Following on from the
Legendary ending the third game, this title sees Master Chief on a hostile
world, facing down both old threats and new. Frequently at odds with the UNSC
forces and Cortana showing visible signs of rampancy, there’s a lot to go on
here. Unfortunately the game never really gets a chance to use this potential for a number of reasons, but two
specific ones stick out.
The first is that, well, Halo
4 as a story doesn’t need to exist. The universe we all knew and loved came
full circle with Reach and wasn’t really that much to go on as sequels
go. Rather than having the option of just going on from plot threads we’ve previously seen 4
needed to spend more time build almost entirely new ones to extend the mythos and suffers as a
result. The second issue is that 343 Industries took the Blizzard approach and
released novels to try and help with their game's plot and advance the story
before its release. This isn’t an entirely bad thing, Greg Bear has done an
outstanding job fleshing out the universe with his prequel Forerunner
Trilogy but without going out and buying it you’re going to feel like
you’re losing out on the meaning behind a lot of plot points. Even with the lengthy
details and exposition given, the game never manages to match the strength of
the story told in the novels. Not to mention it squanders the massive story
potential found in Primordium's reveals. On the upside however,
returning characters are as strong as ever (even if there’s only two of them)
and Cortana’s storyline is definitely the high-point of the single player mode.
Still most of you probably
aren’t playing Halo for the story, so how does the game hold up while
playing it? Well, most of the old mechanics have been kept with a few tweaks to
keep things original in each mode and for the enemies to remain freshly
interesting. Let’s face it, as fun as the Covenant are to
snipe/frag/smack-about-via-rifle-butt they do require further variety to work.
To help combat that problem the game introduces the Prometheans, orange glowing
machines who you’ll quickly grow to hate. Or love to hate depending upon how
you approach fighting them. As well as bringing a whole bucketload of new guns
to pillage from corpses and bodies to mow down, they force the player to take a
few different approaches when facing them. While it would be wrong to ruin the
surprise of running into many of these for the first time, anyone who has
watched the trailers will know of the hovering drones often accompanying the
meatier enemies. These things will quickly prove to be the bane of anyone
favouring grenades, trust me don’t even try using them around them, and will
make fights harder by healing foes, shielding them, offering buffs and even
outright resurrecting them. When facing down groups with these things it can be
remarkably easy to end up in fights of attrition on the higher difficulties.
Visually Halo 4 does
manage to stand out from its predecessor. Notably the Covenant forces and the
Chief himself have been given a few graphical upgrades, changing their general
look while keeping what worked from the last game. While the reasons for
handwaving this away are fairly pitiful, at least with Master Chief anyway,
their look is definitely better suiting for their environment and feels like a
natural progression from what we had before.
The environments themselves
are as varied as you’d expect for a Halo title both in and out of
multiplayer. While you don’t get anything completely new from what we’ve seen
previously, there’s a general sense that the developers were looking at the
errors made in the last game’s layouts and correcting them. There’s a much more
distinctive sense of atmosphere and each location is astoundingly beautiful,
assuming you can stop long enough to admire it while dodging bullets. It might
even be enough to distract you from how the game repeats itself on multiple
occasions and its very linear focus. The former applies more to what we’ve seen
in the past, either emphasising upon breaking something or collecting three
objectives but it’s the latter which really detracts from the game’s quality.
The strength behind Halo was always its openness, how it could
seamlessly switch between corridor shooting and wide area combat with and
without vehicles. This latest game definitely seems to be lacking in the latter
department. Oh they appear and you’ll get chances to zoom about open areas more
than a few times, but nowhere near as much as you’d hope and not with the same
unique grandly explosive moments you’d want to make this specific game
memorable.
Still, the real core of a Halo
game is the multiplayer experience and that seems to hold up extremely well,
though you’ll find a lot of it to be very familiar. The Forge is still present
and the War Games while containing a few new aspects keeps most of what worked
in the past and even Valhalla is still available, The differences come largely
through two things, besides the inclusion of mini-mecha as vehicles, namely how
the ranking system works and ordinance drops. The ranking system seems to be
taking a much more specialised approach and are an extension of the commendations
and challenges in the previous game. This time it's angled more towards a
career development and allows you access to purchases for armour, weapons,
loadouts and further customising your character through specialisations. While
this might seem like Halo 4 is just following a current FPS trend it's a natural development from Reach's ideas and they all work extremely well.
The other gimmick of
ordinance drops isn't quite so flawless. The inclusion of these seems to be an
attempt to give more meaning to mowing down players by the dozen and ending a
kill streak atop of solving a few older issues. In addition to the usual
weapons you find lying about the map killing people, along with other
conditions, will fill up a meter allowing you to call in your weapons of choice
at will. The upside of this is it solves the obvious issues of someone having
the one brute shot on a custom map and camping on weapon spawn points, but
opens up a few other problems. Even after only one or two games it was
noticeably easy for someone with the right skills and timing to keep up their
dominating streak, especially when they are extremely accurate with long range
weapons. As tough as SPARTANs are one guy with a sniper rifle is going to be as
devastating as ever and now with ordinance drops he can call in all the ammo he
needs with less of a risk of running out. That and the fact he can now call in
rocket launchers whenever someone goes after him in a vehicle means it can be
easier to stay ahead if you know what you’re doing in a multiplayer match.
For all these criticisms it
ought to be emphasised again that Halo 4 is by no means a bad game, just
one with some obvious flaws. It does feel like a slight step down from Reach
but there’s no denying that it’s still vastly better than Halo 3 and ODST,
even if it does lack Nathan Fillion. If you’re a fan interested in seeing some
changes to what has come before or just keeping up with the series you’ll not
regret buying this one.
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Halo 4 and all related characters and media are owned by 343 Industries and Microsoft Studios.
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Halo 4 and all related characters and media are owned by 343 Industries and Microsoft Studios.
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