Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the most recent game in the franchise Halo Infinite. After all the shit 343 Industries had put the fanbase through, expectations were really low for this game, and then got even worse when people saw the reveal trailer, which necessitated a delay to polish the game up for launch. Since then, I’m aware that the game has been through some major highs and lows, so I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot going in. Could 343 finally right the ship and deliver a worthy follow-up to Bungie’s trilogy? Read on to find out…

Love

• The Gunplay – As far as I’m concerned, Halo Infinite has the best gunplay of the franchise since Halo 3. Shooting enemies just feels so good. This is largely because your shots feel like they have real impact when they land and there’s some really satisfying feedback that goes along with it. This is best exemplified with the big power weapons, which impact with a massive explosion of fire and colour and a satisfyingly loud bang. Even smaller, standard weapons like the Mauler pack a punch and are really satisfying to blast away your foes with. It feels like they took a cue from Doom (2016) and put a ton of effort into making sure that combat makes you feel like a total badass.
• Enemies Have Personality Again! – The Covenant in the first couple Halo games had so much personality, making them into some of the most fun video game enemies to fight. Grunts screaming and running when you started killing their comrades, contrasted with the tactical, honourable combat of the Elites made the game feel like it wasn’t just a simple shooting gallery. This was eroded away over the course of the series, with them eventually just feeling like regular video game bad guys that you need to shoot to win the game. In Halo Infinite though, the Covenant soldiers have so much personality again. This is largely due to them being extremely chatty – you’ll hear Grunts acting arrogant, only to immediately start squealing and freaking out when they see you, Jackals obsessing over collecting your bounty, Brutes yelling taunts, and Elites steeling themselves for battle, etc. All this chatter almost makes me feel sorry as I mow them down by the dozen.
  • Also, on a somewhat related note, the enemy variety in this game is fantastic. There have been different tiers of each Covenant troop in all previous games, but they’ve been expanded here and are more notably differentiated in my opinion. For example, let’s look at just the Brutes: we’ve got the standard Brutes, multiple variants in heavy armour, guys with jet packs and heavy weapons, chieftains with various weapon configurations, and even melee-only berserkers who rush head-long at you. Oh, and any one of these can have shields and various weapon combinations, making the variety of combat scenarios even among one enemy type truly vast. Good God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually really enjoy fighting Brutes in this game!
  • On another related note, I love the UNSC banter in this game. They spout all sorts of cheesy one-liners which perfectly capture the feel of early 2000s video game writing.
• New Weapons – As usual, Halo Infinite introduces a bunch of new and remixed weapons and, due to this game’s emphasis on fun gameplay, there are some truly awesome additions. My personal favourites are the Skewer (which fires a massive, impaling spear which one-shots most enemies), the Hydra (which is kind of like a Halo version of the 40k boltgun, with an alt-fire mode that homes in on enemies!), and the Heatwave (a shotgun that allows you to set its spread to go horizontal or vertical, making it much more accurate at longer ranges). Making things even better, most guns have special upgraded versions which you can get, which make them even more devastating to use. Legitimately, the only weapon I don’t like is the Disruptor Pistol, but everything else I will gleefully pickup and mow down the enemy with.
• Grappling Hook – Ever since Halo 3 introduced equipment pickups, these games have really struggled to introduce an equipment ability which really sticks with you. The Grappling Hook is easily the best addition to the core formula, bar none. I (perhaps notoriously) hate open world games with dull traversal, but the grappling hook makes swinging about this world quicker and more entertaining, while also opening up space for creative mobility during combat. Making things better, the grappling hook has offensive abilities too, allowing to you grab distant weapons and items, and you can also hook an enemy to swing in for a melee strike. It can also be upgraded to stun enemies, which can be really helpful when you’re getting beat down by a particular guy with a power weapon and need to close the distance to them quickly.
• The Story – Halo Infinite‘s narrative is definitely an improvement on the previous two 343 Industries games. While Halo 4 was bogged down by lore and Halo 5 was vapid and rushed, Infinite takes a more cinematic, character-driven approach that makes it feel more akin to Metal Gear Solid 5 than its two predecessors. The overall story here is basically a throwback: you’re on a Halo ring and the Covenant Banished are trying to activate it, so you have to stop them. The villains also have a fairly large role in the narrative and often show up to taunt you directly. So, while they are fairly generic and melodramatic, at least they leave more of an impression than, say, the Didact or Eternal Warden did. It takes a while to get there, but this story does end up being fairly entertaining by the end.

