Well, I’ll get to it.
Campaign: An amazing campaign. It was very cinematic and suspenseful. It also felt more grounded, and had much more relate-able characters or at least characters we could understand. I loved the Didact as an enemy, and I hope we haven’t seen the last of him. In the past, the main enemies were the fragile and physically weak prophets versus the bulky chief. In this game we saw a villain that could physically go toe-to-toe with the chief. (Although I thought they didn’t explore this enough, it left it open for future games).
Soundtrack: Normally the music doesn’t really affect me too much, but something about the song, “Arrival,” blaring through that last mission made it worth noting. I thought they did a really good job in this department.
Spartan Ops: At first, I was fairly bummed that they got rid of firefight, but the more I thought of it, the better it seemed. Firefight got old, simply put. Yeah, it was amazing at first, but after a while trying for the onyx commendations it turned into more of a chore for credits. Although the first half of the spartan ops season felt a little too distant and pointless when compared to the actual campaign, they managed to fix that mistake with the second half and create a truly great experience (I just wish they played arrival on the last mission again).
The Spartans: A lot of people hate on their appearance in this game and use Reach as a standard for what a good spartan looks like, but I feel completely different, especially since I use the Halo 2/3 spartans as my standard. To me, the reach spartans felt like hardly anything more than just over-glorified ODSTS. I didn’t feel like a super-soldier, just A soldier. These spartan IV’s, like the Spartan II’s of Halo 1-3, look like an enhanced super-soldier wearing special armor. Sure some of the spartan IV variants look wacky, but with such a large selection at our grasps, there’s a lot of really good ones too.
The BR: need I say more?
The carbine: need I say more?
The beam rifle: need I say more?
Forunner Weapons: Speaks for itself, needed to happen. I really like the light rifle and binary rifle, they’re a lot of fun to use and seem really balanced, yet unique. Others like the suppressor and boltshot could still use some work, but they were good ideas (just executed poorly).
Forunner Enemies: I thought they looked really awesome. I thought he execution on the forunner enemies was very well done. I always wondered what they would do, and I’m really glad with the choices they made in this department.
Infected Spartans are Flood: Through the mess that was Halo 4’s excuse for custom games, one thing came out on the good side. When a spartan is infected, they look like a flood character. Maybe not like what we’re used to seeing in the previous installments, but still flood. They took some liberties to make them look more monstrous, and really wicked.
There’s probably others that I just can’t think of at this moment, but this is my list of what 343 did right… which is quite a bit when I look over it. Do I think there’s work to be done? yes, but I’m sure they’re learning. 343 is still a new company, and Halo 4 was their first release. Doesn’t mean it’s ok with everything they’ve done wrong, but it makes it somewhat understandable. They’ve done good enough with Halo 4 that I would’ve gotten a basic copy of Halo 5 and stuck to the series if it was coming out on 360. The problem is really the Xbox 1 for me. halo 4 may have been good enough to get me to buy a basic copy of Halo 5 if it was coming out on the 360, but it definitely wasn’t enough to get me to buy the Xbox 1, which even isn’t entirely Halo 4’s fault.
