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| My Halo 4 Review / thoughts / complaints *SP* | |
| Posted By: RC Master | Date: 11/18/12 4:57 p.m. |
- Summary - Score: 8/10What That Means: Far above average. Halo 4 still comes with an impressive array of options, weapons, abilities and modes to replay. It's much better than I had feared it would be but, it's still not up to the standard we've come to expect from Halo. 343 Industries are no Bungie. - Play time -7:36:17 spent on first Solo Legendary Playthrough of the game. Repeated on Legendary Co-op. Many hours more getting to grips with levels, trying out tricks, doing a few speed runs and tests. Completed both Episode 1 and 2 of Spartan Ops on Legendary co-op and most of Episode 1 on Legendary Solo. Played a few dozen games of multiplayer in a variety of playlists. = Campaign ==== General ===- Don't understand why they had to screw with the iconic looks and sound of so many returning weapons, characters and vehicles. In particular the Plasma Pistol, Warthog and Master Chief himself stand out as the biggest offenders. I actually like the look of the new Cortana overall. She's cute. But her body shape reads a bit more 'nude' than the 'bodysuit' of past games which is a bit awkward. - I always thought one of the major beauties of the forerunner aesethetic was the marriage between the natural and the synthetic. That these structures with all these dramatic straight lines are just set as one with the earth and rocks around it, or that the natural-looking stuff almost 'grew' around it. But it's not long before all the Forerunner we get is just grey metal and more grey metal. With a healthy splash of Tron and some copy+paste+rotate level design. - speaking of foreunners, where Forerunner stuff in the past was largely silent, mild humming, occasional beams and stuff. A lot of the forerunner stuff in this game is constantly moving about for seemingly no purpose. Like the Didact's ship in the trench run in particular. The forerunner aesthetic, to me, was much more about large, impressive structures, layered with subtle geometric detail. But in Halo 4 it's just MOAR SURFACES. - MY GOD THE BLOOM! Holy crap someone at 343i has a complete obsession with applying as much bloom as they can. It makes it hard to see enemies, it obscures your beautiful vistas. It also makes absolutely no sense as visor technology should be aiming to minimise such things. - They seemed to have pushed the visual look of the game so far that it is actually coming back and hurting the gameplay. For example, doors all too often lock immediately and quickly behind you (nerfing exploration) so they can deload them. Often trapping you in very open arenas with ammo stashes no longer accessible and no where to fall back to. Bodies and weapons despawn so quickly that it breaks immersion and you lose valuable pieces of equipment. The whole Promethean enemy/weapon de-rezzing thing is just a cleverly disguised resource-saver. One of the things I LIKED about Halo was that the evidence of your battles would persist. - Music felt better than I was expecting. But it was very quiet for the most part or was totally faded into the background (mood music). I kinda miss the more bombastic stuff - really pumped you up, made you look forward to certain sections just to listen to the music again (and the gameplay was always a cool bonus too). It feels a lot more like a movie score than a Halo game score in many ways. --Gameplay & Features--- Campaign Theatre, screenshots, clips, online rendering, meta-game scoring, in-game timing - All gone. I hold dozens of records across both speed runs and high scores in Halo 3 to Reach. No real options for that in Halo 4 now. Speed/score runs rely heavily on tricks and techniques that are shared often through saved films, rendering and screenshots. And are verified and often published through the same. Needless to say, I am disappointed. I will be making a whole QQ post about this sometime soon. -I lamented pre-release about the HUD. While it's true that during gameplay I am able - to a large extent - ignore it, every time I notice it, it annoys me again. Which, with the copious amounts of waiting around in this game, is often. I yearn for a cleaner, more functional look back.
Next time just make the HUD customisable and then no-one has to worry, eh? Hell, the Spartans already extensively customise the look and functionality of their suits and weapons in-universe, so why not the HUD? - co-op teammates do not respawn in vehicles with free spaces - e.g. warthog - like in past games. Instead they simply spawn in mid-air - which can be quickly 100m behind their bro if they're moving. This is clearly a downgrade and makes vehicle sections more frustrating. - They seriously need someone familiar with speed running concepts on their test team. From Covenant enemies materialising in plain sight, to losing the mission critical vehicles in despawned areas (seriously lost the Mammoth on Reclaimer because I was too far ahead), to frustrating, overly extended, pointless waiting sequences. I think the game as a whole could benefit from being smoothed out in this regard. If I want to listen to your dialogue, let me, but don't make me when I already know what to do. - Oh, I really hate the whole 'getting shot slows you down' thing. Doesn't feel very Spartan. It makes escapes very frustrating and is like a scaled-down version of the Plasma-stun effect from Halo 1 applied to EVERYTHING. -- Plot --- I do not get the character of the Didact. The Domain Terminals just confused me more since he seems a different character. His motivation for disliking humans and turning them into Prometeans before was their mantle-usurping and the killing of many Forerunner, and needing troops to fight the Flood. But I would have thought he would believe that the Flood threat was over by now? What is his motivation now? In the Terminals the Librarian tells him to go teach humanity about the Mantle or somesuch. Why does he disregard this? Were all his actions in Halo 4 supposed to teach some kind of lesson? What the hell was it? - I get the feeling the Didact isn't dead. Obviously the Librarian created some sort of telepathic link between them. He kept saying things like 'If reason will not stop you, then perhaps force will at least delay you' - why doesn't he believed the MC can be stopped? Maybe because he isn't really trying? I mean he's doing all the classic cliche badguy stuff like taunting and just playing with his enemy, when he could clearly annilate the chief very easily. Composer immunity or not. Either the payoff for this is much later down the line, or the whole thing was really poorly written. But if he's not dead, then that still begs the question of what exactly was achieved in Halo 4? Is it perhaps needless obtuse? - Set just a few years after the near-humanity-annilating events of Halo 2/3, it seems a bit much that, once again, Earth is threatened with nearly-overwhelming attack. I think 343 Industries need to localise the conflict better to stop it spiralling into ridiculous places like this. I mean, save the Earth, AGAIN? How many more times are we gonna have to do that this trilogy? If I lived on Earth, two different narrowly stopped alien attacks in 5 years would be enough for me to get the heck out. - I think overall I prefer the non-galaxy-trotting Halos: CE, ODST, Reach. We've waited 5 years to find out about that mysterious planet in the Legendary ending of Halo 3, and it doesn't seem very long before we're off away from it again. I need some time to smell the damn roses. BTW, as far as I gathered from the Terminals, Requiem is where they stored the 'samples' for galactic repopulation, right? - However, I do like that each of the levels has a definite progression in the plot. There are no levels where it's stalled and you're just not sure where it's going.
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