Mixed

• Scan Pulse – Halo Infinite introduces a “scan” button, which will send out a pulse which briefly points highlights all weapons, enemies, and interactable objects in the vicinity, and will display where your objectives are. It’s definitely handy, but it also just feels like a crutch: I constantly want to press this button to make sure that I’m not missing anything. The only reason I don’t do it is because that’s really fucking annoying to keep up, so I just resign myself to missing things. That said, there are times where you actually do need it, because you can’t find some random panel where you need to press a button to advance the mission, and it won’t make that clear to you. Maybe it’s just like this because modern games have gotten so big and detailed that it’s way too easy to miss anything important, but it feels like an inelegant solution to the problem.
• The Characters – A character-driven story needs its characters, and while they are a bit of a mixed bag, what we get here is an improvement on the last couple games overall. First of all, Master Chief is back to being the effortless badass he was in Halo 2, and those Doom (2016) influences have helped make his dry humour even more awesome. Where things get a bit more mixed is in the supporting cast:
  • The Pilot is a coward trying to flee, but gets caught up with Master Chief and becomes exasperated as he gets dragged into danger again and again. He can be somewhat annoying as a result, but he does grow on you as the game goes, and at least I can understand and sympathize with him.
  • The Weapon, on the other hand… I’m really mixed on her. She’s our new AI companion, who is an incomplete copy of Cortana that was supposed to find Cortana, destroy her, and then delete herself. However, upon Cortana’s deletion, the Weapon finds herself still operational, much to her confusion. Her personality is noticeably different compared to Cortana; the Weapon is much more childlike and inquisitive. While she is fairly well fleshed out as a character and I’m glad they’ve gone to the effort to differentiate her from Cortana, she just ends up being kind of annoying to me. Some of this is down to her dialogue, which can be fairly cringey. She’s also our objective-giver, so after every single objective you complete, she’ll say something along the lines of “oh hey we need to go find ____ to advance the story, lets go do it!” This bothers me, because I can just feel the developers prodding me every time she says something like this (which is a lot). Like… it’s an open world, I’ve got camps to capture and soldiers to rescue, I can see my objective markers, just let me do what I want to.
• Open World Structure – I am fairly burnt out on open world games, so I was pretty concerned about how Halo Infinite would fare as a result. Luckily, it works out fairly well I’d say, although there are some pretty big caveats to that. One of the most revolutionary aspects of the early Halo games were their massive, open sandboxes, so going fully open-world just feels like an evolution of that concept. I think it’s best summed up this way: playing Halo Infinite is like playing Combat Evolved the way you imagined it in 2001. That said…
  • Big caveat #1: Halo Infinite is basically a carbon copy of the Far Cry open world structure which has become very tired in the past decade. For most of this game’s runtime, you’re just capturing bandit camps and dealing with a bunch of filler side quests which provide very little incentive to complete them, other than checking off some boxes on your mini-map and allowing you to spawn more powerful weapons and vehicles at captured bandit camps. Surprisingly, this didn’t wear thin for me (perhaps because the game has a fairly reasonable playtime), but if you’ve been playing more open world games than I have, then this may be a bigger issue for you.
  • Big caveat #2: Halo Infinite has the worst level design of the entire franchise, bar none. Since 343 Industries cannot curate encounters or force you to complete missions in a certain order, objectives are absolutely swarming with enemies, and your missions are extremely generic: press X buttons to expose power cores that you need to blow up, kill all bad guys in the area, blow up X objectives, etc. This would be unacceptable in any previous Halo game, but for some reason, being open world makes this less of an issue for me, even though in the back of my mind I know I prefer a more curated, creative, and diversified approach. The gunplay in this game is just so good that it props up issues like this which would have sunk a weaker game. I think this is why, as much fun as I was having playing the game, I just didn’t find myself wanting to play it as much as some of the other games in the franchise, and my play sessions end up being shorter and more spread out than for, say, Halo 2 and 3.

