch onto. Halo 5 ditches much of the sci-fi gobbledygook that plagued its predecessor, but it’s no less confusing for it…
  • First of all, the narrative is poorly conveyed. The actual plot here is pretty simple: Cortana is back and evil now, Master Chief goes AWOL to try to find her, SPARTAN Locke is tasked with apprehending Master Chief, and they all get caught up in Cortana’s plot to resurrect the Guardians – giant Forerunner robots which were used to enforce order in the galaxy. Good luck keeping track of what’s going on though, because Halo 5 just assumes you already know what’s happening at any given time. Like… to give you an idea of how bad the storytelling in this game is, the game just suddenly assumes that Cortana is evil before we actually have any reason to believe that to be the case. You’re just expected to go along with it, but that’s a massive change that needs some time to breathe. Or how about the Guardians: they’re supposed to be the big threat that the game revolves around, but we never really get a sense of what they do or why they’re so scary. Again, the game just assumes that you already know what’s going on.
  • Then there’s the inciting incident which puts this entire plot into motion: Master Chief gets knocked out, hallucinates about Cortana, who gives him some mysterious directives, and then he just decides to do what she told him to (to the point of disobeying his superiors to do so). Like… what the fuck? I get that Halo 3 and 4 had weird hallucinations with Cortana, but they never really came across like they were “real”. This here in Halo 5? It’s full-on space magic, I don’t know how else they can really justify it.
  • Maybe the worst part about this story though is what it does to the Master Chief. He spends this entire game chasing after Cortana instead of dealing with the existential threat of the Guardians… in fact, by chasing after Cortana, he’s actually kind of complicit in everything that happens. You could argue that he was pursuing Cortana, because she was the source of the threat and he needed to eliminate her to stop the Guardians… but that never happens. He encounters her and then they have a chat instead of trying to eliminate the problem. It’s also not like this is the Cortana we knew before; she is clearly an entirely different person now, so it should be easier for him to do what’s needed. Is… is this what 343 Industries were trying to convey from the whole “you’re not a machine” theme in Halo 4? Are they saying that he needed to be way more selfish and damn the rest of humanity for his own interests? Guys… are these tech bros a bunch of libertarians…? Fucking insanity.
• The Characters – Related to all the previous issues we’ve already discussed, the characters in Halo 5 suck. Theoretically, it’s kind of cool that 343 Industries brought Master Chief’s squad mates from the Halo novels into the games. Having ODST‘s Buck become a SPARTAN is also a pretty cool move. However, none of this ends up mattering, because none of them have any development, interactions, or characterization beyond “is a soldier”. Even Arbiter’s return isn’t particularly interesting, because he basically does nothing (although I do find it hilarious that they make a point of telling us that he’s a feminist, because he breaks Elite tradition and allows females into his ranks, LOL).
  • The Eternal Warden is, apparently, supposed to be this game’s main “bad guy”. He’s a Promethean construct who occasionally shows up to oppose you. You end up having to kill the guy like seven or eight times across the course of the game and it becomes tiring very quickly. I also don’t get his part in the story at all. He’s like a rival to Cortana, but she slaps him around like a bitch at every turn. When she vanquishes him at the end, you’d think it would be a big “oh shit, she just killed the powerful bad guy!” moment, but I didn’t feel anything. Dude sucks.
  • Also, probably goes without saying, but having multiple SPARTANs in your story is lame. Master Chief’s cool, largely because he’s the only man capable of saving the day. When you have an entire squad of SPARTANs, it dilutes that importance and your squad doesn’t feel exponentially more powerful than you did when you were solo.
• Technical Issues – Okay, we’ve gotten through the big problems, now onto some smaller fish… This game has some really weird technical issues, the most obvious of which is that enemies will render at a lower frame rate if they’re more than a few meters away and you’re not looking directly at them. I can only assume that this was implemented to keep the game running smoothly and to deal with optimization issues (it reminds me of similar issues in Pokémon Violet). However, this game doesn’t look that good, so I assume that it’s probably a combination of having to accommodate four players and general development incompetence. Oh, and speaking of incompetence, the NPC AI is worthless. You can give commands, sure, but your squad mates will struggle to kill anything, and their pathfinding makes having AI operate vehicles an exercise in frustration. I saw my squad mates get themselves killed constantly, including one particularly funny moment where we had to escape a massive Covenant vehicle. I escaped in a Banshee, only to turn around and see that my squad was still fucking around inside before the whole thing blew up and took them all with it.
• Interactive Cutscene “Missions” – Halo 5 has three “missions” which can only really be described as interactive cutscenes. In these sequences, you and your companions are tasked with finding an NPC, talking to them, and then finding another NPC and talking to them. These sequences legitimately last anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes at most, and make absolutely no sense to me. They even count as full-on missions for the achievements! I’d get it if all cutscenes in the game were done this way, but no, the game has plenty of cinematics, so I honestly do not understand what the hell they were doing with these things.

Halo 5: Guardians was a fucking experience. Moments after the game started, I just sat there and went “Oh. Oh no.” Taken on its own, Halo 5 is a mediocre-at-best co-op shooter with a weak narrative. In the context of this franchise though, Halo 5 is straight-up insulting. As you can see from all the “Hates” listed here, the game was fundamentally compromised on a design level and these issues cascaded to make by far the worst game in the entire franchise. Halo 5 gleefully packs so much of the stuff I hate about the past decade of gaming into its runtime, shedding everything you might have liked about Halo in the process. Oh, and making matters even more annoying for me, in particular: I just made a list of my 25 Worst Video Games of All-Time, and it’s already outdated. Halo 5: Guardians definitely deserves a spot on that list. Is this a bad time to announce that I’m intending to update my best/worst-of lists in about five years time to see how much they’ve changed in that time? Because, unless I play a lot of shit games between then and now, Halo 5: Guardians is sure as hell gonna be on there.