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The Review:
While I do love the Halo Franchise, I thought I had purchased Halo 4…but I think I was playing a Mass Effect game. The graphics look amazing; the lighting, faces, terrain, and enemies just amaze me. But the vehicles look and act terribly. Not to mention the sound. The Warthog sounds like a '92 Honda Civic maxed out at 7,000RPM. The Tank moves slower than it did in any other Halo game before it. The Ghost and Banshee boost sounds like a whisper making it hard to pick out during the game, so it sneaks up on you constantly, as well both handle like a tractor. The only vehicle that I felt like was pretty awesome was the Pelican but you can only play that for 4 minutes and it’s so over powered you really can’t have fun with it. But my biggest disappointment in vehicles would have to be the covenant ships. Yes, the ones that look like they’re made of lego’s and explode into per-defined chunks. The cruiser in Dawn falls apart like it was meant to. The Phantoms disappear and are replaced by an explosion that doesn’t leave any wreckage. Something so common and expected of these two vessels was replaced by mediocre design.
Let’s move on to campaign play. While the enemies are different, I couldn’t understand why Jackals had to be butchered and redesigned from the feet up. If you look closely at them, they look like you took the Montauk Monster and put it in armor. Jackal Before Jackal After It’s just sad and discomforting to see a iconic enemy treated so poorly by 343i. As well, it’s primarily a bird species, and it doesn’t even act like it. You put a Beam Rifle in it’s hands/claws on Legendary, and it will sometimes miss you on the first shot when you are standing still. This dumb down trait really underestimates the expected strength this enemy its suppose to have. The grunts seem normal on their own, except for the audio in the game. They can some how throw their voices to sound like they are behind you, even on a 5.1 sound system. At times I kept wheeling around thinking there was one behind me, when it was actually in the ghost in front of me. The Elites also seem to have their voices toned down. Usually you could hear them scream and bark orders over the weapons fire and music but here in H4, they speak at a lower volume. I can hear grunts more than the elites. That also comes back to Jackals, I don’t think I once heard a jackal scream to alert everyone it saw me. But with all that said, I felt like the covenant was more of a nuisance than really part of the story in the game. The Hunters are frightening fast up close and personal. The Elites AI seems like something stripped from Halo 3, even Halo Reach had better Elite AI. They seem to stay back and not rush in on you when they know you are weak. The jackals aren’t even a fight, while the grunts maintain the expected AI and fighting style they have always had since Halo CE. The Campaign AI of Halo Reach was far superior with the covenant in having them work together, but I suppose since this isn’t really a military covie group, I could see how they are lesser than regular halo AI’s.
The Prometheans seem to have their own fighting style and good AI was put into them it seems. The Crawlers definitely can be a huge hassle in large packs, the watchers are the biggest threat to the fight, knights are deadly at close quarters…but sadly like with most Halo AI, if you stay back, they will let you kill them from a distance. I found that playing Legendary the first time, 35% of my time on each level was used picking up long range weapons and stock piling the ammo to kill 3-6 knights. The plasma pistol that grunts drop came in wonderful help with taking out shields, but there is no equivalent to this tactic using only forerunner weapons.
And now we come to game mechanics. And my only, biggest, frustration with campaign play would be the disappearing weapons. Yes. Disappearing weapons. When I kill an enemy, I expect to loot it’s body for a better weapon or more ammo. Now after I kill it, I may have to fight a couple more baddies before I get to it. By the time I have, the enemies body, ammo and weapon have disappeared. This has never happened before in a Halo Game unless you loaded a whole new part of the map and back tracked a bunch. This is very frustrating. As well you used to be able to find the weapons dropped fairly easily because they always stand out from the ground. Not in Halo 4. Some weapons will blend right in to the grassy earth or rock, making it a sorely waste of time trying to find it in a desperate firefight.
Music is the greatest thing you could put in to film, art, and games. Most of the greatest movies were really created by the dynamic music that accompanied it. Indian Jones, Star Wars, Back to the Future, Ghost Busters and Halo all have these great scores. For example, if you played any song from Halo CE, Halo 2, or Halo 3 in a short 30 seconds I could tell you what moment that music starts playing in the game. Music in Halo has always been tied to the epic fight that was to come. Aside from Halo ODST, it has never been moody melodies. Except for now. Halo 4 has some pretty kick -Yoink- music, but not one song or melody sticks out in my mind from the game. When I think of the game usually the gameplay trailer music sticks out. There isn’t one moment when the music crescendos into a memorable scene. This is a very important part of the game, and sadly it wasn’t pressed upon 343i that they need to have those “Moments” to actually succeed with a new trilogy in the Halo franchise. Now granted the music is pretty cool and fits the environment, it’s also fairly repetitive and keeps to low throughout with little climax to insinuate the key battles in the games. The only times the music would be pretty epic would be cutscenes, which much of those are pre-rendered and not actual in-game engine. And that’s someone completely new with Halo 4. The cut scenes are per-rendered. Every Halo game (excluding Halo Wars) made in studio has always been a in-game engine cutscene. It was a staple of the franchise to show how pretty it could be while using the models from the engine.
In my opinion, even after telling the story of Master Chief and Cortana, the rest of the characters and game itself played disconnected from the universe its set in. It was like playing all three of the Mass Effect games, but in one paraphrased game. I was along for the ride as Cortana slowly dies and Master Chief goes through the motions…Ride Gondala, shoot, kill, step into beam and use shields to shut it down. It was taking several mechanics and rulebook plays from the other Halo games. This felt like plagiarism was put into a video game. Much like buying a Madden game to have no real changes except to have the update player stats and trades.
Calling it disrespectful is just silly.