Hate

• Skipping Over the End of Halo 5 is Cowardly – As much as I enjoy this game’s throw-back to classic Halo and its fantastic gunplay, I just cannot get over the fact that it skips over the end of Halo 5 and basically soft-reboots the entire franchise to not have to bother dealing with the consequences of it. For all my problems with Halo 5, the ending was downright bold. Only a handful of humans managed to escape Cortana before she fires EMP bombs at all worlds resisting the AI takeover, blasting them into the stone age. This hinted at a future game that’s scrappier and lower-tech, where we have to scavenge for better weapons and armour, akin to The Terminator. Plus, Halo 5 barely even started to deal with Cortana as our new main villain, so having her die off-screen before Halo Infinite begins is borderline insane and makes this entire extended universe of continuity feel like a joke. Instead, it’s back to the ol’ status quo: Chief fighting the Covenant on a Halo ring. Is that all this franchise will ever be? Because that’s a depressing future if it is…
  • Granted, Infinite does touch on this storyline in its final hours, but it’s done in such a way where it feels like we skipped over an entire game’s worth of plot and consequences… like, imagine if Star Wars went from Attack of the Clones to A New Hope. It would feel kind of weird and disjointed, right? That’s kind of what playing Infinite is like.
• Load Times – Halo Infinite has some of the longest load times that I’ve seen in a game since the PS3 era. The first time I loaded up the game, it legitimately took at least a minute just to get to the main menu. Thankfully, it loads quicker from there on, but if you’re like me and are playing this game for the campaign, there’s an extra “fuck you” in store: the game always loads into the multiplayer menu, so you have to then select “Campaign” and then go through another lengthy loading screen to play that. Thankfully, once you get in-game, there are basically no more loading screens, but it’s still enough friction up-front that I sometimes didn’t even want to bother starting the game up.
• The Other Equipment Choices Suck – If there’s one big issue with the grappling hook, it’s that it’s arguably too good… which is actually kind of a problem, because you have other equipment you can use. However, they are so inferior in comparison that they aren’t worth using at all. Like, the first equipment you can switch to is the Threat Sensor, which… highlights nearby enemies. Big fucking whoop. The only time you might want to use this is when an Elite pulls out an energy sword and uses its active camouflage. However, I would literally rather blindly fight an invisible enemy that can one-shot me than go through the convoluted sequence of button presses to switch from the grappling hook to the threat sensor… so that’s exactly what I did. I legitimately never used any piece of equipment other than the grappling hook the entire game, and never felt like I missed out for this.
• Rough Around the Edges – Halo Infinite is a game that ended up needing to be delayed for a full year in order to get it into a shippable state… and thank God they did, because the game we got is still pretty rough at times, so I can only imagine what it would have been like if it released in 2020! I’m talking some pretty stiff animations, questionable optimization (substantial frame drops are not an uncommon occurrence), random bugs, weird ragdolling (especially when you die), guns turning into unintelligible blobs that stretch infinitely across the game world, etc. Oh, and there’s one mission where you will be told that you need to visit four beacons, which will be marked on your map and everything. However, these beacons do not allow you to progress until after you’re told about the mission, at which point you are expected to walk forward a little bit to actually trigger it. On two separate occasions, I fast travelled away before the mission triggered without even realizing it, and was then left completely confused about why I couldn’t do anything at these beacons. This could be a minor annoyance, but the area you need to go to to trigger the mission is far away from any fast travel point you will have unlocked up to this point, which turns it into a giant, confusing headache which is far too easy to find yourself mired in.
• Overpowered Weapon/Vehicle Spawns – As you complete objectives in Halo Infinite, you will get “Valor” points which allow you to spawn a chosen weapon or vehicle if your Valor is above a specific threshold. Initially this will allow you to call for an assault rifle or a mongoose ATV, but you quickly start getting the ability to call in upgraded versions of the game’s strongest weapons, or even goddamn Scorpion tanks! It’s cool that they give you the choice, I guess…? But, at a certain point, you have to actively choose not to trivialize the game if you want to have fun. It also robs that feeling of excitement in the tank sections in previous games, as it was no longer this surprise awaiting you, and I just kept finding myself starting every mission with the exact same overpowered guns.
• Worst Vehicle Physics in the Franchise – You can spawn in any vehicle you want at forward operating bases (FOBs) that you capture. This sounds great, especially since it can take a few minutes to get where you’re going in this open world… however, I usually just hoof it on foot, because the vehicle physics in this game suck, particularly for the warthog and mongoose. Like, they control about as well as ever, but they crash, flip over, and get stuck on the terrain constantly, which I can only assume is due to the open world structure and a lack of polish.

