War Games – the new name for multiplayer Red vs Blue. This was always going to be the main area of the game for me, shooting guys is so much better than shooting AIs. It has a lot to live up to – the Halo series is the only First Person multiplayer experience that I felt was flawless – and then in subsequent games they always improve on it somehow. Halo was great – never has lugging an Xbox and TV round a mates house been so rewarding. Halo 2 improved it, made it smoother, added cool new weapons and had an amazing selection of maps. Halo 3 added equipment and refined the whole thing. Halo: Reach added armour abilities – these things really spiced things up. And now Halo 4…
Caution: There might possibly be spoilers!
Where to start? I’m not sure. Maybe with the biggest difference? That, for sure, is persistent loadouts across all of War Games. Guns and armour abilities do initially have to be unlocked, but it is a small percentage of overall game-time – and once unlocked, you can have up to five differing permutations of primary weapon (a rifle or automatic weapon), sidearm, grenade, armour ability, support upgrade and tactical package. The armour mods are interesting – they have subtle, non-balance-ruining effects on gameplay, such as being able to carry one more grenade, reloading faster, having unlimited sprint or being able to spawn with two primary weapons. I definitely favour quick reload on most of my loadouts, but I’ve barely scratched the surface regarding combinations that work well.
The base game-mode, Infinity Slayer, is essentially the first team to score however-many-kills wins, with a subtle, game-changing twist. I’ve never played a Call of Duty game, so I really have no point of reference to tell you what they have or haven’t ripped off of the popular franchise. All I can tell you is that calling in personal ordnance is great. No matter your skill level, as long as you are participating in the game, you are sure to get a power weapon or power up at some point. I like that it is based on score, not kills, so even if you are racking up the assists, you still get a nice little bonus. Weapons don’t spawn in the same way they used to on any gametype – it seems somewhat random in Halo 4, both in terms of weapon respawn times and contents. Sometimes it’ll be an Incineration Cannon, sometimes a Sticky Detonator – it does discourage people from camping certain places though.
I like how the various playlists have been organised by gametype rather than rough generalisations. In previous games, Capture the Flag, Oddball and King of the Hill would’ve all been lumped into one “Objective” playlist together, but now they are allowed to shine on their own. Most gametypes have been tweaked, most notably, Capture the Flag. In previous games you could drop the flag or juggle it to get to your capture point faster, but in Halo 4 once you have the flag, that’s it, it’s yours until you either score or die. It gives you more of a feeling of having a new job to do, a new role in the current game. That, and you get a nice little infinite ammo Magnum (which people have dubbed the “Flagnum”), so you’re not totally defenceless at long range. Oddball has been tweaked as well – you can now throw it like a grenade. I love passing it to team-mates, throwing it away when I’m about to die, or throwing it at an opponent (who automatically catch it if it’s thrown directly at them, regardless of their team affiliation), confusing them to high hell and robbing them of the ability to shoot me, while I shoot them to death. King of the Hill is the only gametype which hasn’t really been radically overhauled – the only improvement I spotted was that new hills are announced five seconds before the last one expires. Still fun though.
I was never a fan of Free-For-All game modes, and FFA Regicide hasn’t swayed me. The player leading the game gets bonuses if he stays alive for a while and is crowned “The King”, and if others kill him (called a Regicide – bit of Latin there), then they get extra points. I really don’t like the stress brought on by a waypoint that all the other players can see above my head, so I stay back for a bit, let other people take the lead then wade in, mop things up and try for last minute victories. It’s more fun in team games, I enjoy covering my Kings back, or if I am the King, then I like knowing I have backup. I’m not the Lone Wolf type. One of the new game modes is Extraction. Similar to Three Plots, Assault in a way, or some of the phases from Invasion in Halo: Reach, your team has to “extract” targets. This basically boils down to holding X on an objective, then protecting it. I don’t find it that interesting, it feels like a less explosive version of Dominion.
What is Dominion? It’s a bit like Invasion Slayer from Halo: Reach, you hold areas and are rewarded with new toys and vehicles. I like that some of the maps used in Dominion don’t use the obvious primary red and blue bases as capture points, instead they use little nooks or secondary buildings. It’s definitely my favourite gametype of the new ones introduced in Halo 4 – if only because I abuse the vehicles. I got 33 kills with only 4 deaths earlier today, simply by knowing where the Wraith spawns in Dominion on Exile. Flood, the new name for Zombies, received a thematic overhaul. Instead of zombies, you’re now infected with the Flood. The Flood models are great, indicating the direction 343 intend to go with everyone’s favourite parasite. Lots of high pitch squealing and a massive bone sword protruding from their arm. I like that they can slash their sword arm in the middle of a Thruster Pack boost – catches many Spartans off-guard. I’ve not had the pleasure of playing any Grifball yet – the official playlist isn’t coming until later in the year, but I can imagine throwing the Grifball, always being able to Sprint, and various new armour abilities will make it unlike the older version.
In terms of maps, I’ll start with the easiest one first, the one I’ve had the most experience with, and that’s Ragnarok, the only old map retooled for Halo 4, and, I believe, the only original map from Halo 3 to ever be remade. It’s pretty much the same as it was, a nice big open area with lots of jagged hills to break up sight lines, and large angular rocks to hide behind. It’s ideally suited to Mantis combat, and the giant robots do add a new element to this old faithful. Exile is another large map, and probably my favourite. Square and asymmetric, with two bases at either end and a natural formation cut into a large rock column in the middle, Exile is great on foot and in vehicles. I love how Halo maps often have fiction built into them. One such map is Abandon – a UNSC facility that was abandoned due to some accident or something, where they were clearly researching something very Flood-like. There’s the Flood again. Although not technically in the game, they do feature subtly. Also, Abandon has pretty purple flowers in the trees.
