Well, here we are again. Another Halo, another semi-reboot, and after a 12-month delay was the game worth the wait? Well for starters I can say yes, but the biggest change here is the new open-world a la Far Cry style. The campaign opens up with an epic cinematic opening leveling that’s rather typical of Halo. Lots of explosions, exposition on what the hell you need to do on this new halo and the game picks up after the events of Halo 5. This is Cortana’s story, but you don’t realize that until about halfway through the campaign. Speaking of the campaign, it doesn’t really pick up until halfway through as well. Because this is an open-world game the entire game had to be rebalanced and changed a bit, but the core of Halo is here and better than it’s ever been.


After you finish the opening sequence which runs you about 30-45 minutes you are spit out into the open world, or technically a large chunk of the Halo ring. Unlike the finely nuanced corridor shooting that previous games were, campaign missions take place just like those, but you have to get to them in the open world. So, overall the campaign itself doesn’t really take place in this open-world, but instances instead like an MMO. The open world itself is 100% filler due to the fact that it actually worked by luck, not by design.

Think about it. The building blocks for an open-world game were already in place. Halo has excellent balancing already. The weapons, enemies, recharging shield, and the few abilities and vehicles already exist in the franchise. Just take all those and tweak them a bit and throw them into a big open space, which technically Halo also already did, and it just works out of sheer luck. The only, and I repeat the only reason why this open-world exists is for unlockables. Mjolnir armor for multiplayer skins and upgrades for the five abilities you get which are mostly useless by the way. You get your recharging shield which you can upgrade. Again, this is an excuse to use upgrade cores. Then you get the biggest change to the game which is the grapple. This allows you to traverse vertically as well as horizontally and is awesome to use. After this, you get a shield which is useful of course, but the two abilities I never used were a sonar enemy detector and a dash ability. In the heat of battle, I don’t need to dash. I can just use the grapple and get much further away or use the shield to regenerate my own.


You can also unlock superweapons which are higher-powered versions of every weapon in the game and show up red. You unlock these by doing bounties. As the game progresses and you unlock more of the world to explore you of course get more vehicles as well. All are here from the past, but you can also fast travel to FOB that you must liberate to unlock vehicles stations. The last activity is liberating squads spread throughout the area and then there are large installations that house tons of enemies. That’s pretty much it. If you stripped all of that away there would be no reason to have this world to explore. You can just blow through the campaign missions without upgrading or doing any side missions, but I do recommend at least upgrading the shields and the grapple. These are handicapped from the start unlike past games, and the game gets brutally hard later on in the game.

Once you finish the campaign you can go back and unlock more stuff or dive into multiplayer. At this point do we need so many Halo games online at once? The Master Chief Collection is still alive and well and so is Halo 5. Literally, the entire Halo franchise is available to play online so what’s the difference here? Well not much really. There are three different types of weapon classes. Hardlight, regular ammo, and energy ammo also go for the campaign. To me, the entire online experience blends and blurs together. I can’t tell the difference between this suite and Halo 1. Call me an idiot, but my favorite part about Halo has always been the campaigns and the story. The multiplayer is fun. The maps are well done and the modes are all here except we now get a stupid Battle Pass just like Call of Duty does. This just locks away cosmetics for your Spartan, but I also never cared about customizing one anyways.


The visuals are really good. While not groundbreaking the open-world looks great albeit the same throughout. It’s just dirt and trees through the entire game. There are good-looking textures, nice lighting effects, and the game seems well optimized even for lower-end hardware. The Xbox Series X version looks mostly like the PC but with slightly lower graphics settings as you would expect. The game does look dated on Xbox One, pretty horribly actually, and Xbox One X is passable. The best way to play is on Series X or PC for sure. However, no matter which console you are on you will get a smooth experience.

Overall, the campaign’s story is decent, but nothing special. Finding out what happened to Cortana after going rampant is interesting, but the new antagonist is just a typical dumb Brute with nothing special going on with him. I love the Halo universe and story, but it’s better explored in the novels and comics if you want to dive deeper into the lore. The world is a complete filler and just works by luck rather than by design. They took everything that already works in the game and just plopped it into this open world. I will admit I had a lot of fun doing the activities. You only get a few and it keeps it nice and simple, unlike Ubisoft open-world games.

After the abysmal Halo 4 I went into this with the lowest of expectations and was really surprised at how good it was. The open world gameplay is a lot of fun, especially with four people (how I played it). The change in tone was refreshing - I really liked the new characters and I felt like the more humorous dialog fit really well. The quips that you hear while fighting grunts were actually quite funny. It's amazing to think this is the same team behind the awful stories of 4 and 5 because I found the characters in this game to be quite endearing

It's a shame because so much else about the Campaign experience was very unpolished. There's very little mission variety and I had difficulty telling the difference between the special weapons you unlock with valor and the regular weapons you pick up. The grappling hook was awesome, but I literally never used any of the other tools available. In fact, I finished the game with something like 10 spartan cores just sitting in my inventory but nothing that seemed worth upgrading. Maybe you get more use out of these tools when playing solo or at higher difficulty, but at the normal difficulty I never found any use in them. The open world map I found well designed, but was a bit too vertical to ever use vehicles for getting around.

While I found the characters great, the overall plot was a mess. After finishing the game and scouring the wikis for 4 and 5 I still have very little clue what exactly was going on in the game.

I did have a lot of fun with this and it's a shame that it took 343 this long to get the formula right. Maybe with some content in the Campaign mode I could see this being even better, but the implication with the latest news seems to indicate that the Campaign isn't going to be supported going forward. I hope that whoever works on Halo next takes this ball and runs with it because there's a lot more that can be done.

Loved the story, open world, graphics, new mechanics, and enemy variety! The The grappling hook added some variety. The open world was a big improvement! The new cortana is a good story twist and I liked the new pilot guy. The upgrades to the deployable shield, the dash, the anti-invisibility, and the hook, were all fun to work towards. Helping the soldiers and then them appearing at Fobs was fun and helps build the realism. The raidable areas were fun as well. The hitlist of banished was fun, although by the end I wiped them all with the hornet. I liked the new enemy force of the banished. The weapon verity was impressive. The enemy verity was more impressive! The boss battles are memorable. Especially the two battles with the flying robota nd his sarcasm akin to glados in portal. Didn't love the limited objectives or linear ending. Awesome game overall!

As a newcomer to the halo series, this was awesome! Had a lot of fun with it and the multiplayer was pretty solid too. I get that long-time halo fans are crying and shitting their pants over this game, but tbh it feels unwarranted. I've never found halo to be particularly compelling as sci-fi, an adventure story, war story, or really anything it's trying to be, so I wasn't expecting much going in. The story is boring asf, but any game with a grappling hook and no fall damage is doing good things.

Also, controversially, I really enjoyed the MP progression system. It makes you try new things and play outside of your comfort zone, actively discouraging farming and encouraging varied use of playstyles. Great game!