Halo Infinite really surprised me. I had heard that its campaign was decent, but I’m so sick of open world games that I was not expecting much at all. Its gunplay was so immediately fun though that it sucked me in. It may look like there’s a lot of things I hated about this game, but honestly, these are all nitpicks. For literally every single one of these complaints, you can add onto the end “…the gunplay sure is fucking great though”. I had an absolute blast with Halo Inifinite, to the point where open world bullshit and a cowardly plot reset couldn’t even dampen my enthusiasm for the game.

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.

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.

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the final Bungie-developed Halo game, Halo: Reach! Going in, this was probably the Halo game I knew the least about, but I had always heard that it was a solid swan-song for the Bungie games. How does the game hold up today? Read on to find out…

Love

• Customizable Avatar – Perhaps the coolest feature of Halo: Reach was one that I didn’t realize until I was most of the way through the game. It turns out that Noble Six, the SPARTAN you play as, is customizable and based on your multiplayer avatar. I set that avatar months before I actually got around to playing the game, so I had no idea until very late in the game that my character was personalized, but it’s such a cool feature and a great way to pay tribute to the fans.
• Perks – The equipment system from Halo 3 has been reworked in Reach and, in my opinion, it’s much more impactful now. The equipment pickups are now replaced with Call of Duty-style perks which operate on a quick cooldown and can be swapped out if you find a perk pickup in-game. There’s some pretty cool options, like the armour lock and jet pack, but (perhaps most notably) these perks finally bring sprinting to Halo (albeit, on a pathetically-short time limit, but at least it speeds up traversal a bit).
• Long Night of Solace – This is the first level where Reach really stands out from its predecessors. A very big chunk of this level has you piloting a space ship and getting into full-on dogfights with Banshees and Phantoms before flying into a Covenant supercarrier and battling your way through the interior. It’s a level that is epic in scope and execution. While I can see some people getting annoyed with this level, since the flying combat isn’t as good as dedicated flight game and it can drag on a bit long, but it’s such an ambitious and epic level that I have to give it major props.
• Lone Wolf – Speaking of memorable levels, the finale of Reach is really memorable. You’re given minimal information about what to do (Current Objective: Survive) and then get swarmed by Covenant. Eventually, you’ll come to realize that there is no happy ending, all you can do is take down as many Covenant with you as you can. There’s nothing stopping you from just chucking a grenade at your feet and ending it immediately, but it’s got that Call of Duty Zombies compulsion that makes you want to hop right back in and see if you can make it further next time.
• Exploding Grunts – A pretty small, but funny change is that Grunts’ backpacks can explode, sending them flying wildly when they die. I love the Grunts for being a bunch of cowardly goobers, and this cartoonish death just makes them even more endearing.

