This review contains spoilers
Honestly? It's ok and fun.
First off let me say, yes the art style in this game has a lot of questionable changes and is a bit over the top on bloom and vfx, but damn I'd be lying if I said it looks bad. This game is beautiful and it feels like it was an entire generation ahead visually. I honestly can't complain about this when it still looks like Halo, albeit a little washed out and less silly, and is very pretty while at it. I'll take this style over Reach's any day.
Gameplaywise this game feels like what Reach would be like had it been a sequel and got more polish time. Armor Abilities are more balanced, sprinting is always on by default (I prefer this to it being the default armor ability) and we get to fight the covenant again (Miss the Brutes though) alongside the new Prometheans.
The Prometheans are not annoying to me at all with the exception of the final level where they're the only thing present, and also probably thanks to only playing Normal and Heroic instead of going Legendary, a difficulty that I find will ruin the fun of any Halo game for me anyway.
I honestly don't see what makes this game a CoD clone when Reach apparently isn't? Is it the like 3 set piece sections at the beginning, middle and end of the game? Is it the sprinting? The bloom mechanic doesn't feel nearly as prominent and the tone of the characters doesn't make me think I'm playing a tacticool aesthetic game anymore.
The music is ok, but it's like movie music, mostly there to fit the scene and nothing else. I honestly can't remember any track off the top of my head, something disappointing for a Halo game.
Now the story isn't great... not awful, but not great. The relationship between Chief and Cortana explored here is pretty good! But it's very forced by the fact that Chief pretty much completely changes personality immediately, and despite the game starting with a cutscene about how he's a broken human with no emotion, the game doesn't explore this outside of 2 cutscenes at all, as he's the most expressive he's ever been. He clearly had his own thoughts in the previous games too, but he never opened up as much as he did here and there is no arc of him overcoming any sort of conditioning or whatever, which makes this feel like it skipped a chapter.
(Spoilers for up to Halo 3 that you hopefully already know) What I really don't like though, and the only thing I would have removed from the game in some fantasy world where I owned Halo for some reason, is the Forerunner lore. Teased since CEA, 4 abandons the original theme of Forerunners being ancient humans and replaces it for a contrived story where the Forerunners were some highly advanced alien race that got in a misunderstanding with the humans.
Humans discovered the flood and hunted it down on various planets, needing to glass them to halt the infection, eventually doing this to forerunner planets as well. They naturally never take the chance to explain to the forerunners what they're doing, and end up in a war where all human leaders (or maybe all current humans at the time?) are killed and then we're forced to regress to a primitive stage as a species by the Librarian. The Didact is really obsessed with getting revenge on the humans though, so he turns them all into Promethean Knights to fight the flood, but the Librarian gains empathy for humans after discovering they were helping stop the flood, so she pushes to have the Didact imprisoned until humans revive after the rings are fired, and he's forced to repent by helping them progress.
I gave a big summary of what happened for one reason: to say it's really stupid. It abandons a cool theme of humans unknowingly dealing with their past mistakes, legacy lost in translation, ironically being in a war with the Covenant which considers their ancestors Gods, and eventually making things right by stopping the flood without sacrificing all life, for something that just feels very contrived and which only justifies the Didact as a villain. The Didact is a very weak villain, his entire philosophy being that humans are stupid (to be fair, they could have spoken up about the flood anytime so the forerunners knew what they were doing) and must be punished, while the Librarian was stupid enough to think he would be the best candidate to lead humanity into their future after becoming technologically advanced again. The whole mantle of responsibility story is generic sci-fi tropes replacing a simple, but effective, mystery with interesting implications.
ALL THAT SAID, I enjoy this game. The gameplay is a nice middle ground between Reach and the rest of the series and, if I ignore all the Forerunner stuff, the story is still decent as a sequel despite the flaws. Sadly, I know it was all for the worst in the sequels, but this game itself is fine and I don't understand why it's considered a CoD clone at all. I guess the multiplayer is a thing, but with MCC matchmaking sucking I can't really pay much attention to it, and ultimately all the bad ideas here are mostly holdovers from Reach. For me personally though, I think Halo is most memorable for its singleplayer.
