Halo 5 Review:

Boy, that took a while, huh? I've waited to review Halo 5 until I was sure that I had spent plenty of time adjusting to, experimenting with, and fully experiencing all that it had to offer, including Forge, its first update, an array of REQs, and multiple types of campaign runs (Normal-Legendary, Solo-Coop).

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Campaign

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Before anything, I wanted to make an observation that I noticed when I finished the campaign:

The intergalactic war between multiple space-faring factions comes to a head when AIs gain great power and turn on their creators in order to establish order throughout the galaxy. One of the AI leaders has an attachment to humanity's greatest warriors, and against her protector's wishes, chooses to keep the super-soldiers alive by putting them to sleep for thousands of years within a giant sphere while the war between the AIs and the other factions rages on outside, and a separate group of super-soldiers works to find them.
This is the exact plot of Warframe.
In fact, most of this stuff is considered less important than the current storyline (this plot is mainly used to understand character motivations and backstory, and is used to explain why the solar system is the way it is), whereas in Halo 5 it's the entire driving plot.

When Halo 5 begins, we're treated to a vague, mostly pointless scene involving a bit of fanservice, a bit of fanservicey callback, and confusing dialogue. This sets the bar out of the gate, and is a setup that is revisited many times.
Before the game launched, we were treated to the intro to each team, and I made an observation on the Osiris intro:

"While way too over-the top and choreographed, I think it shows great improvement over 343's previous game. Dialogue was a bit more subdued (I didn't feel like strangling Palmer, even though she was onscreen longer than a second), and the scene played out a bit more fluidly (from drop to gameplay) than the dead stops that all of Halo 4's levels started with.

I was bothered by the typical "we're waiting until you're seconds from deploying to explain what you're doing here" trope, but whatevs; we've seen it enough times to accept it as a genre norm. Also, busting through a rock was a bit much for me (especially since he lost zero momentum from it), but again, they want to show these not-S2s as a force of nature rather than as trained soldiers, so that's what's gotta happen, I guess.

Looking forward to how they transition that into gameplay (would be great if you started on a somewhat on-rails slide, continuing the momentum for at least another minute), hopefully you don't just drop into a canyon and continue slowly from there." - 9/01/15

Unfortunately, turns out that was exactly what happens, and I was just as disappointed as I expected, but not surprised.

Halo 5 is indeed an improvement over Halo 4 in terms of storytelling, but with an ensemble cast of eight (plus cutscene focus on Palmer, Lasky, Roland, etc.), it's difficult to really grow any attachment to any character, and there are few things that make any character stand out. Vale can speak Sangheili, Buck wisecracks, but that's it. Defining a character by a single trait is the worst kind of writing, and the Halo 5 writers unfortunately give us too little to work with across the board. Who is Linda? Who is Kelly? Why should the audience care? What makes them special? These questions are never answered, which is frustrating to fans who know these characters outside of the 343i experience, because they are vastly different people, and they are fascinating characters (heck, I'm a tad biased towards one of them).
It's like someone heard that Linda was the team's sniper, and figured that cramming a ton of optics to her helmet was all that people would need in order to understand her.
There was nothing that conveyed that she worked best alone, yet always made sure to have the team's back. There was nothing to show how/why John thought she was the strongest of all of the Spartans. There was nothing to show how important the mission and the team was to her above her own personal safety. There was nothing to show that she was "the best sniper this side of Eridanus"... Heck, if she had not had the sniper rifle on her at all times, there would be absolutely zero evidence that she even was a sniper.

This disconnect unfortunately extends to the playable characters, especially with regards to Locke, who you play as for 12 of the 15 levels. Rather than being a faceless avatar for the player, he's given a character, and a bland character at that. Nothing about him is interesting, he brown-noses like no other, and he makes bad decisions. Are players supposed to dislike him?

Another factor is that despite improved storytelling, Halo 5 makes the huge Titanfall-esque mistake of giving out important plot points during combat. In an attempt to cater to the shooty crowd, characters will often have to compete with the sounds of gunfire and explosions while saying important stuff. This is especially bad during the bleh encounters with the Warden Eternal.