Mixed

• Elites Are Back – Look, I know I’ve ragged on the last couple games for being less fun because the Elites were replaced by the less-intelligent Brutes, so I should be happy that the Elites are back here. However, if you put a gun to my head and asked me if I thought that their return was a noticeable upgrade, I honestly don’t think it’s made much of a difference. Hell, even the Brutes don’t feel much like Brutes in this game, they’re just Elites with a different character model. I am not sure why exactly these enemies do not have that spark that made them stand out in the first couple games, but I think it comes down to changes in the enemy AI. Enemies and allies felt like they had personality and intelligence before, but I never really got that sense here.
• New and Rebalanced Weapons – Reach has quite a few new weapons and has rebalanced a lot of the old weapons, although I’m pretty mixed on both of these aspects.
  • In terms of the new weapons, my favourite is the Plasma Repeater, which is just a straight upgrade on the old Plasma Rifle. The grenade launcher is also pretty cool, although it’s kind of surprising that it took this long for one to get introduced. However, other new weapons, like the Concussion Rifle, Needler Rifle, and Focus Rifle kinda suck. Every time I ran out of ammo and had to pick up one of these weapons, I made a stink face and then ditched them as soon as I could.
  • For the rebalanced weapons, the magnum is awesome again, one-shotting most unshielded enemies with a headshot. The needler is also legitimately good here. In every game thus far, I would try it out just to see how it was, but this was the first time where I would actively seek it out. Unfortunately, the plasma sword is kind of shit once again, especially compared to the brute hammer (which has also been nerfed).
• Noble Team – Your squad of SPARTANs in this game, Noble Team are… alright. They have significantly more interesting personalities than the goofball soldiers from ODST, but they don’t have any sort of development over the course of the story. They’re introduced with an archetypal character trait, and then that defines them for the rest of the game. Consequently, I didn’t really care all that much when they start dying, because there’s nothing really to latch onto.
• Story Structure – The fall of Reach is supposed to be this massive defeat for humanity, where one of our greatest strongholds was crushed by the Covenant as they scour the entire surface of the world from orbit. Unfortunately, Reach rarely lives up to this promise, as the game doesn’t feel all that desperate. This is especially true in the first half of the game, where you’re basically just killing time fighting random Covenant patrols. It feels less like a world-ending tragedy, and more like a bunch of SPARTANs getting themselves killed unnecessarily like a bunch of dummies. It’s not until the last couple missions that it finally feels like there are some stakes, but even then it’s not that effective. Hell, I completed the last mission, then the credits started rolling and I literally said “Wait, that’s it?” Sure, it’s followed up by “Lone Wolf” as the epilogue, but I legitimately thought I had a couple more levels of content to go, because the ending felt like an anti-climax.

Hate

• The AI – As I alluded to earlier, the AI in Reach is pretty poor by Halo standards, especially for your allies. That’s a particular problem in this game, since you almost always have a fellow SPARTAN with you instead of some random marine, so it feels even more egregious when they get themselves stuck somewhere and then have to be conspicuously teleported in front of you to keep up. Vehicle pathfinding is a bit better than it was in ODST, but I had one moment in the final level where the AI was driving a mongoose and then they said “We have to jump it!” over a broken bridge… before proceeding to gingerly drive over the ledge. I got lucky and avoided dying because I got caught on the scenery, but it was a pretty embarrassing moment (especially because my AI companion was stuck at the bottom of a canyon, making their forced teleport later even more noticeable).
• No Dual-Wielding – A big reason why the weapons have been rebalanced again in Reach is because Bungie removed the option to dual-wield. This has clearly been done for balancing reasons (you can just make the weapon good, instead of having to make it only good when dual-wielded)… but fuck that. I’m only really analyzing these games on their single-player, so let me have my power fantasy. Dual-wielding in Halo 2 and plowing through a horde of grunts was one of the biggest power trips of my life. I kind of hate this competitive multiplayer mentality some developers have with their shooters, just let players have fun.

Honestly, I was pretty disappointed by Halo: Reach. Ever since this game came out, I figured it would be the definitive Halo game; Bungie’s last, big hurrah before the franchise went to 343. While I did enjoy it more than ODST, it’s missing that special spark that made Halo 2 and 3 so much fun to play through. The industry had changed fairly substantially in the decade between Combat Evolved and Reach, and I can’t help but feel like the growing dominance of Call of Duty, and competitive multiplayer in general, influenced the changes in this entry. Maybe it’s better on the multiplayer side of things, but as far as the campaigns go, Reach was a pretty big disappointment for me, even if the game itself is not bad.

