Another entertaining Halo installment. Looks great, sounds great, plays great. A few gripes however.

Why did they feel the need to change the melee and crouch buttons? This served no purpose and several times at the beginning of the game, I was just smaller instead of hitting a space freak.

Too much Osiris time and not enough Master Chief. It wasn't fun in Halo 2, and although it's essentially still a Spartan, I want to be Master Chief.

Story wasn't great. It was all filler. I enjoyed playing it, but the plot was rather thin and it kind of ended abruptly and perhaps a bit too vague.

Reusing the same guy for several boss fights was very repetitive and not particularly fun.

Otherwise, it's the same Halo, this time with even more visual pizzaz and for that, I can get over some of the short comings.

I had a decent amount of fun with the multiplayer, and the gameplay is pretty well put together, but the campaign is absolutely terrible. Marketing made it seem like Master Chief was main character when we only get like 4 levels playing as him. The rest of the levels you play Locke, who just sorta shows up. Not to mention a lot of story aspects wouldn't make sense unless you read the BOOKS. I don't know a whole lot of people who read the Halo books besides some hardcore fans, but the fact that story aspects don't even make sense unless you read the books is a terrible writing decision.

Loved by some, loathed by others, Halo 5 demonstrated a talented studio's continued failure to understand the identity of Halo in favor of chasing the trends of an increasingly competitive market. For fans hoping to find any semblance of what made the original trilogy great, they will find Halo 5 having not much to offer. For others who are looking for a fast-paced advanced mobility driven competitive arena shooter, they may never find another multiplayer that scratches that itch as well as Halo 5 did.

this is a real two steps forward one step back situation. let's start with the good.

the new spartan abilities are cool! this is a nice example of the mid-2010s "mobility shooter" trend, where you can now dash, slide, clamber, and hover for free. it's fun to do a sprinting melee or a dive bomb on enemies.

although readability is still an issue in this game, something even the game concedes by highlighting items for you, it's not as bad as halo 4. in fact, the environments are genuinely beautiful! some of the best images in the series are here. the level design is unique for the series, every room is very open and offers lots of different paths for flanking and finding weapon caches to give to yourself and your allies. you're always moving forward, and each room is different from the last. there are even a few cool setpieces with the guardians.

however, the quality level layouts are betrayed by the completely undemanding enemy ai, which was previously one of halo's most distinctive characteristics. very rarely was i actually forced to move positions or change strategies. half the time they were so distracted by my squad that they didn't even attack me at all. i tried turning up the difficulty but it didn't affect ai routines, just changed the damage numbers to make encounters take longer. these beautiful, cleverly designed levels just become scenery for a pretty mindless shooting gallery. which might be fine, if most of the guns didn't sound so weak, or of half of them weren't just slight variations on each other. even the vehicle sections are strangely scarce of enemy vehicles to shoot.

these eight main characters actually have a lot of dialogue, and yet somehow still only have half a personality between them. the dialogue is 90% dry exposition and 10% lame quips, all delivered in the tone of someone reading off a powerpoint slide. there are three non-combat missions where you just listen to people talk in a room, and there are audio logs strewn throughout the levels, and somehow none of it is memorable! even the arbiter doesn't get a single cool line.

the meridian arc of the story has a little bit of interesting mystery and tension with governer sloan, and completing optional objectives to protect the colony is a fun dash of roleplaying. but the rest of the story is bizarrely dramatically inert. most of the important events seem to happen offscreen. a third of the game is spent on sanghelios, which is presented as some kind of endless quagmire, but the situation is no more politically complex than arbiter vs covenant, and the covenant are already fragmented and leaderless before you get there, making the arbiter's victory feel like a foregone conclusion. he has no villain to strive against, no loyalties to manage, nothing resembling a dramatic scenario. and the spartans don't even really care about the conflict, they do five levels just to hitch a ride on a guardian.

in only three levels, chief's story repeats the same beats over and over. it's just a road to cortana with the warden eternal telling you to fuck off over and over. the big confrontation should theoretically be interesting, but everyone is already perfectly certain of their position and course of action from the beginning, so there's not much drama to explore. you know how exactly how that confrontation is going to go five hours before you get there. the game keeps bringing up the struggles of ai, but always chooses to cut away from the scene before anyone can have a real conversation about it.

