So, according to the game, I’ve played for 30 hours, 31 minutes, and 26 seconds. I’ve beaten the campaign, solo, on heroic, and started my legendary solo run. I’ve reached level 27 in multiplayer, and in the Arena playlists I play in (Arena, Slayer, and Breakout) I am Platinum across the board. As I’ve had it for almost a week now and put over a day of game-time in I thought I was finally ready to have an accurate grasp on the way that I feel about the game. Here are my thoughts.
Campaign
I know a lot of people didn’t really the campaign, and I can see a lot of their complaints. I agree that the AI Spartans you have with you are terrible. I really have no idea why 343i thought they should be in the game. They add nothing to it. When I first heard that you were going to be able to play alongside a team I was ecstatic. My first thought was along the lines of, “what are 343i going to put into the game to make it challenging, because having a team is going to make it crazy easy.” Oh how wrong I was. Instead of taking this idea and running with it, they just raised the damage of every enemy. A huge cop out in my eyes. Certain enemies (Hunters) were made so stupidly OP that they are on the edge of not even feeling like the same enemy they always have been.
But moving on from that, let’s talk about the missions. While the levels aren’t bad, there wasn’t anything that really stood out to me as amazing. While admittingly beautiful, they are all very similar in structure and scope, and while the open level design is really cool, it all feels kind of small. There are no levels on the size and scope as Halo from CE or The Arc from Halo 3. The best missions IMO are the ones on Sanghelios, and they were nowhere near as epic as missions that came out 14 years ago in the original Halo, and that’s a problem. The story, even coming from someone that has read a majority of the books, doesn’t make much since. Maybe it is supposed to feel that way, I don’t know. All I do know though is that after finishing it Tuesday morning at 5:47 am I was left with a, “that was it?” I can see what they were going for, and in some ways it hit, others it didn’t.
Multiplayer
I know that there are a lot of posts out there talking about how the aiming is weird and the radar does absolutely nothing, so I’m not going to dive deep in to those. All I am going to say is that I agree with both those things.
I feel like I sit almost perfectly between the “hardcore competitive” and the “casual social” groups of people that play Halo, and I have to be honest, the multiplayer just isn’t doing it for me largely because it seems 343i has catered to both extremes, leaving people like me in the dust. Historically I have been a massive fan of BTB in Halo games. When 343i said that BTB wouldn’t be in the game at launch and instead be replaced by Warzone I was a little worried, but I thought I’d give it a try. Sadly all of my fears are true. I don’t like BTB because of the amount of players. I like it because it allows for unique maps and vehicle play in ways that traditional 4v4 can’t. It’s still “classic" Halo, where you battle over power weapons and map control, you just do it on, IMO, better maps and with a bigger sandbox. Warzone doesn’t offer this at all. Instead it has a terrible progression system that takes away almost all fighting over weapons and vehicles.
Contrasting this is the Arena, a hyper competitive, 4v4, “classic,” Halo experience. But yet again there are some glaring issues. As someone who has a wide variety of skill levels amongst his friends, the ranking system actively pushes me away from playing with my friends. A couple of them are better than I am, so I can’t play with them because I will drag them down, and the majority are worse and will do the exact same thing to me. It creates a situation where I am forced to play with people I don’t know, and I hate it. Also, it seems that the ranking system doesn’t work at all. There are ALWAYS two or three players amongst the eight in the game that are just terrible. Teams are almost never fair, and close games are a rarity.
I think that only way that multiplayer in this game can be saved from inevitable population drop is if they add a handful of social, non-ranked playlists into the game ASAP. I understand that people like having competitive matches, and if that’s what you want to do, go for it. But there is an entire group of people that are completely alienated by Halo 5. They just want to play some classic Halo with their friends, and kick back and have a good time. I think ideally 343i increase the radar back to 25 meters (something that Warzone already does), change the aim-mechanics back to what they used to be in older titles, and add social Team Slayer, social Team Arena, social Team Objective, and social BTB into the game as quickly as possible so people don’t leave. Because at this rate I doubt any of my friends will be playing this game when Star Wars Battlefront comes out.