The following is all my opinion of Halo4 from the SR1-SR130. At the top is over-view, then flaws and finally what I loved.(so I just got done with this and noticed it is actually a little long. The mid section on is where I talk about multiplayer with everything above just being a little insight into my Halo experience.)
Hello all! I just hit the rank of 130 and thought I would share my Halo4 experience over the last 130 levels. First let me start by saying I am an avid Halo fan who has played since CE on the computer(going to LAN centers to pwn). Halo was the first game I was actually good. I could stomp my brothers/stepdad plus any random kid that thought they could challenge. It felt good to finally win something. My stepdad saw my love for the game and bought a family Xbox and a copy of Halo. After months off stomping them, the family Xbox became my Xbox and my addiction was in full force. Now I could go on about my history with Halo but that is not the point of this post. Just wanted to give you a little back story on me.
Now to Halo 4!
I live in Vail, Colorado. For those of you that don’t know anything about Vail it has one of the best Ski resorts in the world plus 4 other major resorts within 40mins. I live on my snowboard and am out on the mountain everyday I don’t work. It was to be expected that my game time would diminish. That and a roommate broke my Ethernet port in the back of my first gen 360. I could no longer play online and my roommates didn’t play games. My Xbox pretty much became a paper weight for 2 years. That’s when I saw my first H4 video showcasing the BR. I was in a complete nerdgasm. My favorite gun would make its triumphant return! I rushed to the store that day and bought a brand new 250g 360 solely for the purpose of using the H4 BR…sad I know but seeing that gun was like finding the holy grail to me.
Halo 4’s launch came around and naturally I went to the midnight launch. The GameStop here held a 1 v 1 tourney with 30 people. I was a little nervous but something was on fire in me that night. I won everyone of my matches with 3 going into sudden death(the final included). You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face if you tried. My prize was a copy of HCE, LEH2, H3and the H4 countdown clock(which is chilling proudly in my room…and still flashing “Halo 4” you think the batteries would have died)
Campaign
I took the game home(had a quick safety meeting) and started co-op with my buddy on Normal(yeah we did it the easy way first). It only took about 4 hours worth of gameplay to finish the story mode which was a little bit of a let down. However I did completely love every last second of gameplay during the campaign. The cinematics were breathtaking and story was really well done. the time we finished it was early in the morning and neither of us cared to sleep a wink. Yes, we still had to conquer Legendary but Leonard and I couldn’t wait to start on the multiplayer.
Multiplayer
Any doubts I had about multiplayer were put to rest after I finished the campaign. I mean how could 343i do so amazing in one aspect of the game and screw up the other? Not possible right?..Right?
The first blow was in the lack of two of my favorite gametypes; assault and doubles(so glad it is in now! I love it!). Some of my fondest halo memories are single bomb assault on Zanzibar and Blood gulch. I gave a frown but decided to not let lack of gametypes influence my decision before I actually play the game. Let me say that the first week of H4 online was the best it was. Everyone was excited to try something new. You could pick loadouts which offered a sense of variety to the game. Then everyone discovered just how powerful the Dmr actually was. I cursed the game non-stop as I was out gunned by Dmr users over and over again. I finally decided to make the switch and boy was I surprised. I started winning more and getting a lot more kills. The Dmr has defiantly become my most used weapon which I kind of hate but I don’t like to lose. This seemed to be the story for most of the multiplayer. “hey look at all the choices you can use…but if you use them you will lose”. I just hate the aspect of being forced to use a weapon so I can stand a chance. If you are going to offer multiple weapons then it would be nice if they were evenly matched. You do get the random players with a sense of “pride” that swear to guns like the carbine. Yet every game I play against people using it they’ll have killed me 3 times to my 8 kills on them with the Dmr. It was really heartbreaking to put the BR away but losing seemed worst. (Now that I am done with the Dmr I tend to use the BR more unless up against a Dmr users.)
Then we move into AAs…Reach’s(and Bungie’s) last middle finger to the Halo franchise. I honestly think Bungie was like,“So we are losing rights to our game? What can we do to piss people off”. Regardless of why they were added they are here now and we as players have to deal. Once again 343i granted us with pointless choices as the online community would show which ones are actually useful. ProVis is an obviously overpowered ability that really should not be in the game. In most of the 4v4 maps you can use it as soon as you spawn and figure out the location/movements or the enemy’s. This to me takes away from both the luck and skill aspects of the game. I hate when you are getting chased by three people and you make it around the corner whip out your shotty and wait for you pursuers. Only to have someone use ProVis to see exactly where you are and toss a couple nades at you. Yes there are lots of AA’s to chose from but I would say 90% of players use either PV or AC. I do have respect for players who use other abilities but I once again I am rarely killed by them. I can’t tell you how many players have tried to be slick with the thruster pack only to end up dead. I could count on both hands how many times someone has actually used the thruster pack against me to get a kill. Sure you see videos online of players showcasing the other AA’s but to me in most cases it looks like they are playing against scrubs who have no idea how to counter them. Any gun can look balanced against bad enough people.
Next I would like to talk about Instant Respawn. This addition to the game is probably my least favorite feature. If there was anything that actually breaks core gameplay of online Halo it’s this. In a shield based shooter where the player needs a couple seconds to regroup before they can recover. It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to give the person just killed enough time to make it back to their killer before he heals. I can’t tell you how many times I got into a shoot out on haven or adrift or abandon where I won the initial matchup only to have the person I just killed spawn with a clear shot of me with no shields. No one wants to sit at the death screen waiting for a T-bagger to come along. However, not having any sort of repercussion for death promotes players to just keep running in non-stop not really caring about death. You get so many games where the person on top is 18-22. Sweet you got 18 kills! But did it require you to run in blindly over and over again to do so? Having a Respawn time makes players think twice before making stupid decisions(I.e. 1 v 4 shoot outs).