I won’t even go into the multiplayer aspect of the game. Needless to say its the best this game has to offer and is seriously the best multiplayer of the franchise to date. Its great and I love it… would prefer it on PC but thats another post entirely… this is going to cover the story and why I don’t like it.
I’m going to be perfectly honest here. I have never been a huge halo fan. The story has always been… middle of the road, the writing the same… so I wasn’t really expecting anything spectacular out of this installment either. It would seem that I was quite correct.Now it could just be that I have been spoiled as of late story wise. Having just played through the witcher 3 and its expansion going from that to this probably wasn’t the best of places to start from for this game.
Locke… I care nothing for locke… he has no personality at all and is basically just “generic solider man”. I hate it when developers feel the need to do this. Lets force a new primary character on people for no other reason than to just be different. It would of been fine if they had actually put some effort into making him into something other than a blank piece of paper and expect us to accept him. I get it that lore wise he makes perfect sense for his role in this story. You very well wouldn’t want to make someone who utterly praises Master Chief, to chase him down and bring him in on suspected treason. I just wish they would of put forward even a little bit of effort into making him someone we could side with and understand where he is coming from. Yet we never get the chance… he is just shoved in our face and we are expected to just go along with it.
Master Chief… lets face it… MC has never been a strong character. In terms of protagonists I feel more for Gordon Freeman… a man who has never said anything… ever… than I do for MC. The one thing I fault Halo for more than anything is not exploring possible character development around the process that created Spartans in the first place. Lore wise they went through a hell of a lot to become Spartans and its never really directly brought up in any of the games. The fact that the Spartans just accept their lot in life is really quite stupid. Its quite a stretch of the imagination and in neglect of how human psychology works. MC is no different. He should literally be a shell of a man by this point in the story. I don’t care what kind of augments or training he has had. He should be showing signs of wear and tear mentally by this point. Yet he is only slightly more developed than Locke is simply because he has been around longer.
Cortana… I am loathe to even talk about this because 343 is now guilty of what I have called the “comic book effect”. Where they render death totally meaningless. With Cortana even being in this game they completely negate the GOOD scene at the end of halo 4 where she says goodbye to MC. Makes her sacrifice null and void and robs the series of much needed development. If I were them I would of left her out of 5 entirely and made her show up at the end of 6. They could of easily just made “The warden eternal” be the primary antagonist and changed the whole “hunt” ideology (which I will get too in a second) and just revealed it at the very last possible moment that she was still alive and was the real driving force behind what is happening. Instead she is basically just turned into Space -Yoink!- and for reasons that are never truly explained has seemed too of gone off her rocker. Not to mention I really hate her character design this time around. The F is with those shoulder pads?
The other squad members aren’t even worth mentioning. It seemed they really just wanted to fit 4 player co-op into the game which I am fine with… but they are basically just there. Their AI is laughable at times and them even being there is incredibly forced. Also the whole “blue team” having “been together on countless missions”. If you read into the back story that is true MC has been with them since the start of the Spartan program but we have never seen them until this point. It again just feels forced because someone at a meeting said “hey lets have 4 player coop because the kids will really enjoy that one i bet”.
“Hunt the truth”. The f does that even have to do with this story? Hunt the truth made perfect sense for the radio drama podcast they made leading up to this game (that was actually really well done if you haven’t listened to it I highly suggest you do because the story presented there is MUCH better than the one presented here and its told from the perspective of complete side characters)… I playing as locke NEVER really felt like I was hunting anything. There were some moments in the game where they could of really shown this off if they wanted to. For example the scene where Locke and company are chasing MC and company across the chasm with all the teleporters. That would of been a pretty amazing gameplay moment if they actually let you participate in it. A good 5-10 minute sequence of being right on MC’s heels as he is jumping through teleporters while you are trying to stick him with the armor lock device. Instead what we get is a 20 second cut scene of it happening and then for some reason instead of staying to back MC up blue team just goes into the teleporter… and instead of Osiris backing up Locke they just stand there and watch while MC proceeds to beat Locke’s face in…they could of at least made it so that Locke was really far ahead of his team during the chase… but no… they were standing 10 feet away just watching. Granted if I were watching 2 spartans go ham on each other from 10 feet away I too would probably just stand there and gawk but still… story wise it makes no sense. That entire fight scene seemed to be there just because they needed to have Locke and MC have a confrontation at some point that wouldn’t result in either of them being killed.
Presentation oddities… is it just me or do alot of the cut scenes just seem to … end… rather suddenly. Also the constant location changes are a bit jarring. Suddenly you are on this planet… now you are here… now you are under here… now you are in this canyon… now you are in space… now you are in this forerunner temple thing… all of that with little to no story telling in between.
Do I regret my purchase? No, not really. After all for the vast majority of its life Halo has been about the multiplayer and I am pleased to once again say its pretty spot on this time around. I will get my money’s worth out of that alone I am sure but I was hoping for a much stronger showing on the story side of things. 343 has a good grasp of game mechanics but I think they need to hire some outside help for halo 6 to really make it into something special. At this point I just wish they sold Halo 5 multiplayer as a stand alone thing so you could buy the story if you wanted to because I wish I could get my money back for that part of the game.
All this game has done for me regarding halo is reinforcing the fact that its just a “meh” franchise from a “meh” developer. Sure ill play it through once and i get a few dozen hours out of the MP but as soon as something like fallout 4 hits or any of the other slew of games coming out in the near future, Halo 5 will end up right next to every other halo game on my shelf probably never to be picked up again unless someone else wants to play it while they are staying over at my house.