Please hear me out on this.
Starting with the campaign, I will say I absolutely loved the story telling with it, game of the year material I must say, but the enemies are a tad excessive. With having to use upwards of 2-3 clips of DMR to kill a Knight is obscene, and the AI wasn’t what Frankie said they were going to be.
They were supposed to “learn” our play style and counter us, know when we’re weak and engage us before we could really regain our shields, be coordinated with Crawlers and flush us out and engage, but all the Knights do is look at us, and take pot shots at us while the crawlers get cleaned up and the air support get taken out. So I was rather disappointed with that. They just made them extremely hard to kill and forgone the cunning AI we were promised.
The music was superb I must say! But there were a few instances when the music didn’t seem to fit the situation and that slightly bothered me.
Although I’m willing to bet 343i was pushing the limits of graphics and all the unseen behind the scenes, the campaign was too short for my tastes, we beat the game on legendary in about 5hr:43min. And that’s too short for someone who loves campaign, it’s kind of lacking.
Now for Spartan Ops, I will say it’s much better than Fire Fight, I like the CGI episode, but each of the 5 missions don’t really feel connected and are rather basic, with no real feeling of immersion, I don’t feel like my avatar is my Spartan in matchmaking, and I don’t get any sense of progression of the mission.
It just feels like it plays out as: Go blow that up, go get that, go over there and survive a hoard, time to go now, just gotta blow a few more things up.
I feel it needs more of a story than just what the first episode portrayed.
As for multiplayer…I’m not a fan of instant respawns. I have redbarred, died and gone and cleaned up the kill before their shields even start recharging. I would say it needs a minimum 3 second respawn with our option to take longer to respawn as we go through our loadouts.
The audio sometimes messes up and I don’t hear anything for a while, this is probably a bug that’s being fixed but it’s notable.
Armour abilites seem slightly too useful sometimes and not effective enough. Thruster pack is not really as good as I think it should be, the other abilities are pretty much far more effective. And I don’t really like camo on loadout, it used to be a powerup for a reason. And Hardlight shield seems to take more punishment than it should. Most of a clip of SAW and it didn’t even get effected.
The weapons are not really balanced that well. With everyone having atleast 2 powerups/weapons a game in addition to weapon drops, it can be rather hectic. The SAW literally rips people and vehicles apart, the scattershot is relatively useless, needing more than half the time 2 shots to kill, the UNSC sniper has too much bloom IMO and the difference between DMR and BR is annoying.
The DRM beats the BR in every instance, if two equal skilled players met with one DMR and one BR, DMR wins at all ranges. There needs to be some tweaking for that I believe.
And the kill times just don’t feel right, I can round a corner and get DMR’d to death in what feels like less than 1.5 seconds, it just doesn’t feel right to me. I am an average good player, my K/D has pretty much stayed the same from H3 and Reach sitting at around 1.30, and I’ve never used a weapon that I could easily and consistently kill people with the final shot being the head. The DMR is a 5 shot kill with a headshot and it’s very easy to achieve that for me.
Oh, and another thing that bugs me is the possibility of not being able to play Spartan Ops again in the future. With each mission being streamed, if they ever pull the plug, we don’t get to play it again.
With all that said, Halo 4 is a great game, I just feel it could do with SOME tweaks.
So please comment and give me your feedback and your own opinions of the game.