Halo 5: Guardians (2015)

Playing the Halo games in order makes Halo 5 feel even worse. You go from masterpiece after masterpiece, then Halo 4, which was at least decent, and then suddenly arrive at this.

The campaign completely ruined my mood. The marketing made the story look far more interesting than it actually was, Master Chief barely felt like the main character, and the constant focus on Fireteam Osiris made the whole thing feel disconnected from what I wanted from a Halo game.

The story was confusing, disappointing and nowhere near the standard set by the earlier games. I ended up rushing through it purely to see how it finished, then moved on as quickly as possible. The squad system was frustrating, the repeated boss fights became annoying, and most of the campaign felt forgettable.

After playing the Bungie games, Halo 5 felt like the point where the series had completely lost its identity. Halo 4 had problems, but it still felt like there was something worth building on. Halo 5 took that and somehow made it worse.

I genuinely have very little positive to say about the campaign. It was one of the biggest disappointments I have had with a game series, and it made me wish Halo had remained with Bungie.

Having come this far in the series, I can safely say I don't think I'm a Halo fan. However, I am a massive Halo 5 fan.

This is, by leaps and bounds, the most fun I've ever had with a Halo campaign. I am going to now tell you how my experience went:

I played this on co-op with my spouse, picking it up immediately after all the previous games. Our first lovely surprise was that we got to pick our characters. I had just got done saying how it was a missed opportunity that you didn't get a team of Spartans with you in all the other games that got to be proper characters, and then boom, here I was greeted by exactly that.

We start playing, and lo and behold, unlike ODST the characters are actually nice to each other and act like friends. The gameplay turns out to be incredible with the new thruster abilities that let you dash around. We're having so much fun darting around the map and just causing mayhem amongst the enemies. We're geeking out over the fact that we can heal each other mid-combat instead of waiting to respawn.

When we pick up with Master Chief, he ALSO has his own team of friends and, wait what's this? One of them is his best friend Kelly from the Fall of Reach novel??? That's amazing! So I pick her and she's FASTER THAN CHIEF IS JUST LIKE IN DA BOOK?!?!?!?! I am legit starting to feel like I am a fan of this series.

And then for the first time, we got to explore a civilian area that wasn't at war. My spouse I were discussing how it sucks that we only see this universe from a military perspective and that the UNSC is straight up fascist and evil so we'd love to see that even talked about. And lo and behold, people fucking hate the UNSC! We were so excited, it felt like a payoff to things the original writers didn't even realize they set up.

Then we got to go to Sanghelios and see the Arbiter again and fight alongside his warriors! And there was even a part where you get to walk around a village with Sangheli and Unggoy in a non-combat scenario and just vibe, we were in heaven!

We had a hard time putting this game down. We played it for 10 hours straight and only stopped because the game crashed. We immediately finished it together the next morning. It kept giving us things that we had wanted since the first game and had written off ever getting.

[Note: This is a repost from a personal gaming journal. Originally written sometime in 2017 when I originally played this game.]

Halo 4 was an excellent surprise. In it I found a continuation of the tight controls and gameplay established in the first game and along with it a more personal story between the chief and Cortana. To be perfectly honest, I don't have the faintest idea what had happened with the ‘Didact’ and his supposed forerunner wife, the composer, and that felt a little ham fisted and ultimately got away from the very and admittedly touching personal story they were trying to tell. I bring this all up in service of talking about the fifth game, because I feel it struggles with the same problem.

The story team had a big order to fill: progress the larger ‘universe threatening’ plot while still trying to tell a personal story. That alone is hard enough to do, but they also had to accomplish it while introducing a dozen new characters and especially a new protagonist. Not to mention most of the player base probably care nothing for the story or characters and needed to serve a group that wanted the ability to blow through any area when they wanted to. None of this hangs well together. I can see the target but they shot a little wide.

The addition of a fire team to support you was Halo taking yet another nod from Gears. While it provided people to move the exposition along with, given the absence of Cortana but felt largely unnecessary beyond that. I rarely had to utilize the ‘command’ function and was left wondering just what it was best used for. A missed opportunity for sure. I used it once to have the team focus fire on a wraith while I could focus on some jackals and grunts, stirring my humors a bit, but what a fleeting feeling.

The multiplayer on the other hand is probably the best in the series in terms of sheer cooperative and competitive options. 'War zone' is the new wave based mode and I’ve had lots of fun running games with random players. It reminded me of the heights that Gears of War 4 hits with 'Horde 3.0'.

Halo 5: Guardians is as bad as I was told. An absolute mess of a game.

I'm gonna keep this review brief because so many people have talked about this game. What does this game do right?