Anyway, onto the 343 Industries games, I’m sure those will be much better…

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over our first spin-off title, Halo 3: ODST! This was a weird little release: the series’ overarching narrative seemed to have concluded, so there was a lot of questions about how Halo would be able to continue. Bungie then announced this game, which had started out as an expansion to Halo 3, but would evolve into its own stand-alone experience. The resulting game is pretty interesting for a number of reasons, not least of all because it’s the first game to not feature Master Chief in any capacity. Would the game hold up without the franchise’s hero? Read on to find out…

Love

• Experimentation – Halo 3: ODST shakes up the franchise’s normal campaign structure in some pretty fundamental ways, which make the game feel very unique among Halo titles. The campaign is split into two timelines. The A-plot is the present, where you play as “the Rookie”, who has become isolated from his squad and is trying to figure out what happened to them as he makes his way across New Mombasa. The B-plot involves a bunch of flashbacks to the Rookie’s various squadmates as they battle Covenant forces. The B-plot plays out through traditional Halo levels, but the Rookie’s sections occur through a semi-open world as you navigate through the isolated streets of New Mombasa. In these sections, you have to decide how to reach objectives while confronting or avoiding any Covenant patrols you may come across. It’s a fairly unique structure for a Halo game, let alone a stand-alone DLC expansion, and I have to appreciate that they at least tried to do something different here.
• The Opening Drop is Intense – You name a game ODST (which stands for “orbital drop shock trooper”), and you’d better believe I expect to get dropped from orbit at some point. In that regard, ODST does not disappoint. It opens with some quick character introductions, and then it’s feet-first into hell through a visually-spectacular and chaotic opening that is easily the highlight of the game.

Mixed

• VISR System – ODST introduces the VISR optical HUD, which has some fairly interesting functionality. It plays similarly to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, outlining objects in the world and highlighting friendlies and enemies. With the larger, more open environments, it can be very helpful to have a way to point out where to go next. However, I can’t help but feel like it is a bit of a crutch, like detective vision in so many games of this era: the environments do not clearly communicate where you need to go, so instead the game relies on waypoints and colour-coded highlights to do that for you. It also doesn’t help that the game often makes VISR basically unusable, since it becomes a visual hinderance in bright areas, forcing you to toggle it on and off regularly.

Hate

• The Writing and Characters – For all its military realism, Halo has some pretty cartoonish characters between Master Chief’s confident badassery and Sergeant Johnson’s cigar-chomping antics. However, they’re also contrasted against more serious characters, like Jacob and Miranda Keyes, Lord Hood, the Arbiter, or even Cortana to a certain degree. However, ODST is clearly inspired by Joss Whedon’s writing style on Firefly, even down to casting Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and Alan Tudyk in the lead roles. As a result of this influence, the entire cast are a bunch of cartoonish jokers who can’t take anything seriously or professionally (which gets especially egregious when Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer are arguing about relationship drama over comms in the middle of a warzone).
  • On top of this, ODST is framed like there’s a big mystery that you’re building towards, but the story itself is really uncompelling. The flashback sequences don’t really move the story forward at all, they just kind of exist to pad the runtime. It’s not until the last level that the story actually has some interesting developments, but by that point it is way too late to salvage this narrative. Let’s put it this way: the first three Halo games were about telling a story. This game is just fleshing out the series’ lore.
• The Level Design – While I will give ODST credit for trying something different with its structure, I really hate the move away from a more curated, linear level design. The streets of New Mombasa are huge and weirdly empty. It’s not unusual to spend a long time wandering around without even running into a Covenant patrol. I can see how this might be immersive to some players, but for my part, I found this incredibly dull. I’ve complained before about open world design and how it makes the minute-to-minute gameplay boring, so you can imagine how annoying ODST‘s slow, monotonous traversal gets for me.
• Health Regeneration System – ODST goes back to Combat Evolved‘s health system, where you have a regenerating shield and a health bar to maintain. However, one key difference is that the game will freak out at you long before your shield has actually gone down. This puts you in a stressed state way more often than previous Halo games. However, when you come to realize that the game is being over-zealous with its shield warnings, you kind of just ignore them and push more aggressively, making this new warning system kind of worthless. It also doesn’t help that health stations are really badly sign-posted, so you can go for long stretches of gameplay without a chance to heal while playing as the Rookie.
• The AI – Unfortunately, ODST is the first Halo game where the AI feels straight-up dumb:
  • First of all, the friendly AI are incredibly stupid, especially when they’re in vehicles. Their pathfinding is awful, often getting stuck on objects or charging at a tank and then getting you blown up with no real opportunity to prevent this from happening. On more than one occasion, I had a story-important squad mate get stuck and then (very obviously) have to be teleported ahead of me to prevent them from getting left behind.
  • Perhaps worst of all though is the enemy AI. In ODST, you’re not playing as Master Chief, so you should feel out-gunned by Covenant forces. The game certainly throws overwhelming numbers of Covenant at you, but the game feels like it has gimped them compared to previous Halo games. Throughout this game, I felt like I was making reckless plays which would have gotten me killed in any previous Halo game, but I was getting through because enemies would just refuse to shoot me, or have terrible aim. Making matters worse, I was being forced to make these reckless plays, because I just wasn’t being given the resources needed to deal with all these enemies. I dunno who thought it made sense to have me fight two Wraith tanks and two squads of Covenant forces at the same time with just anti-infantry weapons, but the fact that I was able to pull through this with little difficulty is kind of ridiculous.

