Yeah, this ain't it chief. Terrible controls, a very dumb storyline, and confounding gameplay decisions make this game just a chore to play.
I played for two hours straight trying to find a save spot so I could go to bed, only to find out you can't save in this game. You have to play through the entire game in one sitting. I don't know whose idea that was, but I hate it. I ended up just closing the game and going and watching a playthrough on youtube of someone who knew what they were doing, because I wasn't going to sit for six hours trying to fumble through it on my own.
I honestly don't even remember anything about the characters and I just played it, that's how boring they are. This is definitely not one in the series you need to bother going back and visiting.

Just as a note, I'm playing it on the master chief collection, and it's disappointing that they ruined the textures by losing the code. Unfortunately, that makes the game look much worse than it actually did even in 2001. Also the lighting is pretty atrocious so I had to switch back to remastered graphics a lot during dark sections, which was pretty much the whole back half of the game.
Gameplay wise though, this is a fun game even in the current day. Enough old school jankyness that it adds some flavor, but competent enough shooting mechanics for it to feel polished. Piloting a warthog has be purely nostalgia based though because those things are the devil.
All in all it's a solid game made even more fun with friends in co-op, and I'm looking forward to going through the rest of the story, as it feels like it's only really starting to ramp up in terms of lore building.

I'm not sure what the thought process was behind this one. Most card battlers I've played at least have fun animations, things happening on screen, this was so unbelievably dull. Just click a villains face to challenge them, go in to a battle on a beige background, where the cards have no amination to attack besides moving a bit.
It wasn't too terribly hard to figure out, and I won my first five battles, but it was just so incredibly boring that I dropped it. I even went online to check and see if anything happened if you beat the game and literally nothing changed. Such a strange entry in an otherwise amazing series. I'm not sure whose idea this was.