It feels useless to reiterate why this game fumbled so hard. Cortana becoming a space dictator just feels weird. The guardians feel like an afterthought and the campaign was extremely underwhelming. ALSO, why have a bunch of characters that weren't present in previous games show up here with little context. I don't mind a bit of trans-media storytelling but at least make it sensible for someone who can't read (me.)
I'm not gonna talk about the multiplayer (I kinda liked it, I never had an issue with the microtransactions when I was playing since I didn't have disposable income back then.)

Halo 5 was the first and only Halo game where I played the campaign once and did not ever play it again. The campaign felt like it was being pulled in so many different directions that it didn't feel cohesive, and later missions just turned into throwing a bunch of Wardens at the player. It took me a while to come to terms with the story, especially after the Hunt the Truth campaign teased a completely different one. I think an especially huge miss was not explaining any of the gap between 4 and 5 in game and instead relying on players to read comics and other outside fiction. I have read every Halo book, many multiple times, and was hugely disappointed to find out that Chief and Blue Team's reunion was essentially brushed over in a comic series. I think I would be ok with what the story started, but, in typical 343 fashion, they drop all of the story threads in Halo Infinite, so Guardians just becomes a weird canon island.

Halo 5's multiplayer was a blast. It was incredibly fast and really emphasized the new movement system. While some movement mechanics were definitely overpowered such as the charge and ground pound, 5's multiplayer was so fun to play at a high level because it was so fast.

The REQ system was a frustrating way to unlock customization options, I ended up using a spreadsheet which tracked my unlocks and told me the most optimized way to purchase the three tiers of REQ packs in order to maximize my unlocks. It made sense for weapons, vehicles, and other tools specific to Warzone, but locking customization items behind random chance was a big miss in my opinion.

Warzone was a blast, especially with a group of friends who could coordinate well. Unfortunately it was overshadowed and ruined by full teams of 12 dominating and farming teams of random players. Warzone games were very easy to get snowballing, and you could have one team pulling out highly overpowered tanks and other vehicles while the other is essentially stuck getting spawn killed in their base with nothing but ARs.

Warzone Firefight was an interesting new take on the firefight formula from previous Halo games, and it definitely made using some of the highest tier weapons and vehicles feel much more fun because you weren't afraid to lose them, generally.

Halo 5's forge was another huge step, and the PC forge tool, Halo 5: Forge was a game changer for making content.

I really loved working hard with a large group of people to unlock the Achilles armor and helmet, and it will forever be one of my proudest gaming accomplishments.

343 released an announcer pack for a few dollars which added a few new announcers to multiplayer, Buck and Exuberant Witness were my favorites by far. Something similar today would be significantly more expensive.

I would love to see H5 make a PC release one day, and I think the high speed of the gameplay would be very popular on PC. Halo 5: Forge was passable for forging, but custom games were rough because H5F suffered from severe amount of input lag, the engine was not fully PC-ready.

343 should have been dismantled after writing the story and the campaign in itself but here we are.
Who on Earth thought that:
0) We do not want to play Chief for most of the game?
1) Guardians are fairly design enemies?Why do we need to fight them like 7 times and none of them have any variation or whatsoever?
3) We need to portray Master Chief as someone that is bad?Were we trying to create new games that do not rely on him being in the game?
4) We should ignore some of the interesting characters and themes from Halo 4?

The only good thing about this game is the song from the last mission of the game.

Online at least was ok, but it does not matter because everything good from one game was decided to be ignored for the next one since 343 worked in the francise.