ODST had partially begun the journey of trying to ground this series' central conflict and mythos away from it's superhuman ubermensch protagonist, and focus on more boots-on-the ground experiences of the Human-Covenant war that didn't involve a titular universe destroying ring world.

But Bungie really go the extra mile here by lending an element of prestige film/television to their swansong, a narrative and aesthetic bland of HBO's Band of Brothers and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, especially when you look at the cutscenes' predominant use of diegetic visuals by way of CCTV monitors/helmet cameras, or indeed the movement of the camera itself to give the impression someone is actually recording this.

That kind of obvious trick draws me a little bit out of an otherwise decent narrative experience, though Noble Team are hardly paragons of emotional depth, especially in comparison to ODST's rag-tag misfits by way of Alpha Nine.

Ultimately though, the Bungie approach to expansive level design in this series is still relatively unbeaten, as indeed is the meaty combat and vehicular carnage. For an entry intended to put you in an often downbeat mood about a battle associated in the series' lore with tragic bloody defeat, man is it fun to conk a Wraith with a grenade launcher, hey doesn't this have a major thread about the collateral of war on civilian bystanders-