The Good and The Bad of Halo 5's Campaign

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

I just wanted to give my feedback regarding Halo 5’s campaign. My perspective is that of someone who has played through the campaigns of every Halo game made by Bungie, as well as the campaign of Halo 4. I also only played Halo 5’s campaign on Legendary difficulty. Both of these things may have an effect on my opinions.

The Good

  1. I really enjoyed the gameplay of a lot of the missions. It felt cool to dash into, or be thrown into, alien-infested areas with your squad while a cool soundtrack was blasting.
  2. Speaking of soundtrack, I think it’s the best 343 has ever done. I like how it pays homage to the old Halo themes while adding new flares. Good work.
  3. Stationing power weapons in hidden areas during boss fights (especially looking at Hunters and Warden Eternal fights) was a huge plus for me as I went through the campaign. I liked how I was rewarded for exploring my surroundings to find that weapon which would pull me through, especially on Legendary difficulty.
  4. The Sanghelios environment was super cool.
  5. Nearly every mechanic regarding Prometheans was better in this game than in Halo 4 in my opinion. I liked how the shotgun mechanic for the boltshot was scrapped, and how a lot of Forerunner weapons have tracking bullets, making them different from UNSC and Covenant weapons (except the Needler, but whatever).

The Bad

  1. I think the hunt for Master Chief was entirely unnecessary; the campaign really started for me with the Reunion mission. When he disobeyed orders in Halo 4, no sort of Spartan team was sent to hunt him down, and he saved a lot of people by disobeying orders. So why would the UNSC, out of nowhere, think again that Master Chief was a bad guy just because he wanted to go find Cortana himself instead of letting some other team do it for him? You think they would have learned from Del Rio’s screw-up in Halo 4.
  2. I think the beginning missions could have been restructured to make the plot less confusing. In my opinion, Blue Team should have been the first mission. Then, scrapping most of the Osiris mission, the second mission would start with the cutscene where Locke and his team are rescuing Halsey, following up with a cutscene explaining that Master Chief has gone missing and that they need to track him down, prompting the Glassed mission. This way, there would be a lot less implied information in order to better inform the player. I just think there needs to be more explanation for a game that is already so reliant on outside lore.
  3. Not enough Master Chief missions. Although it’s a popular complaint, it’s a justified one, because the main Halo series (referring to the old and new trilogies) has always been, and always should be, about Master Chief. Even in Halo 2, while the Arbiter was playable in some missions, Master Chief’s fight against the Covenant was clearly the main focus. In Halo 5, it seemed like the spotlight was on Locke while Master Chief was either simply wandering around to find Cortana, or sitting in a Cryptum. In my opinion, if someone else is going to be the main character, a number shouldn’t be in the name.
  4. As I briefly touched on earlier, the game is too heavily reliant on outside lore. As a Halo 4 player, and someone whose only connection to Halo is through the games and an occasional Wikipedia article, I was very confused about halfway through the game about what the heck happened to the Didact and how Master Chief got back with Blue Team. While it’s not nearly as much of an atrocity as Destiny’s Grimoire, it made me a little alienated from the campaign.
  5. This is the big one. Halo 5’s campaign was clearly made with a focus on cooperative play, but not only is splitscreen unavailable, but the AI squadmates are mediocre at best. It was extremely frustrating playing on Legendary by myself and having to rely on AIs that would stare at my body and take some light rifle shots to the head before reviving me. I really like the idea of a cooperative-based Halo campaign, but the AI teammates either have to be smarter if they are going to play a key role in the success of the player, or it needs to be much easier to get a get a group of four real players so that the AI performance will not matter (AKA splitscreen or matchmaking).

So, that’s my two cents regarding Halo 5’s campaign. Feel free to post what you think is good and bad about Halo 5’s campaign as well.

2

Don’t forget about all the stuff they said we’d see in this game, like Chief’s hunt for his humanity and how Cortana’s death will affect him and other things, none of which we ever saw more than maybe once

3

The campaign is such a cluster f***. First off, the story was absolute trash. It came completely out of left field, it undid a lot of the progress Halo 4 had made, and it was horribly executed. The characters didn’t fare any better. Blue team is completely devoid of life, Locke is more boring than Chief, and Vale and Tanaka have about as much depth and personality as a bag of bricks. Buck is the only character that actually managed to have some screen presence. The villains were either completely wasted (Jul’) or made no sense (Cortana). The level design as well was just boring. Every level broke down to “enter large valley section, walk to other end killing enemies along the way, repeat”. There were no memorable levels or encounters. Previous games had awesome moments like the jumping on the Scarab in Halo 2, the trench run at the end of CE, or the space mission in Reach. The closest we got to a “memorable” game-play moment was the Kraken fight, which was basically just a big, stationary, platform.

The only thing I really liked about the campaign were the Sanghelios missions. The art design was beautiful and it was really the only time in the campaign where it felt like you were a part of something and there were stakes involved.