You realize that basically makes this a Halo review thread—just not about your review?
(I jest.) :)
Spoilertastic - perhaps we need a thread?
[spoiler]Thoughts on the campaign:
- As mentioned above, more dramatic impact in some scenes than the whole series has had up to this point. More character development, too. That doesn’t mean it was always good. Del Rio too obviously stodgy, Lasky was a welcome character though. And the scientist on the station who got Composed was really well done.
- I do think it’s a signifier that 343 wants storytelling to take more prominence going forward, though there was way too much reliance on the books stuff and the domain terminals. They are trying, but it will take some learning to get it right.
- The autoscroll trench run was horrible. And colored my opinion of the whole as it was so near the end of the game. What a bad decision. I play Halo for the shooty bits.
- Weak climax/dénouement. Didact goes out like a chump though I doubt he’s dead. Feels weird they want me to think they are just going to move on with Halo minus Cortana. What the hell happened to Halsey and where is she? Is John just changing armor, or is he retiring and thinking about taking up goat farming? It was a setup for a sequel that didn’t give me very much information about what that sequel might be or where it would start.
- Who got their heads together and decided that 2012 needed to be the year when everyone would kill off characters and go for the emotions card? Seriously.[/spoiler]
Design stuff:
- Sound design is great. Couldn’t have asked for better.
- I’m probably expecting too much, but I was hoping that at some point they would deviate from the older “go here, push a button, spawn some bad guys” gameplay. I suppose FPSs just get better at hiding that instead of inventing completely new things most of the time.
- The best thing they did was get rid of dual wielding and get back to the core gun/grenade/melee setup. It’s much less confusing than what Bungie had ended up with by Reach and closer to Halo: CE (thankfully).
Other stuff:
- I hope Spartan Ops gets better. I really do. I like the idea and it’s just the kind of thing that would get me to keep playing a game after the initial SP experience is over. And it’s not clicking from a narrative standpoint. Where’s the Chief? Where’s Halsey?
- That said, whoever decided to put Jennifer Hale in Halo gets a high five.
- I miss Firefight. I didn’t think I would but I do.
- I’m getting a great vibe off the MP so far. It’s a lot of fun and I’m finding it more accessible than some of the other games in the series have been. New game types are well-thought-out. I think I will be playing this longer than I have in previous installments. The new concepts added to the level progression are actually well done, and they feel more like Battlefield than CoD (this is a good thing).
- Why can’t I get XP for my Spartan when playing Campaign? That’s eight hours where I should have received something to level up.
Overall I would say it’s the best in the series in my book so far, even with the weird removal of Firefight. 343i stepped up and they did what they needed to do - the game doesn’t really suffer for being post-Bungie.