Halo 5 Pros and Cons
What is good
- Great gameplay - Epic campaign - Great maps - No loadouts - No armor abilities - Balanced sprinting - De-scoping is back - In-game Chatter
The gameplay overall is pretty awesome, it is fun and I never found it to be repetitive. The campaign is pretty epic, and it highlights some of the coolest things to do in Halo perfectly. You will find yourself in a banshee taking down objectives, or mowing down through enemies with a scorpion, or take out covenant forces in a mantis, or rush down a building at high speeds taking enemies out as you go. It really makes you feel like you are experiencing Halo in the best ways. The maps are great. They have decent size, they are varied and there are many ways to go around with many different routes. A few things people complained about in Halo 4 was loadouts and armor abilities, that loadouts didn’t fit in and that armor abilities were OP, well no more, for these have been removed in Halo 5. Certain things like active camo and some armor mods are returning, but that is part of REQ in warzone and you have to earn up for them and get them first, so it is not like you are spawning in with extra grenades or invisibility from the start, plus you could spend your points into something else like a power weapon or a vehicle. Something people also complained about was sprinting and how it allowed for easy escapes, well no more, because if you think you can escape so quickly and regenerate your shields, think again, because now your shields won’t regenerate if you sprint, so it gives people the chance to finish you off without letting you heal up, and I find it to be a cool way to balance it out without ditching sprint completely. Also, de-scoping is back, don’t think I have to go into too much detail. And something new is the chatter, this allows players without headsets, or those who don’t want to talk, a chance to communicate with their teammates.
What is bad
- No split screen - No Firefight or Spartan Ops - No flood or playable elites - No dual wielding - Micro-transactions
However halo 5 has some bas things about it. Now I don’t want to sound like some super halo veteran that complains about everything new and everything that goes missing, buuuut… There was no split-screen, I don’t know why but that is a rather large con, this is the first halo that doesn’t have it, so that means no playing with friends in the same couch. Halo 4 didn’t have firefight, but at least it had Spartan ops to replace it, and I felt like it was cool, but now Halo 5 doesn’t have neither of those modes, whether they didn’t have the time or they didn’t do it to focus on improving the campaign and the multiplayer I don’t know, but it just isn’t there, and that, undeniably is a con. There is no flood, even if lore-wise the flood are gone, they could have still just done an exception. Technically it is just a War games simulation. Right? There are no playable elites, which was a pretty cool thing in the past halos, but since halo 4 they aren’t playable. There is also no dual-wielding, I don’t know why but since halo 4 it is not there either. I mean it could be balanced by doubling the reload time, increasing the spread and maybe making it so you can’t aim, or maybe just have a smaller zoom, but they aren’t there at all. REQ packs are new and it is something I support, you earn them by gaining REQ points and buying them with those points in the store, but they also added the option to buy them with real money. Even if buying them with real money is completely optional, just the fact that it IS there is bad, I just don’t like micro-transactions.
What is interesting
- Smartscope - Campaign teams and orders - Spartan abilities
Some things I found interesting (but not bad) were the Smartscope, the campaign teams, and the new Spartan abilities. The smart scope is a new way to aim in Halo 5 (For those that live under a rock). Which instead of just zooming in, you now get some sort of holographic zoom in your HUD, which is a pretty cool alternative and a fresh change. Some people are against it because some of them look too much like a typical ADS, but I like it. In the campaign you now have teams that you can give orders to. This adds something more to worry about in the action. You can tell them to go to a certain place, or target a specific enemy that is causing you trouble, or tell them to revive someone because you are busy fighting elsewhere. I like that a lot and it adds a new tactical way to play that feels fresh. The Spartan abilities I really like, they are a cool concept. Because, let’s face it, if you have a giant thruster on your back, you might as well use it, and that’s exactly what the Spartan abilities do. They let you dodge things or simply boost forward with your thruster ability, or clamber up obstacles in case you missed your jump, or charge into people. Some fans were against clamber because there wasn’t any in previous Halos and it makes it so you require less skill to jump to places, or that hovering makes it too easy to fire at people mid-air. But consider that these have cooldowns, and that stuff like hovering and the charge up for the ground pound can leave you exposed to enemy fire. I really like these Spartan abilities quite a lot and they are all pretty cool.