An excellent campaign and first start for 343 Industries. I really enjoyed diving into forerunners after Greg Bear beautifully fleshed them out in the Forerunner book trilogy. I do find myself skipping enemies after a while because encounters get boring and tedious, Halo 4's campaign suffers from the gameplay loop of run somewhere -> push button -> kill enemies -> run somewhere.. , but is otherwise very fun with a great variety of settings.

Spartan Ops was an interesting addition and the original weekly episodic release made every week a blast. I do not think SpOps was a good replacement for Firefight, but it scratches the PvE itch enough. It is a shame that the next set of SpOps were canceled as I would have liked to see where the story continued.

Halo 4 is the first case of 343 creating amazing story threads which they end up dropping in the next game, Halo 5, where they do the same thing, and then do it a third time in Halo Infinite.

The standard multiplayer was fun, but it does deserve some criticism for the loadout system. If you take out the loadout system, it feels like a newer take on the classic Halo formula, so I tended to stick to playlists which disabled it. I did use the loadout system for a while, but it does become very meta heavy and being able to spawn with weapons such as plasma grenades and plasma pistols gets very overpowered very quickly.