Little Backstory:
I remember being in 6th grade and saving up every penny I had to buy an Xbox and get a copy of Halo so that I could play with my friends. I also remember having LAN parties with friends in highschool where we’d cram as many people into a house as we could, even having people sitting on the toilet and bathtub, just to have a seat. It didn’t matter… Halo was just great.
My personal opinion of Halo 5: Guardians: I’m really disappointed.
I just bought an Xbox One to go back and play Halo CE and Halo 2 remastered. Those look amazing and I can’t tell you how excited my inner child was playing those levels again and feeling the nostalgia rush come back to me in troves. Then I played Guardians
Warning: Spoilers to follow. Stop Reading now if you haven’t played the game and don’t want it spoiled for you.
Multiplayer
Jumping straight into Slayer…wait… oh I guess Team Slayer is now just Slayer… that’s … different. Ok anyways let’s keep going.
First few games were alright. Getting used to everyone having sprint and flying up behind you and Destiny Titan Shoulder charging you constantly is quite annoying but I guess I’ll deal with it. The fact that your shields don’t recharge while sprinting is incredibly inconvenient, as most people won’t bother shooting you, and just shoulder charge you. Spawn points seem to be a mess, with getting killed 2-3 seconds after spawning and if it wasn’t that, I started to engage one person and got spammed by two others almost immediately. If they died, then it wouldn’t be long before they got back to where I was fighting because there’s infinite sprint…
343, you’ve introduced too many new mechanics… you had all this power of “Can we do it?” and never stopped to ask yourselves “Should we do it?” Bungie realized this when they added sprint to Reach. They knew that adding sprint would change gameplay dynamics so much, that they limited it and made it to the point that “yeah you could have it, but it’s not that useful”. Gameplay feels so fast that you really don’t have time to build up a strat against the enemy. Halo has never been about getting back to the battle as fast as you can. The journey from sprint back to the battle gave you time to think about what you were going to do differently or observe the enemy fighting your team mates and you could figure out where to jump in. Sprint needs to be seriously looked at mechanical wise. Gravity is a joke. Moving in the game feels like I’m on the Cairo station in zero gravity or moon gravity… ignoring the fact that I’m moving inside of a 1000lb (half ton) suit… Also, I’d like a way to be able to turn off the “aiming in air floats you in air” feature (Edit: Thank you for that, I didn’t see it in there). I hated that in Destiny and I still hate it in this. I’m not gonna even start on Req points. I can tell already that I’m never going to use them outside of unlocking armor pieces… that was a really bad mistake. Again… over complicating something that was fine to begin with.
Some positives that I will give you that have been really good. The ledge grab was really helpful… never realized how useful that would be until I started relying on it. The Zoom in for most of the weapons is nice to have. The Assault rifle feels pretty good, given that it was pretty useless in Halo 1 unless you were within punching distance. BR is more accurate now with it’s spread pattern… nice change over Halo 4 where it was kinda trash.
Campaign
Hmm where to begin. The first scene is Spartans jumping into combat. Pretty cool scene, but … that fight would have been a lot more fun to do if they had let us play it. First level: Running through combat. Game feels pretty fluid. Guns feel solid, and sound good… Prometheans everywhere… some of the basics like shoulder charge are discussed and shown how to accomplish. Cool… got it. Finally get to Halsey, and … Cutscene. Could Halsey die and you fail the mission? YES. THAT’S THE POINT. Please see this: ex-Bungie next to 343 Industries - YouTube because I really feel like you’ve lost sight of what made Halo important.
Alright fast forward and now we’re to the part where you drive a Warthog. Does this Warthog have any mass at all? Or is the ground made of ice… 343 … what did you do? Did your physics guys just throw everything away from Gravity that Bungie established? Does everything take place on the moon now? Holy crap. Where’s the spinning barrels of the gatling gun? What’s this solid mass barrel thing … it doesn’t look impressive at all. I know you can do better than this, the Halo 2 Remastered machine gun sounds and looks amazing! Also, AI on your team mates feels like I’m back to playing Halo 1 again. Keeping my team mates alive, is as much of a chore, as completing the mission is. Sometimes I’d just rather let them die and finish everything on my own because then at least they’re quiet and not going down every 15 - 30 seconds… or the whole lot of them tries to attack one hunter and all three get downed at the same time. Whatever…
Finally get to play a level as Chief… all of a sudden, classic halo feel is back. Steve Downes nails the voice and the experience of being inside a pitch black hallway makes me feel like a Flood revisit would be perfect right about now. I know that’s not going to happen in this game, but it would be perfect. I still have no idea as to what we’re doing here. The story has not really been told to us, we’re just showing up to this ship that’s adrift in space and supposedly got attacked… no reason as to why or how or what we’re going to do but… sure… fight bad guys and hold X to complete objective. Oh, we’re supposed to recover this ship but suddenly tons of convenient show up and now we’re going to pull a Halo 1 and detonate the core… again… You’d think the Convenient would know this trick by now. How about this 343… instead of having thousands of Convenient show up and having to repeat old stories, you find out that the core is damaged, and bringing it online has started a chain reaction that is going to make the ship go kaboom… Chief has a countdown timer that he has to get to the prowler bays and get on the ship before it explodes. One capital ship shows up with re-enforcements, and sends drop pods flying into the side of the ship, dropping off re-enforcements for you to deal with on the way out the door → boom boom boom, end scene. It’s little stuff like this that seems like the script writers aren’t even trying. They just fly anything off the top of their head, into the script, and never take a step back to go “hmm I wonder if that actually would happen”. Too many times that I’ve had a picture of Fry going “Seems Legit” in my head when it comes to crucial plot points.
I’m gonna stop there.
Closing thoughts
You really should have stopped trying to make halo more than it was at the end of Halo 3. “Get Call of Duty out of my Halo” I can see why this is definitely said… If you’re more worried about adding little gimmicks to Halo like painted Assault rifles and crazy armor camo, you’ve lost sight of what the game is truly about. You might wanna go back to the drawing board for Halo 6 and scrap every “new” feature outside of Halo 3. Use Halo 3 as your bar and don’t go beyond it feature wise. Oh, and bring back dual wielding… Sensable? No. Fun? Definitely. We don’t want CoD, we want Halo.
That’s my final thoughts.