Story aside, the initial missions are pretty boring shooter fare (complete with a "shoot x number of objects to proceed" portion, and a "things explode harmlessly all around you" scripted sequence in the first level), but the game actually gets fun after that. The Meridian levels are probably the most focused and Halo-esque. "Unconfirmed" and "Evacuation" are my favorite levels to play, and follow in the Halo tradition of being earlier levels played through backwards, but with a different context. If the Meridian missions were just two levels instead of four, they'd probably be right up there with the better Halo campaign levels. Unfortunately the missions get pretty forgettable after that, and they blur into each other. Alliance? Enemy Lines? No idea what happens in those levels (and I've played through them numerous times). Clearly nothing important since I could link other levels together to the end with roughly the same story. Maybe you fight the Warden in one of them, and he spews dialogue that you should be listening to, but can't since you're shooting him and his minions? I remember "Battle of Sunaion", because that's where you run around shooting generators like five times.

And the dialogue is probably the worst that I've seen in any recent game (right up there with vanilla Destiny). The cutscene with Roland, Lasky, and Halsey is a series of non sequiturs that only serve to confuse, and the scene goes nowhere. How many times does Cortana have to say "John" before the writers felt sure that players understood their relationship as friends? Why does Blue Team keep asking the Chief questions that he obviously has no idea about? "Chief, where are we?" "Chief, what is that building?" "Chief, what is that console doing"? Dialogue for the sake of dialogue does not make things less confusing.

Co-op play is as fun as ever though, with greater emphasis on sticking together due to the "downed" mechanism that can keep players out of the fight for a long time. And co-op just has more fun moments than being alone with the terrible enemy (and friendly) AI...

Tl;dr: Some really fun missions halfway through, boring boss fights, borderline on-rails vehicle sections, terrible story and writing. Fun co-op, and Legendary difficulty avoids the common pitfalls of bullet-sponge enemies. Definitely one of the better Legendary experiences in the Halo series, and Tim Longo's influence is clearly felt in the design (which is a good thing).
6/10

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Multiplayer

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Halo 5 is a fast-paced shooter with a focus on verticality, reflexes, and improvisation. Is it classic Halo? Not in the slightest. Does it feel like Halo? Oddly enough, yes. Movement, shooting, and combat encounters feel like a natural progression from Reach. Still not quite as polished as it hopefully becomes (Black Ops 3 is pretty much the pinnacle of fluid movement, and the marriage of navigation and combat) in Halo 6, but it's much more focused than it was in Halo 4.

While extremely limited, the offerings in multiplayer are already fun. Some maps work better than others, but for the most part, they are easy to navigate, and lead to great firefight encounters. My favorite multiplayer offering has to be Breakout. Quick elimination gametypes are becoming my ideal form of play, but that's not to say that I don't think Warzone is a fun diversion.

Warzone is the "premiere Halo multiplayer experience", whatever that means. It plays a bit like Tribes and Planetside, and probably wishes it was Battlefield, but it's pretty sloppy. Definitely a hot mess, since it can still be really fun. Snatching a boss kill at the last second, taking out an enemy base's AI defenders, bringing down a tank with a well-placed grenade... All extremely satisfying moments on a constantly-changing battlefield. Warzone no doubt has the best and the worst of what Halo 5 has to offer (the "rich get richer" aspect of it can pretty easily turn matches into lopsided slaughterfests). It's fun for a couple of rounds, but eventually gets tedius because of the lack of variety (hopefully that changes when the promised human flying vehicles allow for a Spire-esque map). I don't feel that it was worth losing Invasion (Warzone Assault is a poor replacement), but for what it's worth, I'm looking forward to see where they take it.

