It's kind of unfortunate that the only Halo game with a good story worth a damn happens to be attached to a shooter that's lackluster in almost every other area.

Not to say that the story is the only component worth considering here, Halo 4 definitely has incredible audio and visual design, with the best sfx in the series and wonderful vistas to discover. The soundtrack, while not as good as Bungie's general outings, is still solid and makes a lot of particular scenes ebb out of the screen in awe.

But everything else here is practically a miss! Level design is wide open but terribly balanced areas, with subpar enemy design with weaker AI than their prior counterparts. The forerunner enemies especially end up annoying in how reductive the strategy is to manage them, with some of the weakest emphasis on positioning here. It's unfortunate, because otherwise the campaign tells a great story about moving on, despite its shortcomings on pacing and the dank meme that is The Librarian. There's also some cross lore from the books that isn't exactly well put in here, although it does make true on forcing the Chief into an incredibly unfamiliar area with a shitton of time passing, so it's somewhat forgivable.

The multiplayer and spartan ops are just outright awful too. While it's not exactly the worst multiplayer in the world, firefights have incredibly boring map design and very low skill floor mechanics. You can pretty much sleep to get a decent kd because ttk is high even for Halo. Weapon strategies are simplistic, and snowballing is an ever growing problem even after patches. And the less said about Spartan Ops, the better.

That being said, I can't really say that this is an overall misstep in the series. The highs of Halo 4's campaign is enough to make an enjoyable entry and it does FAR FAR FAR FAR better than what Bungie did with fucking Halo Reach. Worth playing once.

Criminally underrated. Now I understand the problems with Halo 4, like the fact that multi-player sucks, it doesn't feel like a true halo game and the fact that it changed a lot of the lore significantly. But despite the gameplay being more akin to Call of Duty, it is still good. And the story, while a bit complicated, is the best part. This is the game where it focuses on Master Chief's humanity the most and what it means to be a soldier. And his friendship with Cortana is explored more and... sad. The story is definitely sad that it's so far the only video game to make me cry.

Man, I hate to say it, but Halo 4 is just a mess. On the surface, the game seems pretty alright, but once you dive into Legendary difficulty, the issues rise to the surface in mass.

One-hit-kill hitscan enemies, huge health bars for almost every enemy type, the long, boring-ass levels with an awful checkpoint system, unreliable teammates, minimal ammo for basically every gun in the game, terrible enemy spawns, and SO much more really drags Halo 4 into a serious pit of tedius and repetitive gameplay loops that are torturous to complete.

Halo 4 certainly has its perks with a somewhat okay multiplayer mode, Spartan Ops, and a few campaign highlights, but it's otherwise a tedius experience that I rarely ever enjoy playing (and especially DON'T on legendary).

Se a 343 tinha a missão de mostrar a que veio, então já chegou como uma grande decepção. A mediocridade do jogo é patente no tocante à estrutura de missões, que repete o mesmo padrão de novo e de novo, sem muita criatividade. A história é dependente de terminais e conteúdo transmídia, fazendo um trabalho ruim de desenvolvimento dos personagens.

A trama é conduzida de forma apressada e não desenvolve muito bem os atos, resultando em um jogo extremamente mediano, sem muita originalidade e com gameplay altamente mais do mesmo. Ponto baixo da série.

I remember being super stoked for this game when it came out, got it the day it came out but wasn't allowed to play video games on school nights and had to wait until the weekend to start it. Genuinely one of the most painful things 15 year old me had experienced! One of my best high school memories is still having my friends over that weekend and passing the controller around as we played through the campaign, and even though the years in between have tarnished my opinion of the game I'll always have that. And I genuinely do think the part where you actually play the campaign is pretty good! The narrative choices are bad and the multiplayer is a big letdown but it was a solid first outing for 343 when it comes to level design and iterating on a classic franchise while still making it feel like Halo.

O primeiro Halo sob a direção do estúdio 343. A nova direção é uma boa explicação para o porquê é uma experiência tão... desnorteada. É evidente que não sabem muito bem o que fazer com a franquia. Para sair do empasse, tentaram uma abordagem dupla: ao mesmo tempo aumentar o escopo da aventura para níveis galáticos (com a história dos Forerunners e do Mantle of Responsibility) e torná-la mais pessoal e focada nos personagens (especificamente, a relação entre Master Chief e Cortana). As duas ideias em si têm seus pontos fortes, não senti que conseguiram fazê-las se comunicar e reinforçar mutuamente. O resultado é uma experiência sem foco e um tanto confusa. Entretanto, as bases sólidas que o estúdio Bungie criou com a franquia ainda estão aqui, então mesmo com os vários deslizes nunca chega a ser uma experiência ruim.

A solid enough effort from a first-time studio, that suffers from not enough development time and a little bit of an identity crisis - Many of its flaws are inherited by Reach, but just as many are newly introduced. Not every level is solid, but a decent amount are. Halo 4's strengths are found in it's cinematography, voice cast, and human story, but doesn't manage a totally clean landing in most things Forerunner related: mechanically, aesthetically, nor narratively.

This game looks like how Mountain Dew tastes.