I will give Peter David this: combat is hard to write well. Combat is dynamic, confusing, exhausting, and it's all too easy to make it sound humdrum or predictably back-and-forth. Peter David's combat scenes were boring, and when they weren't boring, they were frustrating. But he's primarily a comic book writer, and what works for a visual medium doesn't necessarily work in prose.

The problem is that much of HitD felt like a string of loosely connected events, rather than a story with a solid narrative. And for all that the capabilities of Forerunner technology mattered to the story, the protagonists may as well have been wandering around Africa hunting for ancient temples.