Hello, Halo fans! This is my first actual post on here, possibly because for the first time I feel like I have something to say. I’ve been playing Halo since I got Reach as my first xbox game and fell in love with the series. I’ve poured thousands of hours between all of the games, and even skipped school to play Halo 5. After beating the campaign and playing a bit of multiplayer, I’ve finally come up with my opinion and developed some thoughts that I want to put out there for someone to read. Who knows, maybe this will actually make a difference in the long run, maybe it won’t, but I have to try.
Halo 5 is a wonderful game. But it’s far from perfect, far from what I expected, what we hoped it would be. The multiplayer is fabulous, and the only real complaint I have is the restrictive path to get armor through RNG REQ packs, so this will mostly focus on the campaign. As many have pointed out, the huge marketing campaign had absolutely no presence in the game, which is disappointing. Despite loving the Chief, I loved the idea of him actually going rogue and fighting AGAINST the people he protected, the people who branded him as a traitor. But… That didn’t happen. All we got was one (pretty cool) cutscene of Locke vs Chief. Not to mention that there wasn’t even the slightest reference to the whole Hunt the Truth campaign. Please 343, if you’re going to advertise this as “The greatest hunt in Xbox history,” deliver on that.
Moreover, the campaign felt short and unbalanced. I spent nine hours on my first heroic gameplay, and that was mostly due to cutscenes and the fact that I spent so much time trying(and failing) to find all of the intel and skulls on my own. Plus, there was only three missions as Blue Team and three missions where you literally just stand around. I understand the purpose behind these missions, to explore and find new secrets and admire the graphical power of the Xbox One, but there’s no reason that that couldn’t have been done through pauses in the fighting during the actual missions, while those missions could’ve been used to give Blue Team more screen time. The AI seems to have improved, and personally, I thought that the new abilities, ADS, and revive system worked well, but I think it made the difficulty a bit easier and took some of the risk out of it, but that shouldn’t be too hard to fix in the next game by possibly increasing the AI difficulty a little. My biggest gripe about the campaign is the repetition. I know Angry Joe pointed this out, but how many times to we have to fight Warden Eternal, especially if he just uses the same attacks over and over again? It became annoying after a while. Not to mention that the missions felt kind of the same too. There was no one single mission that stands out in my mind other than maybe the one where you first see a guardian. It felt like “kill these guys, keep moving, kill these guys, scan a door, kill more guys, fight a Warden Eternal, ending cutscene.”. One of the biggest things that I loved about Reach was the diversity: a space mission, a sniping mission, a couple of big vehicle battles, a few CQB parts, etc. Other classics like Silent Cartographer, Outskirts, The Covenant, and even the Library all stand out because they each felt different and unique from the surrounding missions, and I feel that Halo 5 was really lacking that. Perhaps that could be something to work on for Halo 6: make as many memorable missions as possible without them feeling the same.
And then there is the story. I’m not gonna lie, I liked the twist. I think it was an interesting and necessary addition to the Universe, where so much has been black and white, distinctly good and evil. But now, Cortana is adding that shade of gray region, and I think if it’s explored more in the next game as her plans unfold, if the execution is perfect, it can redeem itself from the execution in this game. The way the game ends is heartbreakingly anticlimactic: as soon as the game really picks up for the first time since the first act, it’s over. It ended way too early and the buildup to this reveal really wasn’t there. Plus there’s the fact that I finished the game yet still don’t really know exactly what a guardian is or what it can do. You’d think that if it’s important enough to be mentioned in the title of the game, it would be explored a bit more. In the mission after the Battle of Sunion where we were on the Guardian, or even when we met Exuberant Witness, the timing for a bit of exploration was perfect for this, but it just didn’t exist other than “Such a show of force is unsettling; just one guardian is enough to police an entire solar system.”
Additionally, we completely killed off the main baddie of every game before this. Jul M’dama was killed ten minutes into the game, and unless you read Halo: Escalation and played Spartan Ops, his motivations and intentions and plans were completely unknown. I feel like his death was a waste of potential. Plus, didn’t Halsey and Palmer hate each other? Why are they suddenly getting along? Where did the promethean warriors come from and where were they in Halo 4? Is the Didact really dead? Are there other living forerunners? What’s happening to the Flood? How about the Prophets and Drones and Brutes, what are they doing? All of this is just left open in Halo 5, and if you didn’t read the books(I’m a busy guy) you don’t get any answers. In this way, I feel that the story relies way too much on the other pieces of lore. It’s fine to lean on some other sources for information, but Halo’s campaign should be able to stand on its own without having to go through all of the other lore(kinda like Destiny and the grimoire cards, actually) for answers to the unasked but present questions.
Finally, the character development in this game is abysmal. Of the eight central characters, I only feel like I’ve bonded with two: Chief and Vale. We obviously all know Chief from the other games, and Vale always seemed to save my butt when under fire, which naturally became the basis of a bunch of jokes with my buddies and myself. But all the characters had so much potential, yet they seemed so static. Locke was cool in Nightfall, but in this he comes off as a transparent character that blindly follows orders with no motives of his own. At least Buck questioned it, but even he felt static. Blue Team was the same way, but I can kinda understand their willingness to help Chief. But then you have all of these new characters like Warden and Exuberant and there is so much potential in them, but none of it is reached! The only one that came close to showing multiple sides was Warden, but even he wasn’t clear enough with his motives and everything to truly develop.
So yeah. That’s what I think about Halo 5. Overall, it’s decent. It isn’t the best, but it’s good. I’ll be playing for a long time, until Halo 6. 343, thank you for this great game. But for Halo 6, please please PLEASE add some variety in the gameplay, change the AI difficulty, work on the unpaced and confusing story and rely less on the expanded universe. Try to take this amazing cast and expand on them, and truly give them life. Please do a bit more to flesh out the campaign in general, and PLEASE BRING BACK SPLITSCREEN! If you do this, and keep the multiplayer how it is, Halo 6 will be perfect.
What do you guys think? Any thoughts or comments? 