Warzone does help to highlight some of the worst issues in the game's performance, though. Because of long sightlines and action, the problems that curse the game are amplified tenfold. One of the biggest is that players and AI around you will begin to have really choppy animations, which are jarring, and can make combat encounters frustrating (i nsome Warzone maps, distant players flat-out look like 2D characters running around at 15fps, while the game runs at 60. The problem seems worse on Elites, which can have the choppy animation at 5 meters away sometimes (is it 5 meters? I feel like I can't trust the radar...). And some textures get really muddy to the point where it's distracting, but the game runs smoothly, so there's that.

With that in mind, I can't imagine how the game would run in splitscreen, so the loss of that is understandable, even though other games pull that off by cutting the framerate in half (and Black Ops 3 still runs beautifully in Splitscreen). Why they felt the need to cut LAN support as well is also a huge blow to multiplayer for those of us who enjoy LANs (or live in the same house). But them's the breaks.
Custom games are pretty fun. At the moment, a lack of gametype options limits the experience, but 343 has promised more gametypes down the road.

Tl;dr: Despite the abscence of vital objective gametypes such as Assault, KotH, Oddball, and Invasion, the Slayer-centric multiplayer is pretty fun, and weapon balancing is the best that it's ever been (with over 30 guns, that's quite a feat). Definitely building to be a fantastic experience down the road, even if some features had to be cut.
7.5/10

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Forge

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Without Forge, the game would have taken a serious hit, and indeed it didn't launch with it, but better late than never, no?
Turns out it could have cooked a bit longer. Plenty of oversights, missing features, and occasional bugs hamper an otherwise fantastic toolkit. This is definitely the Forge I'd been hoping for for a long time, and hopefully continues to grow in the future. The controls are impressively intuitive, and I was able to whip up a playable map in a fraction of the time that it would have taken me before. Lots of quality-of-life improvements across the board, and we're already seeing people get very creative with the scripting and sandbox (I've even been able to get an Invasion prototype working), even if the available canvases are pretty weak (the space canvas is the smallest, wat?).
There's not a whole lot to say about Forge other than "Great work, 343".

Tl;dr: An impressive toolkit, excellent controls, and lots of player freedom come together in the delayed-but-worthwhile Forge. Hopefully better maps and tools come soon to improve the feature, but for creative types, this is definitely the premiere mapmaking tool on Consoles.
9/10

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Theater

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A vital tool for Halo fans, Theater has led to some fantastic screenshots, machinimas, gameplay clips, panoramas, and even contests... So it's sad to see the feature is a sad shell of its former self. No campaign theater, no custom game theater, and no way to save clips or share them. The only temporary files available have to come from Warzone or non-Forged multiplayer maps, so the added "Machinima tools" are little more than an empty gesture, since they're pretty pointless right now.
What's worse is that the existing saved films are from 343's server, as opposed to the code saved to your console, so the videos aren't synced well, and will not be representative of your actual gameplay.
At this point, I'm surprised that 343 hasn't altogether ditched the tool, since it's been treated so poorly (as opposed to the fantastic feature-rich Theater mode in, say, Black Ops 3).

What sucks is that it has so much potential:

Sad day when Korny only has two screenshots to showcase...

Tl;dr: A terrible release of a once-loved tool, Theater in Halo 5 is laughably bad. I pray that they improve it down the road, but given 343's long history of disappointing Theater, I'm not holding my breath.
1/10

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Overall Thoughts

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After the terrible release of the MCC, expectations for Halo 5 were at an all-time low. But Halo 5 mostly succeeds in distancing itself from that trainwreck. Excellent gameplay and an ever-growing list of features help offset its terrible story and other shortcomings. Though I haven't forgotten their blatant "14 Day Buy And Play" lie to fans, I'm a bit more optimistic and trusting towards 343i than I was before. The butchering of Theater is a real bummer, as is the bastardization of the characters that we have loved in Nylund's novels, but the good in the game evens out (and in some cases outweighs) the bad. I can see myself revisiting Halo 5 plenty of times down the road. The move to free DLC in exchange for microtransactions was definitely a stroke of genius (even if the grind for customization options is some of the worst that I've seen), and hopefully the excellent Forge tool sees plenty of development down the road.

Overall, a pretty solid effort from 343.

7/10