So I want to start off by saying that I don’t hate this game, I’m just disappointed in how it turned out. With that said I’m gonna list all the good and bad things I can below.
I loved playing the campaign in this one, but I found myself hating the story. it was (in my opinion) a bad direction for the franchise to make one of the most loved and enjoyable characters the “bad guy”. while the story is not yet finished I can not say that in the end it worked out, but for now at this point I find myself more upset with this story line than I was with Halo 4. I was fine with the inclusion of a new Spartan team to share the story with, but I was not fine with the lack of playtime as Blue Team, 3 missions… 3, really? the new characters don’t feel like they have much depth. I mean sure we get some back story throughout the campaign about them, but I feel like everyone is hollow except for 2 or 3 characters. on top of that I felt like some of the missions in the game were pointless because they could have been replaced with a 2-3 minute cut scene. sure, in those missions they added some fun little bits of info with Intel and dialogue with random people in the area, but I still felt like I was just running around for no real reason. my last complaint about the campaign is that the cut scenes seem to cut off short sometimes… or a lot really. it just feels like there was more to the conversation and everyone got cut off. I’ll finish this paragraph on a good note, I do love the new monitor Exuberant Witness.
multiplayer is fun, but it can be super unbalanced due to the random req packs (oh dear god don’t get me started on why I hate that). because the reqs are random you got people getting nothing but bad reqs and people getting amazing overpowered reqs. I want to play Warzone, but every time I do I seem to get to req level 4 or 5 and suddenly everyone else has tanks, banshees, and op power weapons, as where I do not. “just keep playing and you’ll open a pack and get something good.” they tell me, well, allow me to retort. I can’t stand to keep playing because I’m not having fun. I spawn I die, I spawn I move 5ft I die, rinse and repeat. at some point you just get frustrated and want to throw your controller like a boomerang at the nearest persons head. warzone is running into the same issue Halo 4 had where everyone could spawn with a boltshot and ruin everybody’s fun in cqb, or spawn a plasma pistol & plasma grenades and just ruin vehicles. as where both these past issues are no longer much of an issue, it’s mainly due to much more obvious issues jumping ahead of them. when warzone first came out everything worked fine, but then after the first update the spawning seemed wonkier and placed you directly in the path of bullets and vehicles more often. example: my buddy Raptor spawned 4 time in a row on A.R.C. outside the garage and was ran over by a ghost 2 times in a row then blown up by a wraith, followed by spawning directly in front of the same wraith and getting splattered by it. the garage was being contested at the time and that’s why he was spawning outside, but it was spawning him inside the same 50ft area in front of the tunnel between there and garage. the idea of warzone is great, but at this point it’s just a game of Top Trumps where whoever has the better card wins. which leads me to my final issue with warzone… WHY ARE THERE SO MANY DIFFERENT WEAPONS AND VEHICLE VARIANTS!!! coughs and clears throat sorry about that, any who… I can’t understand why 343i has included so many variants of vehicles and weapons, both power and loadout. I understand the need for a variant of each loadout weapon to allow people the ability to pick which version of which weapon they prefer, but that clogs up the req system and the menu in which version of the weapon you want. this specific game needs a special matchmaking balancer that matches you up with people with equal level skill, and req cards. that way you don’t go in against a guy who’s only high level vehicle req is an ONI Guasshog where your current best card is a 1st tier Ghost. another thing, why is there power weapons of the power weapons? a saw with a larger clip… okay… larger clip and explosive rounds??? WTF?!! WHY?! I love me some explosions, but seriously… some of these weapons are ridiculously overpowered! last on my warzone list is the extreme amount of vehicle variants. once again I do understand having different variants that do different stuff, but why do we have 6 versions of a Mongoose and Scout Hog?
as far as arena goes I don’t have much bad to say about it. I do dislike so much being mapped to the melee button. I continue to have moments I tap the melee button to punch a guy as I’m dropping behind him to have it start the charge for a ground pound, which completely screws me over. I also don’t understand why being shot before I hit top speed kicks me out of sprint nor do I understand why 343i has set the shields to reset charge time if you sprint. they said it was to keep people from just running away and popping back out with full shield, but I don’t see it helping with the running away part. if anything I see people running farther away to get enough distance to find somewhere safe to recharge. if shields came back a little bit quicker that wouldn’t be much of an issue or if your recharge time didn’t reset when you sprint, just paused. I wish we had a grenade indicator because I keep hearing those pesky little metal bouncy balls of doom, but rarely see them. frags in this game just seem to bounce to much. I can never bounce a grenade at someone’s feet in close quarters, it almost always bounces past because frags skip like a golf ball on a frozen lake. a good note here, plasma grenades seem to be well balanced and better than they were in 4, but I still wish to see a bigger blast radius on them. which reminds me to mention another good note, I love the splinter grenades! to me they’re almost more useful than plasmas.
Continued below in next post.