Happy birthday, Halo 4! It was released on this day back in 2012 and was the first main game in the series to be released by 343i. It was controversial, to say the least, with many not liking the character designs or the QTE fight at the end. But you know what? I really enjoyed the Campaign and over the years it became my favourite out of all the Halo games and still is to this day with Midnight being my all-time favourite mission.
The multiplayer, I didn’t really play a lot of because of the absurd achievements, but Spartan Ops was different. With the cutscenes and gameplay, it was as though we were playing a second Campaign and, despite its repetitiveness, I thought it was really good. I remember wishing for a Season 2, but it never happened sadly. And Fireteam Crimson and Majestic were left to other media. In fact, I remember more than a few forum posts where people complained about how “bland” Spartan Ops was and how it was too repetitive. But then the mission “Two Giants” was released, and man, were those people singing a different tune. 343i had pretty much seen the criticism, said, “Watch this.” and delivered one of the most phenomenal Spartan Ops missions. I loved it. What was really fun about Spartan Ops also was finding all of the Red vs. Blue radio Easter eggs where if you shot them, the following cutscene audio would change to that of Sarge, Grif, Simmons, Donut, Caboose, Tucker, or Church.
Now, the Forge mode. That was amazing, especially when we essentially had three or four large empty maps to forge on. I remember just messing around on Impact with a friend. He would build a base on one asteroid and I would build one on the other, with neither of us hanging back on what we built, and we would essentially just play Slayer… which ended up being Snipers most of the time despite us building a bridge between the two asteroids 