I just plain don't like 343i's art style. The S-IV multiplayer armor is overly busy and silly-looking in a whole number of ways, the new and redesigned weapons like the rocket launcher, hydra and prophet's bane look lame, dull and/or incongruous with the rest of the designs, and the environments, particularly the covenant architecture, is just plain unpleasant to look at and doesn't look much like anything in any of the previous games outside of the hollowed-out giant insect that seems to make up the harvester. Lighting and color usage on some of the maps is terrible. Truth is the worst, with everything in the map looking the same, and too dark at that.

And it feels like they're catering far too heavily towards e-sports, even down to making the "War Games" aspect of it even more pronounced. The weapon selection is incredibly boring. Kill cams, in-game timers, intros and outros and far too much talking both from the announcer and the spartans themselves make it feel like the game over-explains itself and tries to hard to justify the multiplayer mode's existence. It makes even a simple gametype like slayer seem far more complicated than it needs to be.

While not all of that is necessarily bad, the multiplayer doesn't the same elegant simplicity and "magic" of previous Halo multiplayers, even Halo 4 to an extent.