Now before I get started, I wanted to say, this is a fantastic game, I had never played a campaign so good that I actually felt really sad at the end, so freaking awesome. And the multiplayer is so nice. It’s certainly a huge step up from Reach.
But there are some problems for me. And most of them aren’t massive problems, it’s just a compilation of them all that really bogs it down for me.
I am a die-hard Halo fan, I will always be one. Its just how it will be for me, but I am at a point where I dont really want to play Halo 4 and I don`t really want to play Reach, so I might as well go outside. The last bit of that is a quote I got from reddit but I feel the same.
The statement,“A Diamon covered in feces” is a good analogy(it’s a long vid, skip to the last 15 mins or so for the recap).
The potential for Halo 4 is incredible, and fixable, but the Call of Duty-ization of the franchise isn’t sitting well with me. Now before you call BS on that statement, hear me out on this.
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Halo 4 now has a loadout system akin to CoD. Complete with the ability to make sniper classes, anti-vehicle classes, and a variety of sub-classes.
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Halo 4 now has mods which are very similar to perks, some are direct copies while others have a Halo-spin on them.
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Instant respawns along with unbelievable kill times is just like CoD. I’m calling BS on this one for I can die before I can even react from two people instantly shooting at me. Part of that spawns from the extended radar.
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A flinch system over de-scoping. Just like CoD, but for Halo it’s incredibly disruptive experience.
<mark>Now don’t get me wrong</mark>, Halo needed changes and a new fresh start, but I feel they went too far and took too much out to the point it doesn’t play the same.
In previous games, you normally knew when your enemy had a power weapon, knew when they were going to spawn and could normally discern the locations of enemies based on your teammates locations. And all the changes throws a wrench in the gears of matchmaking.
I was a fan of the loadout system from day one. It would take out of the age-old dispute over AR and BR game types. And I didn’t think much of the ability to choose any primary weapons for loadouts until I got my hands on the game and played it extensively.
I was under the assumption that weapons had a sort of circle of effectiveness starting from the player and moving outwards. AR starting from the beginning, then the BR, then the DMR.
If the DMR faced the BR in the BR’s area of effectivness, the BR had a better chance of winning. And vice versa for all weapons but in reality we got the zero bloom DMR from Reach which makes it DMR>Everything. You can literally out snipe a sniper with a DMR.
When you add that with a fully customizable loadout with any weapon, grenade and side weapon changes what Halo is for me because it alters some of the true blue Halo roots such as driving the Warthog.
I’m not kidding on this. I normally play in a team, and am normally matched up against a team. With that said, you won’t last more than 30 seconds with a slightly underpowered chaingun and about 4 over-charged plasma shots coming your way. When you add that to the unbelievable aim assist on the snipers and other weapons, you will be sniped out of the hog a lot of the time.
And when you take into account of the amount of snipers that can be found on any given game… It’s just… Blah.
And on certain Dominion games it gets to the point where it’s complete hell. Every game I have played on Vortex, whoever gets Bravo base wins the game, hands down. It’s neatly impossible to get through either of their bases after that because they are likely to have two binary rifles and two incineration cannons. What I’m trying to emphasize is that there are often way too many power weapons on many maps at any given moment, and some times there are not.
Now with all the said, I still love to play Halo 4, but sometimes it feels like I’m not playing the same game that I was playing 10 minutes ago. It’s hard to explain but it just feels off sometimes and you can see it in the score boards. On average my friends and I play quite well, but some nights it’s just lag and really bad game after game.
The last few things I want to talk about before Spartan Ops is Oddball. It’s just not the same, especially with instant respawns. There are games like on Haven where the holder will walk around the map and his teammates will progressively cut you off kill you, then they will be killed, all the while, the carrier keeps getting away, even if your team adjusts to the tactic, they just go the other way. And if you do manage to head them off, they either throw the ball off the map or across the map. The ball should reduce player speed by maybe 20%, be a tad heavier and thus can’t be thrown as far, and give penalties to being thrown out of bounds.
Now for Spartan Ops!
I freaking love the concept of Spartan Ops. It would have been a perfect replacement to Fire Fight.
But it feels like whoever was in charge of making it, spent all their money on CGI episodes and to supplement their project were given a cheap forge mission editor. And like, 4 maps to have 25 missions on (so far).
For the hype they you made for this, it’s a serious disappointment.
After the first two chapters and playing 10 missions, half of which were going to an objective and just shooting and blowing stuff up, you go backwards on the same maps is just sad for me.
And then it comes to the story. The plot strings connecting the missions to the episode or more like threads.
Half the time Palmer comes on the radio it’s basically <insert generic female macho line here>, <insert lame insult there>, <insert condescending congratulations>.
With how freaking amazing the campaign was, they should have given Spartan Ops more body and flavour than what it is now.
Finally, if you were to ask me what I think needs to be changed, I would say this:
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Nerf Boltshot. I don’t feel we should spawn with a shotgun that’s more effective than the scattershot.
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Lower the aim assist on the DMR and either make it slower or less accurate at extreme ranges.
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Either make stickies 1 grenade per loadout or make frag and stickies 1 on loadout. I have literally seen like 5 or six grenades thrown at me from just two players.
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No plasma pistol in loadouts in BTB and make them spawn on the maps themselves.
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Drastically limit weapons in ordinance and put more emphasis on power ups and small arms power weapons like the needler and sticky detonator.
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Make Camo either a power up or only obtainable in spawns on the map or ordinance.
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Make the Ghost more stable, it flips way too easy right now and with players extreme jump height it’s too easy to avoid being splattered.
That’s all I can think of at this moment but feel free to bring up what I had missed.
Please make constructive comments even if they’re negative, mention what they have done right or some things that needs tweaked.