Now Playing: Halo 4

Playing Halo 4 for the first time, I really wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d seen opinions on the game range from it being the best Halo campaign to the worst. Visually, Halo 4 is impressive. It’s hard to believe it was designed to run on the same hardware as Halo 3 – although they really needed to tone down the reflective ‘shine’ from metallic surfaces.

From a gameplay point of view, Halo 4 feels like, well, Halo. The moment to moment combat is as fast, frenetic and most importantly fun, as ever. The weapons all pack a suitable punch and the vehicle sections are a blast.

The campaign doesn’t waste any time in throwing you straight back into the action. It reminds me a lot, overall, of the Halo 2 campaign – a strong start followed by a somewhat lacklustre finish. The early levels as you try to figure out where you are and what the f**k is going on is a lot of fun. And, as you’d expect, Halo 4 has new enemies to fight and new weapons to play with.

Although I like the visual design of the new weapons, I’m not going to pretend they’re particularly exciting in terms of use. They may possess cool new exotic models, but their function follows the same pattern as your standard weapon types – burst rifle, assault rifle, sniper rifle, shotgun and rocket launcher.

And the new enemies, although also pretty cool visually, don’t really offer much in terms of a tactical combat experience. There’s a ‘dog’ type enemy that charge at you in packs but can be destroyed with a single head shot. And then there’s a humanoid enemy that really just acts as a bullet sponge, soaking up shots until they eventually fall.

The most interesting, but also irritating, of the new enemy types is a flying drone that can deploy turrets, shield enemies from fire and even regenerate fallen allies. It’s a clever support unit and you’ll often want to target them first. It can be kind of annoying when there’s several of the f**kers all zipping about though.

The story of Halo 4 is a pretty decent continuation of the series and I was certainly interested to see how it developed. I also liked how the story focused on the relationship between Cortana and the Chief and actually humanised them a little more than the previous games. It felt natural given what the two had been through together over the course of the series and it injected a little more heart and personal stakes into Halo 4 than I was expecting.

Although, overall, I did enjoy the campaign, I’d probably agree that it is the ‘worst’ in the series. But that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s bad – it’s just not as good as the others. Similar to Halo 2, the campaign becomes more linear and restrictive as you progress, often funnelling you through endless, narrow alien corridors and ending with a somewhat unexciting final confrontation and a lame QTE boss fight.

There is some decent variety to the campaign in terms of environments and mission types – at least early on. But the structure of the missions and the general level design really isn’t up to par with the other games in the series. I still had fun with it, but it’s not a campaign I can see myself wanting to replay again in the future.

Like with my other Halo reviews, I didn’t touch and have no real interest in the competitive multiplayer so I won’t be factoring that into my score. I did, however, work my way through the Spartan Ops mode which is a pretty substantial addition of 50 separate missions, all strung (very) loosely together with a story set after the main campaign. Although you can play it solo, it’s clearly designed primarily for co-op play.

The missions all last around 5-15 minutes and their objectives mostly revolve around ‘press switch’ and ‘kill everything’. There’s no checkpoints or anything like that – if you die you just re-spawn. The mode also recycles and same maps over and over to the point that you get kind of sick of them. I won’t say the mode is an amazing addition to the game, but it doesn’t do any harm, either.

Overall, Halo 4 is a pretty decent game, but it’s certainly the weakest of the series if you don’t count ODST which is, more or less, a Halo 3 expansion. I’m glad I played it though and it’s a shame this Halo collection doesn’t include Halo 5 which, despite all the bad things I’ve heard about it, I’d still like to give a spin. At 6.99, or as part of the MCC, Halo 4 is still worth checking out if you enjoyed the rest of the series. It won’t blow you away, but it’s a solid Halo experience.

6/10