'Halo 4' Review - Forbes

Usually when there’s a ’4′ in a game’s title, there’s not much to be said about how it’s going to be a reinvention of the series. Across five different shooter titles, Halo has given us new guns, maps and gameplay modes over the years, all developed by its creator, Bungie. With Halo 4 however, it’s important to note that this is supposed to be a shift for the game in many ways.

Bungie is out, moving on to other projects after almost a decade spent in the Halo universe. Even with the game’s massive success, it’s hard to blame them for wanting some space from the series. But Halo, as a franchise, is too important to Microsoft and the continued viability of the Xbox to let it go by the wayside. 343 Studios was brought in, and assigned the herculean task of taking over Halo while the expectations of millions of fans hung in the balance.

They didn’t have to reinvent the game so much as they had to rebuild it. 343 used an entirely new engine for Halo 4, one that pumps up the graphical prowess of the game, but still had to retain the look, and more importantly the feel of a true Halo game.

Part I â€" Campaign

There are many aspects to explore about Halo 4 and we’ll start where many gamers begin, the campaign. It’s more or less target practice for multiplayer mode, and gets players familiar with new weapons and upgrades in the game before seeing them out on the Team Slayer battlefields. Oh, and there’s a story too.

When we last left super soldier Master Chief and his holographic sidekick/quasi-love interest Cortana, they were floating in a wrecked ship after defeating the Covenant menace for the final time. The world ending power of the Halos had been nullified, and there was nothing left to do but cryosleep until someone found them.

The neverending date night on board the Forward Unto Dawn

Some may disagree on this point, but Halo has never really shined when it’s come to the plot of its campaigns. The missions may be enjoyable, but the story they’re wrapped in lacks any real dramatic punch, and is often a loose collection of sci-fi jargon strung around some big universe ending threat that requires you to activate switches A, B and C in eight or nine different areas. As games start to get better, more intelligent stories, the bad ones start to stick out like sore thumbs.

Halo’s middling story tradition is continued here, even if the plot has moved on from its old premises. Master Chief must now fight the “Prometheans” who may have considered a name change after the release of the not-as-good-as-it-should-have-been Ridley Scott film that even shares some plot points with what we see here. The exact nature of the threat is unclear, and for some reason you’re still fighting the Covenant alongside this new race for reasons that are brushed over in the early seconds of the game.  The voice acting and the script are by far the worst either has ever been in the series, and Cortana, alternating between malicious corrupted AI and a one-liner delivering  sarcasm machine, grows tiresome. And the truth is, Master Chief is just not a strong lead, and never has been. A permanent lack of face (and subsequent facial expressions) can be forgiven, but he’s so robotic in everything he does and says, I’m half expecting a plot twist at the end of this new trilogy that he’s actually just been a combat adept Artificial Intelligence this whole time.

What is a vast improvement over past games and immediately noticeable from the first moments is 343′s new engine. The Chief and his arsenal of weapons look stunning with a more detailed render, although Cortana has been sexualized to the point of absurdity, considering she’s a foot tall hologram, and looks like she should be working in a virtual brothel somewhere with her newfound, unnecessary D-cup.  But overall, the Halo universe has never looked better, and this will probably be as good as it gets on the current console generation. Unless Halo is now following the yearly Call of Duty release schedule (which would be logistically impossible) the next Halo game we’re bound to see from 343 will likely be for Microsoft’s next system.

The campaign reveals what changes 343 has made in the universe, and what sorts of new things they’ve brought to the table. 343 is in the unenviable position of needing to keep many, many things the same not to upset fans, while at the same time adding enough to the game for it to seem fresh.

“Fresh” isn’t the correct word here, however. 100% of the Covenant foes found in the campaign are the same five or six breeds we’ve fought in the other games a thousand times, and the new race of Prometheans only has three new enemy types total. There are flying support robots that should be taken out first to make battles go easier. There are dog-like creatures that gallop around on all fours while still managing to somehow shoot pistols at you. And finally there are “Promethean Knights” which are a cross between a standard Covenant Elite and those ice-skating aliens from the first Borderlands game. In short, there’s nothing too revolutionary to see here. Rather, the Promethean’s proudest achievement is that their existence lets us not have to deal with an alternate third race, the Flood, one of gaming’s all-time most annoying foes.

Guns are a different story, and there are a lot more new ones to be found here than in previous games, as well as all the old favorites. And I do mean ALL the old favorites. If it was a moderately used gun in a past game, chances are it’s returned here. That even means seemingly redundant weapons like the DMR and the Battle Rifle can be used side by side. Only missing are things like the submachine gun or spiker, guns that no longer serve a purpose now that dual-wielding is kaput. Also curiously absent in the campaign were the rocket launcher and Spartan laser, two old favorites, but they do end up making it into multiplayer.

A new mech vehicles makes an appearance as well

So what’s new? Well, the UNSC has a couple of upgraded toys like the SAW machine gun, rail gun and the sticky grenade launcher. The Covenant’s arsenal is mostly the same except their assault rifle has been made over to be more like its human counterpart. And now of course there’s a whole new class of Promethean weapons whose equip, firing and reload animations are incredibly damn cool from an art direction perspective. However, it’s very obvious that nearly all their weapons are just the assault rifle, battle rifle, pistol, shotgun and sniper rifle with new skins and particle effects, meaning they really shouldn’t change gameplay significantly even if it seems like this is the biggest array of guns in a Halo game to date.

The campaign is enjoyable enough, but it lacks anything to make it distinctive from past games. Even finishing it just a day ago, it’s hard to think of moments or sequences that truly stood out from a gameplay perspective. Every game in the series seems like it has the various stages where 1) you drive a tank around, 2) you drive a ghost around, 3) you counter-snipe a bunch of snipers,  4) you fight two hunters at once and its hard, and the list goes on and on. Level and mission design isn’t great either, as nearly every sequence has you turning on two to three switches scattered in various locations to go to the next area, which is always a dull objective. And by the end of the game, the environments, as good looking as they may be, start to repeat themselves. Additionally, there’s no real difficulty curve here.  The final few missions didn’t seem any more difficult than the first few, and even more unfortunate is that Halo decided to go with the “Call of Duty” school of boss fights at the very end, and I’ll leave it to you to see what that means.

I don’t envy 343′s position here. It’s maddening to try and keep enough things the same so that people don’t say you’ve butchered a beloved franchise, while at the same time trying to give it new life. Halo 4′s campaign is adequate, but with any fourth, fifth or sixth game in the series, we’ve seen it all before.

Now the campaign is a mere six to eight hours while multiplayer is many dozens or hundreds more after that and really should be the part of the game considered most heavily during a review like this. However, in attempting to boot up multiplayer for the first time, I was dismayed to learn it had to be installed from a second disc. While some may have those newfangled 160GB Xboxes, my old 16GB forced me to delete a whole bunch of DLC from my hard drive before it would even let me load multiplayer. Be forewarned if you own a similar model.

Next: PART II â€" MULTIPLAYER