I have played through the Campaign three times – once with Jane on Normal, once with Lewis on Heroic, and once by myself on Legendary. This is what I thought of it.
Caution: There will be spoilers!
Also, as well as the spoiler warning, I should let you know that this may be all over the place. I’m not going to basically write out the whole story, I will jump from start to end and back again with little warning.
But I will start at the beginning.
The introduction, with Cortana waking up the Chief was quite heart-warming. You could tell she had been longing to go on another adventure with the big man. Also telling was the onset of rampancy – she didn’t seem herself from the very start. This slowly got worse over the course of the game, with her actually freaking out and letting bad guys get away when she very easily could’ve stopped them. Random outbursts of emotion were also frequent, and quite effective in portraying her instability. Her sacrifice was a sad moment for sure, and her final moments with the Chief were bittersweet, but I’m pretty sure that the Librarian made a back-up of Cortana or fixed her in the way that “only” Halsey could. You don’t just kill off Cortana. It’s not that easy.
The Master Chief was, well, the Master Chief. A bit less stoic than usual, but I felt 343 balanced his lines very well. I’m glad they didn’t take the Firefight route – his voice in Halo: Reach was just terrible. Having him commentate and add an exclamation to the end of every fifth kill was quite annoying. As I said, I’m glad they didn’t take that route and left him mostly silent. It was a very tense few minutes waiting to see if the Chief had actually survived the Composer’s blast. It looked like Cortana thought he was gone. The music used in this sequence was fantastic – Neil Davidge was a superb choice by 343. All the music was incredible throughout. It had that familiar Halo feel to it, but it was fresh and new – much like the antagonist and his army. I had an inkling that Davidge was going to work – he produced some of my favourite albums of all time: Mezzanine and Heligoland (both with Massive Attack), so I knew it would be atmospheric and hard-hitting. I was not expecting a remix album, but after listening to snippets here and there – I finally caved in and bought it. I have the Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 soundtracks which I don’t exactly listen to on a day-to-day basis, but this album, these tracks, they are something else.
This Didact chap was pretty mean, and I loved his armour. I can see Forerunner tech inspiring UNSC and Spartan gear in the next games. The Chief and Cortana were once again duped into instigating some kind of disaster – although it was more of a ruse than a blatant withholding of information, with the Didact straight up forging distress calls from the UNSC Infinity rather than 343 Guilty Spark simply not telling them that firing the Halo rings will wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy. I liked that 343 Industries didn’t shoe-horn a boss fight in there – they are just not Halo – the Quick Time Event after running a really fucking intense gauntlet sufficed. I’m not sure he’s really dead though – we never actually saw him dissolve. I’m glad Captain Del Rio got demoted – the guy was a clueless asshole – and Lasky took his place. The way it tied in to the live-action web series “Forward Unto Dawn” was pretty cool. Spartan Sarah Palmer, on the other hand, seems a bit of a joke, going by Spartan Ops. The writing in this new Firefight mode is utterly horrible (in terms of both the scripting and mission road-map), with disrespectful Captains, Spartans who spend their days at desks doing paperwork, and a fascination of the Covenant to guard buttons (closely followed by Spartan fire-teams who are determined to push those buttons, just for the sake of it).
The levels themselves were fun, if a little linear. There weren’t many different routes through levels, or wide-open spaces – even the vehicle based levels felt like big corridors. I assume this is because of the sheer beauty of the environments, and 343 Industries will be able to rectify the breadth of the levels in later Halo games. The visuals were seriously upgraded for this latest instalment, I have to say that Halo finally looked part of this current generation. Which is ironic, given that we are so far into this generation. Some of the set-pieces were reminiscent of older Halo games, such as riding the gondola back-and-forth, but the game was also peppered with some unexpected touches. Things like Quick Time Events for scaling lift shafts, over-charging your shields to power a Ghost’s boosters, flying a Pelican, and flying a Broadsword to do a Death Star trench run. Getting around via sub-space portals so often felt a bit cheap, as it was a method of transportation that the earlier Halo games avoided so carefully, only using it very rarely.
A common complaint levelled at the Halo series is that they force you to play through similar environments again and again, or make you hit three buttons when one would’ve sufficed. I relish this. Sure, parts of levels are similar – but you don’t fight the levels. The similarity of the levels should help you rather than hinder or bore. Once you have played through an area, it should be your ally the next time you have to traverse it. It’s very rare you have to take the same route though, or fight your way through in the same way. More often than not you come at a familiar area from a new angle and have to fight a different mix of enemies. And then there is how you fight – ammo for one gun doesn’t last forever. It is never the same area, same route, same enemy selection, same weapon choices. There are always subtle differences, always choices to be made.
This was my favourite Campaign in terms of storytelling, but it was far too hard. This was due to a combination of factors. I mentioned in the Enemies post that I felt the Prometheans shields were too powerful, and combined with a lack of safe zones, I felt I was constantly being check-pointed into harsh surroundings. I’d get to a new area and be stuck out in the open, enemies closing in fast – it made a lot of fights quite tricky. Relying on trial and error and repeatedly having to restart areas is never fun. I never felt cheated when I died whilst playing Reach on Legendary – but in Halo 4, I did.