The game looks beautiful in my opinion and the set pieces are well done. The level design is mostly alright and the game controls well for the most part. The Multiplayer has gotten better since launch as well

Now, what does this game do wrong? Well, the story is an awful mess. Master Chief, along with his team known as "Blue Team" goes AWOL from the UNSC after Chief has a vision implying that Cortana is alive. Team Osiris led by Spartan Locke is instructed to stop them. This game's first mistake is that it expects the player to do a bunch of homework to even understand what is happening. There is stuff that happens in this game that you'd only understand if you played Spartan Ops, read the novels, watch a mini-series, and listen to a podcast. Seriously? Nobody wants that.

Its second mistake is that the game outright lied in its marketing. The game is marketed in a way that suggests that we are gonna see this big fight between Locke and Chief. And that we would get to play that fight... Nope, they have one horribly choreographed fight in a cutscene and that is it...

And its biggest mistake in the story is that it is a character assassination of Cortana. The way she goes out in Halo 4 is done very well... But now... She's alive... And also evil... And wants to rule the world. What was the point of having Cortana die if she was gonna come back anyway? This also ruins Chief's entire character arc in Halo 4. He doesn't feel human anymore which was the whole point of Halo 4.

The enemy AI is once again really stupid and how come we have to fight The Warden Eternal... 7 Times? It's just a mess. Doesn't help that you only play as Chief like 3 times and play as Locke for almost all of it. A character nobody likes.

Hey at least Buck from Halo 3: ODST is in this game.

Don't play this...

1/5

Wouldn't Recommend

(played campaign only, Normal difficulty)

Before I played this game, I'd heard nothing but universal hate for it. Having finished the campaign, I can now officially say that... it's fine. It's yet another meat & potatoes shooter for the Xbox.

The graphics are great. The sound is great. (Some of) the guns "feel" great. It's Halo.

But, the predominant "Knack" enemies carried over from the second half of Halo 4 really fall flat for me. As cheesy as I found the Covenant in earlier games, these guys just feel like lifeless, generic targets. Even the boss fights are literally all against the same guy, spread out about 5 times throughout the game.

While the story was kind of a dud, I don't think it's nearly the disaster that I'd heard it was. The biggest issue is that it doesn't really start to get interesting until the final third of the game. Then they do a big "oh, never mind" on the Team vs. Team premise of the first two-thirds of the game; and it ends.

Bungie did a great job with the storytelling in Halo 3 ODST, and it really seemed like 343 Studios was trying to replicate that success with this game. While it has ODST's large cast of characters, Halo 5's cast were all written as shallow, samey, unmemorable space soldiers -- including the new protagonist, Locke. The closest thing you get to a personality is when Buck gets killed (not a spoiler, because normal gameplay includes you & your teammates constantly getting killed & revived) and he belts out some cheesy voice line.

That's not to say that this numbered Halo game completely ignores Master Chief. He's still there -- just only for about 25% of the game. Pushing him to a secondary character role felt like a major misstep.

On the bright side... I had almost no issues streaming this game through xCloud.

I have loved the Halo games over the years; I still can't get the Halo 2 soundtrack out of my head, but PS4 was my choice of console that generation so I haven't had the opportunity to go through Halo 5 until 2021 - I still don’t have an Xbox One but have been experimenting with the cloud services on my phone with a GameSir X2 controller via Microsoft’s project Xcloud; at a £1 for a month it'd be rude not to.

Halo 5 didn't blow me away on previews and playing it didn't change that either. It's just going through the motions again without knowing what the it's trying to do or say. Again, it commits the sin of Halo 2 by taking control away from the chief but unlike the Arbiter, which was unique and fun, you play as random Spartans I don't care about. Yes it's all very pretty, but as someone that is very sold on the John & Cortana relationship, it's all ultimately pretty pointless. The way that Bungie finished the Halo saga on Xbox 360 made the story feel done and this doesn't persuade me otherwise.

Project xCloud is definitely worth trying though if you have a good internet connection (and dedicated controller setup). It's wizardry that it works at all.

I'll keep this brief:

• I think this game has the tightest and most satisfying combat, best graphics and overall production value of all Halo games. It's online multiplayer is great (the best since Halo 2), and I spent a LOT of time in the cooperative firefight mode.
• It has a terrible story in comparison to the original Halo trilogy, and though I appreciate all the "stuff from the books" that made it in, like Halo 4 I think it leans too heavily into that content. The marketing around this game was really off base with the whole Chief being on the run thing. It was a disappointment on a few levels.
• Lack of split screen multiplayer was a huge misstep. I get the technical reasons why it wasn't possible, but Halo as a franchise was built on couch co-op and slayer matches.

Overall, it's a must play if you own an Xbox and have any interest in shooters, but it failed on a few key levels. I'm really hoping 343 rights the ship for Halo Infinite.

It has an AWFUL beginning, like, REALLY bad! I did not recognize it as a playable or enjoyable experience until the second mission.

I am very curious why it starts the way it does. Anyway, I had some fun with it in co-op once I got that "Halo" feel.

BUT

The story is uninteresting gobbledygook and the gameplay feels like the original game. I do not know, after Halo 2 the series lost me.