There are spoilers in this post, don’t read it if you haven’t beat the campaign.
I didn’t have much hope for a good storyline going into Halo 4. The trilogy ended on a fine note, and should have. But I bought the game, played through on heroic, and have some things to say.
First off, there were so many plotholes, some of which were probably because of the horrible equalization of sound, as in I didn’t hear it, which I’ll talk about later.
Now, why the hell were the covenant trying to kill Chief at the beginning? I think it would be pretty hard to not recognize the person who saved your -Yoink- 4 years ago.
But fortunately, killing elites is fun. You have to outsmart them, unlike a certain enemy we’ll be talking about later. So we go through the first level, It’s fun I guess, and then eventually we get to this random dude who I can’t tell if he’s flood or foreunner. He kinda looks like a flood, but it sounds like he says he’s a forerunner. And then they play a video where you really can’t tell who are forerunner and who are humans so you have no idea who’s winning in the war. So all I got from that was “Someone trapped me”. Dunno if he’s flood or forerunner, but whatever. So he can pick up chief. Why the hell wouldn’t he just chuck him off a cliff or smash him into the ground repeatedly? Clearly the chief is a threat to this dude, so I don’t understand why he didn’t kill chief.
So then we get these new enemies. One of them being possibly the most -Yoinking!- annoying enemies I’ve ever faced. Dogs. These things run around, climb up walls, and come in huge packs. They’re extremely tedious. It’s not like it’s a challenge to headshot them, they’re just a pain in the -Yoink- to deal with. They’re not fun.
The other new enemies are “Knights”. Cortana doesn’t tell us any useful tactics to use against them like she did for elites in previous games. We know literally nothing about them. I still don’t even know if they use shields. But all in all, they’re boring. Their ai is horrible, they literally stand where they are, shoot you when you come out from hiding, then dodge to the left or the right. Occasionally they’ll teleport to you and oneshot you and you can’t do anything about it.
There’s a huge lack of human guns in the game. It’s so hard to come across human weaponry that you usually carry around a light rifle and a forerunner pistol thingy. This pisses me off because the human weaponry are AWESOME! Running around with the shotgun feels badass, especially with the great sound effects. But no, the only shotgun I get is some -Yoink- orange one. Also, if you don’t have a weapon that can headshot, you’re -Yoinked!-. The only efficient way to kill dogs are to headshot them.
The sound: The sound effects are AWESOME! The guns really have a kick now. Unfortunately, the equalization is set so that you can’t -Yoinking!- hear voices because your guns are too loud. Also that whenever it enters a cutscene I have to turn my volume up so I can hear them. The sound of the game is around 100% but voices are around 50%. This is why a lot of the time I had no idea what was happening; I just couldn’t hear them. And subtitles really detract from the game, because you don’t even view the cutscene, your brain feels that the words are most important and focus on that.
The most important part: The story. It was horrible. In a nutshell, cortana goes crazy, chief becomes invulnerable because of a magic fairy, then chief nukes himself but somehow lives. Oh and cortana died, but no one cares about her now that she has buckteeth. It just didn’t amount to what the original trilogy cooked up. This story had weird things like the magic fairy, cortana splitting up this somehow bringing down a shield, and a gun that can’t aim itself 20 degrees to the left to fire, requiring you to pinpoint the location to shoot. I didn’t connect with any of the characters, especially since cortana’s rampancy caused her to be a -Yoink-. Chief suddenly became obsessed with cortana even though in other games he prioritized humanity first, which was quite annoying. Also, I thought halsey died a long time ago? How would halsey fix cortana?
So all in all, it was a vague story that was too far fetched for me to fully understand. It did not satisfy. So what are your thoughts on this campaign? Agree with me? Think I’m an idiot? I’d like to know.