The main area of the game for me is War Games, and I feel it is a massive success. The maps are great, and I quite enjoy the new ways to play the old favourite gametypes. I don’t think personal ordnance messes up balance – you just have to be more wary of that enemy coming around the corner. He could have a Battle Rifle, he could have an Incineration Cannon. Play it safe. Do some recon. Quick spawning is good, I like spawning next to my team-mates rather than in a distant, empty, battle-free corner of the map.
Overall, I got the impression that the Campaign was merely a warm-up for 343 Industries. The existing enemies included were safe choices, and it harks back to the original Halo: Combat Evolved. The new Prometheans were great to look at, and both a joy and challenge to fight on Heroic. The Halo 5 Campaign, most probably on the next generation of Xbox, will take the beauty of Halo 4, and add to it in terms of scale and intensity thanks to larger storage and more advanced hardware. I can see the Flood re-entering the picture in the next game – I’m personally hoping that 343 Industries keep them as shambolic hordes for the most part, with the specialised units like the Tank and Ranged pure forms rarely encountered. Was I the only one who enjoyed the sheer endurathon of The Library and Cortana levels? I’m excited (and a little scared) to see how deadly these Flood-infected Spartans are…
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…
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.
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.
As one of the three main facets of Halo 4’s Campaign mode, and a huge part of how successful the multiplayer side of things were going to be, this was a potential area for disappointment. Not only did any new weapons have to be balanced and Halo-ish, deciding which old ones to keep and which to quietly brush under the carpet must’ve been tough too. I was going to cover the vehicle selection in this post as well, but it’s standard stuff really. Apart from one new one, there’s just the basic, standard, (dependable) set in Halo 4. Mongoose. Warthog. Ghost. Banshee. Wraith.