First off let me say, yes the art style in this game has a lot of questionable changes and is a bit over the top on bloom and vfx, but damn I'd be lying if I said it looks bad. This game is beautiful and it feels like it was an entire generation ahead visually. I honestly can't complain about this when it still looks like Halo, albeit a little washed out and less silly, and is very pretty while at it. I'll take this style over Reach's any day.
Gameplaywise this game feels like what Reach would be like had it been a sequel and got more polish time. Armor Abilities are more balanced, sprinting is always on by default (I prefer this to it being the default armor ability) and we get to fight the covenant again (Miss the Brutes though) alongside the new Prometheans.
The Prometheans are not annoying to me at all with the exception of the final level where they're the only thing present, and also probably thanks to only playing Normal and Heroic instead of going Legendary, a difficulty that I find will ruin the fun of any Halo game for me anyway.
I honestly don't see what makes this game a CoD clone when Reach apparently isn't? Is it the like 3 set piece sections at the beginning, middle and end of the game? Is it the sprinting? The bloom mechanic doesn't feel nearly as prominent and the tone of the characters doesn't make me think I'm playing a tacticool aesthetic game anymore.
The music is ok, but it's like movie music, mostly there to fit the scene and nothing else. I honestly can't remember any track off the top of my head, something disappointing for a Halo game.
Now the story isn't great... not awful, but not great. The relationship between Chief and Cortana explored here is pretty good! But it's very forced by the fact that Chief pretty much completely changes personality immediately, and despite the game starting with a cutscene about how he's a broken human with no emotion, the game doesn't explore this outside of 2 cutscenes at all, as he's the most expressive he's ever been. He clearly had his own thoughts in the previous games too, but he never opened up as much as he did here and there is no arc of him overcoming any sort of conditioning or whatever, which makes this feel like it skipped a chapter.
(Spoilers for up to Halo 3 that you hopefully already know) What I really don't like though, and the only thing I would have removed from the game in some fantasy world where I owned Halo for some reason, is the Forerunner lore. Teased since CEA, 4 abandons the original theme of Forerunners being ancient humans and replaces it for a contrived story where the Forerunners were some highly advanced alien race that got in a misunderstanding with the humans.
Humans discovered the flood and hunted it down on various planets, needing to glass them to halt the infection, eventually doing this to forerunner planets as well. They naturally never take the chance to explain to the forerunners what they're doing, and end up in a war where all human leaders (or maybe all current humans at the time?) are killed and then we're forced to regress to a primitive stage as a species by the Librarian. The Didact is really obsessed with getting revenge on the humans though, so he turns them all into Promethean Knights to fight the flood, but the Librarian gains empathy for humans after discovering they were helping stop the flood, so she pushes to have the Didact imprisoned until humans revive after the rings are fired, and he's forced to repent by helping them progress.
I gave a big summary of what happened for one reason: to say it's really stupid. It abandons a cool theme of humans unknowingly dealing with their past mistakes, legacy lost in translation, ironically being in a war with the Covenant which considers their ancestors Gods, and eventually making things right by stopping the flood without sacrificing all life, for something that just feels very contrived and which only justifies the Didact as a villain. The Didact is a very weak villain, his entire philosophy being that humans are stupid (to be fair, they could have spoken up about the flood anytime so the forerunners knew what they were doing) and must be punished, while the Librarian was stupid enough to think he would be the best candidate to lead humanity into their future after becoming technologically advanced again. The whole mantle of responsibility story is generic sci-fi tropes replacing a simple, but effective, mystery with interesting implications.
ALL THAT SAID, I enjoy this game. The gameplay is a nice middle ground between Reach and the rest of the series and, if I ignore all the Forerunner stuff, the story is still decent as a sequel despite the flaws. Sadly, I know it was all for the worst in the sequels, but this game itself is fine and I don't understand why it's considered a CoD clone at all. I guess the multiplayer is a thing, but with MCC matchmaking sucking I can't really pay much attention to it, and ultimately all the bad ideas here are mostly holdovers from Reach. For me personally though, I think Halo is most memorable for its singleplayer.