I'll preface this by saying that I am not the biggest fan of Halo 4, if you loved halo 4, that's great! but you might not like the rest of this post
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(also this is the second time I've typed this post because the forum exploded this morning
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Halo 4, where do we start? right, well, end of the previous halo game we got to play, Halo:Reach, Masterchief wasn't even in it, so we spin back to Halo 3.
Right at the end, after Masterchief saved everything, he popped himself into a stasis pod, right after dropping the badass line "wake me when you need me..."
so he floats through space, and in the meantime, courtana develops hips, a larger bottom along with shiny new nudy space shape, sadly she also has developed a case of the mentals, because she's only supposed to be on for 10 years, and it been like 12 or something. No idea why she can't spool down into hibernate mode or something. I guess the most hyper-intelligent AI didn't think of that one...
anyways, after halo 3, all the bad dudes got killed, there's no one left to muck things up, so we're all good.
but wait! Ultimate baddy space yeti is here and he's messing up everyone's junk, so it's time to wake up the chief!
Cue 6 hours of fighting with courtana going mental and have arguments with herself, it's OK though, you can tell when she's cross because she goes red instead of blue.
Materchief is all like .. hmmm... can't see how having a corrupted AI could possibly go wrong..
after your 6 hours of fighting things because of reasons I'm sure were explained somewhere in a book or something, you finally catch up to ultimate baddy space yeti where you have an epic showdown, and a tense battle where literally the outcome of the battle with decide if the universe will be safe again. Faced against insurmountable odds, the chief persists and battles on to save the day. You conduct this epic and monumental battle by throwing a single grenade which sends ultimate baddy space yeti from his very safe spot on a magical space bridge into a hole.
courtana is fine, materchief is fine, universe is probably alright too.
Masterchief plots a course for home to get Courtana fixed by Dr Halsey, who probably given the nature of statis and space travel has probably died a long time ago, but ah well. I'm sure they'll fix that McGuffin somehow in halo 5...
Roll credits.
I really can't pin down what exactly it is about halo 4 that made it feel so far removed from the other games in the series. for me it felt like someone had tried to made a really good cake, but all they had to go on was a picture of what the last really good cake looked like.
There are so many things that were mildly irritating that ended up leaving me with a bitter taste.
The warthog engine sounds like it's been replaced by a petrol strimmer.
I remember spending an hour trying to get past the level when you're on ghosts trying to flee while the level crumbles around you, it worked just fine in single player, but with 3 players, someone was forever being bounced out of the level and falling through the floor. Upon re-spawning they would bump someone else out of the level making the section virtually impossible to complete.
The space ship flying section felt like it was glued on to the game at the last minute and again was massively problematic with 3 or 4 players.
There was the promise of the "spartan-ops" being a rich addition to the game, but they weren't available on launch, and when they did come out, it was just re-treading story missions.
The multi-player weapons were massively unbalanced and games were often dominated by invisible snipers or the overcharged bolt-shot.
I also got fed up of forever ending up playing in valhalla, as much as I enjoyed that level from previous games, under the new weapon and loadout system, it seemed far too easy for one team to dominate.
As nice as it was that 343 sorted out for extra players to join if members of your team quit out, this often meant playing on your own in multiplayer, you would be thrown into an already running game you have no chance of winning.
Let's not even go into the mountain dew and doritos debacle...
The game sure did look pretty, but ultimately for me the game felt completely hollow and devoid of any of the gameplay experience that I'd got form any of the previous Halo games, which kinda breaks my heart a little.