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Bear with me here if you are sycophantic enough to think that Halo 5 (with it’s nonsensical appellation Guardians. Seriously, the Guardians aren’t meaningful characters in the game and are only mentioned a handful of times) is actually a good Halo game. I will explain my reasoning before the overly sensitive moderators on here quash my post (aka any dissent).
The worst part of the game is the multiplayer, but let’s start with the campaign. As with Halo 4, after playing through Halo 5’s rather uninspired campaign, I have not once been struck with the urge to reply the levels, no matter that I can get some achievements for doing so. The bland art style is, quite frankly, less visually impressive than Halo 3, which came out eight years ago on the last generation console. The Spartans themselves look sharp, I will admit, but that is as far as any beauty in this game goes. Just look at Destiny if you want to know what Halo SHOULD look like on the Xbox One. The story is pretty weak to say the least, with the gist basically being that Locke (who we never grow to care about) is chasing around Master Chief who is chasing around Cortana seemingly just because, and Cortana is turning into a bad guy because, well, every game needs a bad guy (or girl). I guess. The story only takes around 12 hrs to complete, and honestly at least an hour or two of that is waiting for your idiot AI teammates to revive you after you get chopped up and downed way too quickly. It honestly gets to the point where you fear one-on-one confrontations with grunts because there’s a decent chance they will somehow win. A decent chunk of the rest of the time the campaign takes is taken up by actively searching for collectibles. In essence, the campaign is hardly the “longest Halo campaign in a while, if not ever” as advertised by 343 and the video game media.
The game basically exists in the same game that part 1 of the last books of the Hunger Games and Harry Potter did, namely as a cash grab placeholder whose sole purpose is to put out a game to make some money off of the masses while not significantly advancing the Halo story in the slightest. Add to this the fact that the game was released incomplete (it took over 3 weeks for forge to come out? No campaign co-op matchmaking? Not all game modes available at launch? 2 sizeable updates within the first month of release?) and it has become pretty clear (especially when you factor in the disappointing Halo 4 and the debacle that was the MCC) that 343 either is unable or unwilling to release a complete, quality Halo game. In short, 343 will never be able to carry Bungie’s water. The Halo that made Halo famous died when Bungie left, and now we are just left with a withered husk being pranced around, with 343 pretending that the franchise is still alive, ala Weekend at Bernie’s. Sure, they will keep releasing games as long as people keep buying them, but the soul of Halo has been dead since 2012 and shows no signs of being revived by the current administration.
The multiplayer is full of holes and flaws as well. There’s the horrendous grenades, both in terms of what causes what amount of damage and the general physics of how the grenades interact with their environment. It used to be that you could use grenades tactically to weaken or finish off enemies. Now grenades are just things that you throw around willy-nilly, with the worse of a throw you make resulting in a better outcome for you. Skill in grenade use is not rewarded. If you try to aim a grenade or use them smartly, you will rarely be rewarded, whereas people who randomly chuck grenades in no specific direction get inordinately rewarded for their incompetence. In Bungie’s Halos, it was clear that they really took care to pay attention to the physics of how a grenade would react to its environment both before and after being thrown. You could throw a frag grenade and bounce it to devastate an enemy. Now if you throw a grenade hoping for a bounce, it will probably just hit the ground with a thud and die without coming close to your enemy.
The maps look terrible as well. From the moment the prematch visuals come up, it is obvious that this will NOT be your father’s Halo (and let’s face it, if you like this Halo you probably weren’t old enough to have played the Bungie Halo’s when they came out). In the case of the art, as with most everything else in Halo’s 4 and 5, it is clear that while Bungie made it a point to go the extra mile on most every aspect of the game, 343 is content with simply ‘good enough’. If there’s a problem, they can patch it later. None of the maps are visually inspiring at all. In fact, if I were 343 I would quit copying Bungie’s maps. It’s just embarrassing for 343 since Bungie’s maps look better, even 8-10 years ago. If you don’t believe me, pull up Ragnarok from Halo 4 and then pull up Valhalla from Halo 3. Valhalla looks better. By a mile. Whatever the reason for the change in art style, it has been a dismal failure. Even if the graphics are technically better than on Bungie’s Halos, they clearly don’t look as good as Halo 3 and Reach, even with those games coming out 5 and 7 years ago respectively on the last generation of consoles.
The gunplay is equally bad. Oftentimes, enemies will get killshots when they don’t actually HAVE a shot on you. Or they will kill you from long distances with the Assault Rifle before one can even get more than one grenade off. Putting a rocket launcher on it and thus making the Mongoose probably the most feared weapon in Halo is ludicrous. The Spartan Charge was clearly going to be a glitched ability from the outset, and it has definitely proven to be exactly that. Others will get Spartan charge kills from a standstill off their back foot, while ofttimes I won’t even be able to sprint to Spartan Charge an enemy, and even if I do it feels clumsy and they bounce off half the time unharmed, then finish me off with a quick AR burst. Weapons like the Hydra launcer will get one shot kills on a moving enemy for one person, while for another won’t result in a kill even if being shot at close range with a full clip right on an enemy in an enclosed space. The Ghost shooting is laughably bad, with poor shooting resulting in kills quite a bit. The radar being nerfed makes no sense, as one can get chopped up in the blink of an eye by a vehicle that never appeared on the radar. This is pretty much a continuation of the bad radar from MCC.
There are a lot of instances of getting the drop on an enemy, having a huge advantage on them from a better position, and still getting killed by a few spray bullets from the AR or SMG or similar weapon. It’s not at all uncommon to have a 9k, 10 d game which rightfully should have been 14k, 5 d. The generosity with which some people get kills is laughable. I won’t even delve too deeply into the lack of being able to vote on maps or game types, or the pointlessness of REQs. Suffice it to say that Halo 5 is a continuation of the terminal cancer that 343 gave the Halo franchise with Halo 4 and continued with Halo MCC. The best days of Halo are clearly long past, gone along with Bungie. May Halo rest in peace, even if 343 keeps dragging out the corpse and parading it around to make some more money by releasing inferior and incomplete games.