I really enjoyed the first five-ten hours but was pretty disappointed after that. Once you’ve screwed around in the open world for a few hours, the game really doesn’t throw many new ideas at you. The last like 5 missions that are all linear were really boring and too many of the boss fights were bullet sponges.
It felt like if they came up with one or two more grapple-hook level tools, then polished a few more things, didn’t repeat the same three environments the whole game, it would have been something really special. As it stands, it really falls short of what I thought it was trying to be. It’s hard to finish the game and not feel like they were just trying to reach a minimal viable product.
IDK I’m still stuck on assault the control room from Halo 1 on legendary
First outdoor bridge, jump off to the left immediately outside the door onto the snow ledge. Jump down to the canyon floor from there. Ezpz.
Even if you miss that you can also hijack a banshee when you first get to the control room later on too, but that shit was in the strategy guide.
Genuinely one of the most repetitive and boring campaigns I’ve ever played. The first Halo game literally repeats multiple levels backwards and still makes those levels more interesting and engaging than anything in this game. I don’t thing you can possibly get a better lesson in game design than that. Completely agree with your entire post.
Every single main story mission where you go underground in the ring is the exact same thing. Same corridors, same rooms, the only thing that changes is sometime you fight a bunch of normal enemies at the end, sometimes it’s a boss. Then the other main missions are just “climb this slightly different tower to fight this other boring big bad thing”.
The combat is fun, the mix-up of the game-play is good, little bits like the unique upgraded weapons are cool, filling an armored limousine with marines and handing them lasers is great. But you only get to use any of those things to do any one of 40 copy and pasted bases scattered around the map. At least I can enjoy some of the good parts in the multiplayer, I guess.
It starts very strong, peaks early, and totally fizzles out in the end. There are so so so many great ideas and things that in isolation are fantastic (best hunters for sure, and enemy variety) but none of it quite gels together.
Imo the biggest problem is what smoke and mirrors the “open world” really is. The truth is that this isn’t really an open world Halo so much as it is a fairly meh standard Halo campaign with a potentially cool but ultimately incomplete open world aspect sort of grafted onto it and it shows in the fact that so much of the plot happens in instanced sections and how little reason there is to go explore in the hub world.
Story wise I really think I’m done with this series…and that says a lot given just how formative it was to me (I have an entire library shelf full of Halo crap for fucks sake). Halo 5 may have sucked but the one genuinely cool idea that made it worthwhile was the epic Cortana heel turn and reveal of the ai as the dark horse faction of the universe.
Atriox is fine as a villain but goddamn it…the way they just retconned and handled all that shit off screen just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
Also where the fuck is the god-damned Arbiter, or Rtas, or the two elites who were part of your squad in Halo 3?!?
All in all…I checked out the legendary ending online already and I think if I’m ever going to sate my nostalgia I’ll just play master chief collection.
Story was whatever, the open world is cool and works with Halo better than I thought it would but there’s not a lot to do after a while. Not as good as the older games, but the gameplay improvements like climbing ledges is so stuck in my brain I kept trying to do it when I went back to play Reach. I will say I hate quirky MCU-humor wacky-zany style characters and Weapon crossed that line a couple times for me.