The weapons all feel horribly unfun to use in comparison to any other halo title. Some of the weapons actually have no use at all in the campaign. Why would I use a sidekick when the brutes use the boring mangler which is just the ce magnum without the cool look and with bullet drop. Just use the mangler and you’re all set. Why use the plasma pistol when I can just have a pulse carbine. There’s just a lot of why this why that with weapons and it all just culminated into it feeling boring and bad.
Where are the friendly Spartans, odsts, any different type of marine. Where is literally any ally. They can’t just be gone from the ring since the infinity crashed here. If they died why didn’t we see it. If they didn’t why can’t we contact them. Why doesn’t any marine that we find know of anything pertaining to them. Speaking of those marines, why do they play like garbage. They can’t drive you around, they have no impact on the story, there’s no squad mechanics that you could use to feel like you even have any by your side. There’s nothing of substance to them. They are just walking robots that shoot at aliens.
The enemy variety is a hard pass. I would rather have to fight only rocket flood through the entire campaign. There is no shortage of problems. Elite ranks all turn into a camo energy sword elite past the rank of major. All of them, it only depends on when which is only when you get close or break their shield. Brutes are basically brain dead bricks walking around ready to be shot except for chieftains. Those chieftains are playing bloodborne. They move way too fast and swing way to quickly. What happened to the fun tango of the halo 3 chieftain. All fodder enemies are pretty much negligible as you can just walk past them without any regard for damage. Since this is the banished from halo wars 2 where is all the special units from that. Where is the colossus, scary scarabs, suicide pack grunts, skitterers, honor guards, and many MANY more. There is no shortage of boring, unbalanced, and unfun enemies in this game.
Vehicles are boring. Like where are the fun ones. Where is the falcon, hornet, gauss hog, revenant, any halo wars 2 vehicle, where is anything. Not only is there nothing but what is there has horrible physics and any flying vehicle you can destroy by tapping your wing on the edge of something at 1 mph. I actually tried that with the wasp and it destroyed it which is pathetic.
The open world lacks any variety in encounters, visuals, exploration, collectibles, secrets, and so on so forth. There’s nothing to do and it was a giant waste of time. “Bosses” were boring. Collectible were only audio logs which I would’ve rather seen. Show don’t tell. Skulls were there but would disable achievements for some reason. Every enemy encounter was the same few enemies lazily designed to use human and forunner weapons because they’re broke or something. I don’t understand where all their armaments went from halo wars 2. Where’s the brute shots, spiker, mauler, plasma rifle, plasma carbine, and many other weapons from previous games. It’s not like it wouldn’t have been there. Atriox was there. THE LEADER OF THE BANISHED was there. If he is there so is all that armaments they used to fight and win. And if they won wouldn’t they want to use the weapons they used to…you know…win. Shameful.
Finally, the story was awful. It was a fanfiction but as a video game. The endless was the biggest cop out ever. I don’t understand why they were made to be such a threat if they were easily contained on the ring, can’t take all other sentient life into its own, and can be beaten to death by 3 punches as the finally of the game. They have no lore, no interesting fight mechanics, not even interesting looks. As for the other parts of the story. Cortana had hers off screen and slightly shown to us through holograms. We had nothing to do with it…at all. What kind of boring lazy storytelling is that. The banished suffer the same fate. Atriox has his story off screen and does whatever he does with nothing pertaining to us. Esheram and the other banished play far cry with us as the only “hands on” story. They only talk with us through a walkie talkie as we complete menial events that feel like time padding until the end. When at the end we just beat him up and that’s it. That is the end of that old bag who did literally nothing but talk and tell someone to try and fight you.
There is no saving grace for this dogwater campaign. There are no good side characters. Everything from the previous games is forgotten or just washed off as if it were nothing. There’s nothing fun to do. There is just plain old nothing there. It is a bare bones boring experience that only could be fun if you don’t play it at all. Rant over, TLDR, the game sucks in every facet.