Halo 3: ODST left me thoroughly underwhelmed. I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, but I really dislike all the ways that this game attempted to shake-up the Halo formula. I appreciate the attempt to differentiate this game, and I’m sure that there are people who love what they were going for here, but nothing they’ve tried here makes Halo more fun to play for me. As annoying as Combat Evolved could be, I still enjoyed myself there more than I did here.

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the series’ third entry, Halo 3! We’re now past the point where I had any first-hand experience with these games: I remember this game being an absolute blockbuster at the time, and it was the #1 shooter in the world for a few years until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare took over the genre, but I never got to play it. Could it resolve Halo 2‘s cliffhanger in a satisfying way? Read on to find out…

Love

• New Weapons – As usual, a new Halo game means new weapons, and they’ve introduced some really cool ones here:
  • Best of all is the brute hammer. This thing is ridiculously satisfying to use. It’s devastating, one-shots pretty much everything, has a large area of effect blast when it hits (which will kill multiple clustered enemies), sends debris flying on impact, and makes a really loud noise. It’s the quintessential distillation of the brutes as a species, and it’s fantastic.
  • The spiker and mauler are both really cool options. The spiker is kind of like an SMG version of the needler, it’s really reliable and enjoyable to use. The mauler, meanwhile, is a shotgun pistol. Both of these guns are dual-wieldable, which just makes them even more fun to use.
  • The Spartan laser is also a really cool power weapon that puts out a devastating amount of damage. However, it remains fairly balanced due to its long charge time before it fires, meaning that you have to keep the target in your sights or waste the shot.
  • Oh, and the game now lets you pickup gun turrets from around the environment and use them as power weapons! It’s as badass as it sounds to pick up a heavy machine gun or a plasma cannon and then spend the next minute mowing down everything in sight.
• Weapon Rebalancing – Halo 2 suffered a bit due to its wildly unbalanced weapons. You could maybe argue that this was intentional, but Halo 3 is clearly trying to make every weapon viable. There aren’t really any weapons here that I wouldn’t want to pickup. Most of the weak guns from Halo 2 have been improved massively: the assault rifle is back and actually useable, the shotgun is worthwhile again (although it’s still nowhere near as good as it was in Combat Evolved), the plasma rifle is far better against non-shielded enemies, the Brute shot is significantly better… really, the only weapon that has clearly been nerfed to oblivion is the energy sword. The lunge distance has been made extremely short, and while it does one-shot most enemies, I’ve had instances where I’ve had to hit a Flood combat form five times to get a kill on normal difficulty… HOW???
• Epic, Free-Form Combat Scenarios – Gone are almost all the corridor shooting levels from previous Halo games: Halo 3 loves to revel in the large combat arenas where you fight alongside allies and use various vehicles to combat hordes of enemies. Probably the biggest highlight is driving a mongoose ATV while your allies blast rockets at enemy vehicles… and then a scarab walker shows up and you need to disable it, jump on board, and then blow it up from the inside. Combat is straight-up epic in this game!

