So I recently finished Shadows of Reach and decided now would probably be as good a time as any to express my thoughts as to 343’s latest addition to the Halo franchise.
So what do I think having read all 3 books?
Not terrible, not bad, not good and not great. Overall I’d describe these books as OK, 5 out of 10 stars.
First off I’d like to say these books are well written. Troy Denning is a very competent writer and overall his books for the most part don’t fall back to lazy writing or breaking established lore just so the author can make a particular point, which I appreciate. I do find his descriptions of space battles a tad bit hard to follow compared to Eric Nylund’s brilliant writing style, and for the life of me I still don’t understand how a handful of UNSC Prowlers got the best of 100+ Covenant ships over one of their own planetary defence grids. But other then that, the writing is fine.
So what’s my problem?
All 3 novels were published and released in the last 2 years, which apart from being very fast for the publishing world also seemed to coincide with the first trailers and news of Halo Infinite and its renewed focus on the Master Chief, and that it a nutshell is my problem with these books. They feel at best like a knee-jerk reaction to a very real problem, as I think after much internal deliberation after Halo 5’s lukewarm reception 343 came to the correct conclusion that they squandered their most valuable asset over Spartan Ops and Halo 5’s story, and now seem to wish to make quick amends by pumping out a load of narrative for Chief, but before they’d decided concretely on what they ultimately wanted to do with his character. The result is that it feels Chief and Blue Team are just in these novels for the sake of it, and because the author likely has not received any guidance on how Chief is set to develop as a character over the next 10 years and what specific events will shape his development, the novels contain no real gut wrenching revelations or defining character moments for Chief or Blue Team, or the events they participated in during and after the war. Likewise, because we know all members of Blue Team survive the events of the war the first 2 novels are completely devoid of any real sense of high stakes or danger. Blue Team seemingly breeze through any potentially dangerous situations not because they are exceptional and experienced battle hardened soldiers at this time (which there not) or have technology equal or superior to Covenant technology (which they never did), but simply because the plot requires them to survive. There is no real learning from personal loss or fatal mistakes and as a result the Blue Team were introduced to in Silent Storm feels little removed from the Blue Team we last see in Shadows of Reach, despite over 30 years having passed in between.
Just to be clear, I love Master Chief as a character and I love Blue Team. I loathed Spartan Ops, I loathe the character Thorn and just about every Spartan IV that featured in SO’s, and I hated Halo 5’s story and the entirety of Fireteam Osiris with the exception of Buck. The biggest mistake 343 ever made was trying to phase the Master Chief out of his own saga in favour of inferior Spartan clone knock-off’s, and I truly believe this may have cost 343 and Microsoft billions of dollars in the long run when you look at the sales figures of the like of Halo 3 compared to 4 & 5. Saying this, (and it genuinely grieves me to say it), these neither these novels nor Blue Team gain anything from the inclusion of the other in this series, and that is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of these novels. There are some genuinely good ideas these novels revolve around, but the presence and focus of Blue Team detract from them.
The concept of an ill fated alliance between the Covenant and the Insurrectionists of Biko at the very start of the war which we know could only end in the extermination of the Insurrectionists, but they naturally do not is a really fascinating premise for a story. I would have loved to have seen the Covenant take ‘peaceful’ control of Biko as a forward operating base and initially be greeted as liberators by the insurrectionists, only to see it slowly dawn on the human POV characters that the cultural and social rift between the two factions is insurmountable. That moment the Insurrectionists realise the the Covenant are truly the genocidical monsters they’d been warned about as discounted as UNSC propaganda could have been priceless. Instead we get tantalising glimpses of what this doomed alliance would have looked like but nothing more, because of the focus on Blue Team.
Likewise, the idea of a unit of war weary renegade Covenant warriors stumbling upon a colony of abandoned human children on a near inhospitable world could have been equally interesting and given the stand punch-clock Covenant antagonists that long absent opportunity to see their everyday actions humanised. Instead Oblivion felt very much like an uneventful missed opportunity.
Shadows of Reach was very much a mixed bag for me. As with all the others it’s a competently enough written book and it was nice to see an actual and slightly unconventional pitched ground battle in Halo for what felt like the first time. At the same time and as I’ve said previously, the so called ‘Created Conflict’ and the sudden rise Created faction in general this book is set against the backdrop off has got to be the most ill-conceived, ill defined and boring background conflict in history, and I think 343 are now painfully aware of this. I’m 99% convinced after reading this book that Created and Cortana will never make another visual appearance on screen, and will simply be erased from the universe and people’s selective memories when Hasley inevitably taps that ‘delete malware’ key she’s now got the software for. It is probably the most infuriatingly aspect of this book that everyone pays lip service to the fiction that the ‘Created’ currently controls the galaxy, but at the same time treats the UNSC as a major regional power to be reckoned with that still has an intact chain of command and can project military force, and is not just in reality a handful of scattered ships, naval officers and scientists struggling to survive as their fuel and supplies steadily dwindle as the Created choke them to death by attrition. It’s truly infuriating that this novel could have been set against the backdrop of a resurgent Forerunner or Precursor Empire, or a Bio-Mechanical invasion of the galaxy by the Flood instead of this cheap imported Skynet knock-off.
The Banished were likewise a disappointment, and Atriox is certainly no Horus Lupercal as far as first impressions for Halo Infinite go.
That would be my opinion at least. What would everyone else’s be?