Been playing LOADS of
Halo, both Halo: MCC and Halo 5. I've been sucked in completely by both the Campaigns and Multiplayer to the point where I've kind of neglected all my other games for the moment (though I've still managed to play a few wee things here and there).
I am absolutely loving it, the Master Chief Collection is a seriously good package with every single game bar 5 on there, being able to drop into any mission on a whim and having a huge variety of online games available. Only issue I have is sometimes finding games through matchmaking can take aaaaaaages depending on which playlist I'm trying to find, anyone else ever have this issue? Sometimes I've sat there staring at the matchmaking screens for up to 5 minutes or more it feels like.
I finished Halo 5 earlier in the year and now I'm going through the campaigns methodically starting at Halo: CE and doing them all on Heroic. Just started Halo 3, and I'll lay out my thoughts of Halo 5 first here:
Halo 5: Guardians was a blast from start to finish for me. It felt like a mechanically refined, aesthetically gorgeous evolution of many of the best bits of previous halo games. The various movement abilities are all very fun and responsive, and the arsenal of weapons is possibly the best so far, they managed to take the Forerunner weaponry that I was kinda "meh" on in Halo 4, and turn them into something really fun and distinctive-feeling. Vehicles are likewise a lot of fun, and a few levels with set pieces including Mantises (the mechs), Phaetons and Banshees, Warthogs and the like are all bombastic and feel epic in that classic halo way.
Enemy variety was also quite good, and I eventually found a satisfying method to deal with most enemies. Even though the Covenant are still the most fun to fight, the Forerunners in this game do have their own distinct weaknesses and styles that once you puzzle it out it becomes quite smooth and satisfying to take them down.
There are a few sore points that hold this game back from being great. First of all, despite my feeling that the gameplay is refined and movement options are the most fluid that they've been in the series, the level design never truly reaches the heights and open playground-feel of e.g. The Silent Cartographer, with most of the levels being more linear affairs. That being said, each level does feel complex and dense with lots of nooks and crannies and alternate paths to find packed with secrets etc. that somewhat makes up for this.
On top of this is the infamous Warden boss fights. Lots has been said about this so I won't spend too long but basically: wow, the same boss seven times? Yawn!
But possibly the worst aspect for me was the absolutely groan-worthy narrative that just kept getting in the way of me really enjoying myself. It felt like Halo: Spartans Avengers Assemble or something. And the whole Cortana storyline felt really off for me. There was an abundance of Melodramatic Soliloquys that I was really uninterested in from both Cortana and the Warden, and too much blunt exposition rather than more natural environmental storytelling. Osiris team was mostly uninteresting, with the possible exception of Locke, who does have some potential though it's mostly wasted in this muddy, unfocused story (there's no clear objective or bad guy or MacGuffin or anything in the first 60% of the game, beyond "Gotta go find the Chief").
Blue team are even worse. Literally, their presence detracted from the experience for me. Who even are they? At one point Buck says to Locke, "They're like family to the Chief". But they haven't been present in any of the previous games, and Halo 5 does very little to help make this feel believable at all. They're interchangeable and forgettable, and in fact their presence actively removed from what COULD have been some "Metroid Prime"-esque explorations of spooky, mysterious locales. They tend to chip in with wise cracks and radio chatter to kill the mood while you explore the atmospheric abandoned space station in one level and the intriguing Forerunner Genesis planet which has all this cool flora and fauna and topology that is really cool to look at. Perhaps I'm mistaken here, because previous games did have allies with you a lot of the time too, but it felt diluted and tonally wrong this time round, and I'm not entirely sure why.
I did enjoy 031 Exuberant Witness though. It reminded me of Guilty Spark and had a charm and personality about it. The fact that it drops a Scorpion in from thin air for you to blast Covenant with certainly didn't hurt either.
Haven't mentioned the music yet, but I really liked it. The new themes felt right and were unique enough to not be derivative, while the renditions of classic halo themes were deployed to excellent effect during climactic campaign moments. Very Much Approved.
This post is getting massive, but I want to mention Custom Games and Forge here too. Simply put, the possibilities in Forge this time round are seemingly endless, and it's seriously impressive. I played a game where one player controlled a giant plastic pig in a sandbox full of physics blocks and towers etc, and everyone had to run away from the pig, blasting it with rockets and ducking under debris to avoid being "eaten" (if you get touched by the pig, you instantly die). And that's just one game of dozens and dozens of creative gametypes on there. Another highlight was playing Shotty Snipers on a 1:1 Forge recreation of the Skyrim city of Solitude. This was amazing fun and reminded me of classic online pc games like HL:DM or Sauerbraten, where you'd join a server and people would be playing good old Deathmatch on all sorts of weird and wonderful custom-made maps.
Overall it felt extremely fun from a gameplay perspective, but the campaign was a bit of a missed opportunity. Watching the trailer for Infinite after playing this has got me worryingly hyped; I feel like if they take this core gameplay and put it in a big, playground-like, Alpha Halo-esque environment, it could be absolutely phenomenal... but given the latest scandal with Cyberpunk and all its hype, I should really try to temper my expectations