Mixed

• Equipment Pickups – Halo 3 introduces several equipment pickups, which operate similarly to the temporary armour upgrades you could find in the previous two games (bubble shield, deployable cover, auto-turret, invisibility, invincibility, flashbang, etc). The big differences are that they are way more common and you get to choose when to use them. They’re… alright. They certainly work, but they do not feel all that important to the combat flow (at least on normal difficulty: I can see bubble shields and deployable cover being way more impactful on legendary). A lot of these equipment pickups are stationary once used, which isn’t really something you want to be doing in Halo most of the time. It’s also really hard to see them; I kept accidentally picking them up by walking over them… I could count the number of times I intentionally grabbed an equipment pickup on one hand and still have fingers to spare for your mom.

Hate

• The Story – Halo 3 is a suitably epic finale for a story about a galactic war and genocidal alien parasite. However, as it goes on, I can’t help but have several nagging issues about it which sour it somewhat:
  • First of all, the grand, sci-fi world-building of Combat Evolved and Halo 2 is pretty much gone. We learn nothing new about the Covenant society (which, if you’ll recall, had its entire freaking capital city genocided by the Flood in Halo 2). Basically nothing new is learned or introduced here, it’s just culminating the events of the last two games. Aside from a couple big deaths, there’s no risks taken. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s disappointing after the thoughtful writing and big revelations brought in by Halo 2.
  • On a related note, the war just kind of… ends. The prophets are dead, but you’re telling me that there’s no Covenant still choosing to fight? The Brutes sure as hell seemed to want to fight this war, they’re not taking over and continuing the fight? There’s no new power structure forming? Oh, and the game acts like the Flood have been defeated, but that was just one Gravemind… given that we know there are multiple Halo rings still out there, that presumably means that there are several installations which still have Flood on them, right?
  • I get that Cortana’s out of the picture for most of the game due to the events of Halo 2, but you can really feel her absence (and, when she comes back, it’s a breath of fresh air). Definitely makes you appreciate her character more, but the entire narrative suffers without her.
  • I also found it pretty disappointing that the last couple levels are basically just rehashing the ending of Combat Evolved, to lesser effect, in my opinion.
  • Finally, Arbiter’s just kind of “here”. People complained about him in Halo 2, so Bungie folded and he’s no longer playable outside of co-op. He’s still gets a couple story moments, but his character development is stunted and we miss out on a lot of the developments that would be happening on the Covenant side of things (like that the Elites are now working with humanity against the Covenant).
• Flashbangs – So, something I neglected to mention about equipment: enemies get to use them as well. This is not that big a deal most of the time, but where it becomes infuriating is that one of the pickups is a flashbang. It’s worthless when you use it, but when Brutes start chucking them around, they’re infuriating. There’s a reason most first person shooters do give NPCs flashbangs, it basically makes the game unplayable when they’re used. Thankfully, these were only used on a handful of occasions during my playthrough, but there was one section early in the game where Brutes were just spamming them at me and it drove me nuts. Oh, and speaking of which…
• Brutes – Brutes just are not that fun to fight compared to Elites. At least in Halo 2, you only start fighting Brutes halfway through, but here they’re the main enemy for a good chunk of the game. Since they don’t have shields, this breaks the strategic weapon choices from the previous two games, since plasma is less-necessary. They’re also a lot less intelligent, so the enemy AI is not nearly as interesting as it was previously.

Halo 3 is solid, but I can’t help but feel disappointed with it compared to Halo 2. While it is a fitting conclusion for the trilogy, the world just feels smaller and more dumbed down after the expansion it received in Halo 2. The gunplay is definitely improved, so it has that, but I guess this just shows where my priorities are with games: gameplay is just one factor to the overall package, and story matters quite a lot to me, to the point where Halo 2 is the clear best of the trilogy, even though Halo 3 undeniably plays better overall.