1: War Games is fast, but there’s a certain degree at which this can hurt the gameplay. It’s now much easier to get killed without even seeing who is shooting at you.
Aim-assist seems to be more powerful this time around to help with the faster pace, but this can really be infuriating at longer ranges.
2: Hit-scan guns, mainly the DMR, make Halo 4 much longer range than any other Halo game. It is very easy to get melted from any range as long as they are a decent shot, and since hitting someone doesn’t un-scope them, attempting return fire often results in one’s death and tends to be ineffective.
3: Precision weapons fire extremely fast with almost no penalty to accuracy. For this reason, a BR or DMR can take on an AR in CQC.
4: The Boltshot does its job, but the range on it can be pretty ridiculous.
5: Sniping is easier this time around to deal with the faster-paced gameplay, but it can be a little bit too easy. In Halo 3 a sniper was a strict veteran-only weapon, while in Halo 4 anyone mildly experienced can pick it up and pop some heads off.
6: Being able to see ordinance on the map is useful, but makes learning the maps much less necessary. In Halo CE, 2 and 3, you really had to know the weapon placement to ensure your victory.
7: Personal Ordinance drops are cool, but it basically makes it so at least a quarter of everyone has a power weapon at any given time. In Reach and previous, there would be a bunch of people with power weapons at the start, but it the weapons would soon be used up and it would turn into a normal spawn-weapon or whatever-precision-weapon-you-can-find-and-the-AR battle.
8: The maps look fantastic, but they seem to be designed less around the weapons and more around the player. Considering Halo 4’s style, this isn’t surprising, but makes it so no map is really memorable.
9: Campaign is fun, but it feels a little too easy and repetitive. Halo 4 legendary I had few problems with, while in Halo 3 and Reach legendary I had a significant challenge (we’ll forget Halo 2 and it’s aimbot jackal snipers on legendary). The encounters are usually structured the same way (fodder all over the place, support in back, leaders in between) and play out the same way. Midnight seems to be a bunch of the same areas but with different enemy set-up.
10: Prometheans are formidable foes, but are predictable and can be taken down in generally the same order. In terms of game design, their AI is extremely complicated, but I feel like the current-gen console can’t handle what I think they should be capable of. The Prometheans seem like they should be more secondary characters like the Flood, appearing much less, but extremely difficult to take down. The Knight’s near-invincibility, while is makes sense, is often just infuriating to fight them.
11: The balance of Halo is rather unlike the normal FPS balance of Halo. The bad guys’ weapons are designed for them, while the UNSC weapons are more designed around a Spartan. Covey weapons seem to be weaker and much less effective than UNSC guns, but the forerunners’ beautiful energy blasters are like Mad Jack Churchill in weapon form. In other Halos, I get a feeling of equality across the board, each weapon having a specific use (except for the all-purpose CE magnum). The enemies seem designed to be enemies instead of being designed around the player’s abilities. For example, the elites seem to drop like flies compared to their counterparts in CE, where you had to be careful about their scary-blam!ing-fists and their super-accurate plasma shots. The maps seem designed around more around the player, like the weapons. Without a weapon-centered outlook (which again makes sense for Halo 4), the battles on the maps seem to be DMR=I win no matter what others might have. In the other Halos (Reach less so) the maps seemed to be designed so that the guy with the shotgun must go here, the guy with the sniper goes here, and the guy with the AR or duel SMG run up the middle as a distraction.
12: Please, for the love of all things good, bring back friendly fire. Grenade spamming now has very little downsides (while in Reach you were guaranteed a betrayal because of those mini-nukes).
13: No multiplayer UNSC flying vehicle. I miss my hornet.
14: The Broadsword is a cool vehicle, but we only get to use it for a short time. I had the same complaint with the Sabre in Reach.
15: The characters in Halo 4 aren’t so powerful as they were previously, with the exception of the Chief and Cortana, of course. My problem is Cortana {SPOILER ALERT} is gone at the end of the game. She was basically a main character, and now she’s gone. Del Rio just came off as a pretentious drill sergeant who thinks he knows everything. Lasky was cool, but wasn’t really a powerhouse of story telling. Palmer is a good attempt at a strong female character, but comes off as just a dog of the female gender. The Didact gave me a reaction of “oh hey it’s the Didact” unlike the Prophets who made me think “you ignorant blam!holes! I shall annihilate you with all the bullets!” or the Gravemind who invokes a feeling of “OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT SCARY THING”. There’s no other hero; like the Keyes, Johnson, or the Arbiter; that Chief and Cortana really work with. It feels more lone-wolf than ever before.
Halo 4 is a good game, but isn’t a good Halo game in my opinion. I appreciate the effort, but some ideas need to be scrapped and some scrapped ideas need to be re-implemented. Next time around, I hope 343 tries to make it more like Halo 3 (personal favorite)and Halo 2, sticking more to the slower paced but “think before you throw” play style of the Halos of times past.