Meltdown is a funny one. Built around a figure eight track for vehicles, it’s a pretty large map, but you can’t really see much of it at once. The sight lines are maybe too short for a map that is often 8v8. It’s pretty though, and it orientates you with a neat trick of one half of the map being snowy, the other being slightly melted (another aptly named map). Solace reminds me of Narrows (a Halo 3 map), but it is different in terms of map features (vertically layered rather than horizontally long) and aesthetics (it looks as if it is being reclaimed by nature). Another one of my favourites, and yet again reminding me of old maps, is Adrift. It brings to mind Condemned from the Halo: Reach Defiant Map Pack, a map designed by 343 Industries. Incidentally, all the maps have a chunky feel, with lots of diagonal lines and cheeky little ramps and jumps – an ethos that first came to my attention when 343 released the Defiant Map Pack. While all those Reach maps felt like they did belong in Halo, they had a different vibe to them that was distinctly not Bungie. The Halo maps that Bungie made were quite often rounded, skinny, subtle and straightforward. 343 maps are all straight lines, chunky, and some can be a little complex at first.
Vortex is another odd one. I’ve only played it in Dominion, which never seems to use the proper red and blue bases as actual Dominion bases. I get the feeling that flags would spawn in the buildings at either end of the long wind tunnel rather than in the pokey little hut and the dingy cave that you must capture in Dominion. It, like all the other maps to be honest, is beautiful, and I hope to play it in Big Team Slayer or an 8v8 CTF one day. Yet another apt name for a map: Complex. It is complex. Almost too complex. It’s a map that doesn’t have many distinct features other than a group of buildings – in fact maybe the distinct feature is that it doesn’t have a distinct feature. Moving swiftly on – Haven. This map is great, and easily the best map for the traditional 4v4. It is actually quite a simple design, a trademark of all the best maps. A simple cross on top with walkways going around the perimeter, with a similar setup on the floor below. It is the interconnectivity of these routes that make this map shine. Finally, we come to Longbow, yet another large vehicle friendly map. 343 have really answered those critics who moaned that no previous Halo game had enough Big Team maps. Longbow is based around control of the upper platform. There are four large ramps intended for vehicles that lead up to it (two on each side of the map), and various routes and passageways for pedestrians to get up there without fear of being splattered. Once a team has settled in up there, it can be quite difficult to remove them. They have height advantage, their team-mates will respawn up there near them, and on a subconscious level, you feel you must always be trying to get up there, regardless of how many times you’ve just been cut down trying to claim the high ground as your own.
Two of the three Forge maps, Erosion and Impact are quite unlike anything we’ve ever had to Forge with before. Erosion is dusty, grimy and orange, while Impact is set on an asteroid belt The third map, Ravine, is a more traditional Forerunner style, with green fields and silver building blocks. I’ve already made a map on Erosion, I love the custom pipe pieces, but it is a little dour. Impact looks to have the best selection of unique pieces, and setting colours for each part can really bring a map to life and give it character (see picture). I’m pretty happy with the additions to the Forge – the ability to quickly duplicate the current item with a tap on the d-pad and magnets allow you to build up basic shapes pretty quickly and accurately, making it easy to go back and fine tune later. Magnets are also very handy for the pipe pieces on Erosion – they never quite seem to match up properly when moving them manually. The new dynamic lighting feature makes any map look more complete and solid – In Halo: Reach, you could have two identical pieces next to each other but they’d be totally different shades for whatever reason – but dynamic lighting fixes that issue. The current piece you are looking at is highlighted green, making it less likely you’ll move some crucial part by accident. Very useful.
We’ve had a map pack already, which features three new play-spaces, and they are all quite novel. Harvest is essentially three lanes – one full of walkways and buildings down the middle for pedestrians, with two wide lanes down the sides for vehicular combat. Shatter is an odd one – it took me a very long time to get to grips with the layout. The bases feel like they are round the wrong way. They are blocked off and kind of joined in the middle – there is just no way to enter them from the front – you have to go around the sides or back. It feels like a symmetrical version of Relic. The third map is Wreckage, and it feels and looks like a homage to the old Halo 2 classic, Burial Mounds. There are various combinations of maps and modes that work well together. Haven is great for 4v4 Slayer, Adrift is perfect for Capture the Flag, Exile and Longbow excel when played with Dominion, and Ragnarok is Big Team heaven.
It’s not without problems though. Weapons dropped by you or your enemies after death disappear far too quickly. The Fileshare system is utterly broken. The labels on ordnance drops are sometimes broken. Occasionally it will show a little icon of a Sniper Rifle, or a Shotgun, then when I get over there it’s a couple of Frag Grenades or a Battle Rifle. And other times after I’ve picked up my personal ordnance, the little green icon telling me what is (was?) incoming just hangs around for ages. The Engineer’s Drop Recon armour mod, which is supposed to tell you when timed or random ordnance is being deployed, rarely does. I thought it’d be useful to call out drops in advance to my team-mates, for example that our Sniper Rifle is re-spawning in 5 seconds, or being greedy and grabbing some rockets before anyone else even realises they are there, but basically you’ve just got indicators all over your screen, some of which do have weapons under them, but some of which, don’t. There are no countdowns to when things are dropping, and I was waiting on a Saw to drop for pretty much an entire match yesterday. This last one may just be a personal gripe, but taking out the red X’s that indicate where your team-mates have just died was a mistake. It was so useful.
All things considered, it is my favourite competitive Halo multiplayer experience – they just keep getting better. 343 Industries have done an incredible job, even more incredible when you consider that it was their first game as a team.
