Halo 4

It sure is Halo.

This phrase - an accurate description of Halo 4 - will mean different things to different people. To some it will herald the dawn of a new age - the 343 Industries era of Halo. They will see this statement to be a congratulatory handshake to a team who worked hard to remain faithful to a series people love.

It should be seen this way, because no matter what you think of the Halo series, 343 set out with a task - make a Halo game worth the number four - and they did so admirably. They put their own spin on it, too - adding elements like sprinting and more armour abilities into the Master Chief's repertoire - but at the end of the day they appear to have worked their darnedest to make a Halo game, and that is exactly what they achieved.

To some people, this will not be enough. To some the Master Chief didn't need to be roused from his slumber to take part in another fight - and Halo 4 is definitely about starting another fight. The anti-religion allegory is laid on thicker in 4 than it ever was before - no small feat for the series - as a fanatical section of the Covenant boards our hero's vessel and he's forced to battle through them. For all of this though, it seems like MC might actually throw the first punch.

After just straight wrecking Covenant warships, the Chief and Cortana go shooting their way through a Forerunner planet - a startlingly beautiful place, part terraforma, part machine. You might notice that I mentioned Cortana above - the relationship between MC and Cortana plays a huge role in Halo 4, though I personally don't understand why.

Cortana is eight years old when the game begins - an apparently terrifying revelation, because AIs can only live for seven years before they begin to fall apart. Naturally she has to explain all this to you because the average person has no knowledge of the arbitrary lifespans of artificial intelligences. She suffers at the hands of Rampancy - apparently the AI begins to think itself to death - and through the game her Rampancy rears its head to screw our armoured hero around.

Watching as she slowly marches towards "death" is supposed to be touching, I guess, but for me it was about as touching as watching my PC reboot. I guess I need something more than an increase in chest size to begin caring about her - and Master Chief's showing close to no emotion about the situation certainly didn't help.

On the Forerunner planet you get the opportunity to fight a new enemy - the Prometheans. These come as a welcome relief to continuing MC's genocidal efforts against the many species of the Covenant - though naturally the Master Chief wastes no time eradicating another alien species from the galaxy mere moments after meeting it for the first time. Sadly the Prometheans almost all fit into traditional roles - though there is hope here.

The shielded Knights are Elites who can teleport and the Crawlers are Grunts who can run up walls - which means that both exhibit far more mobility than the Covenant, but ultimately never really do anything different. The Watcher - a hovering pain in the arse who can resurrect fallen Prometheans and shield them from damage - are the only real new enemies here. They are harassers who seem to be all holes - impervious to every other bullet I shot at them as it zipped through their geometry - and when they caught my grenades and threw them back at me I was delighted and crushed at the same time.

Speaking of grenades - the Prometheans bring with them new weapons. They're pretty, following the Tron theme of the enemy faction themselves, but they're ultimately just different versions of weapons you already have. The shotgun variant called the Scattershot is heavily reminiscent of the Flak Cannon from Unreal Tournament, but the rest are largely forgettable.

Still, the combat overall leaves much to be desired. Halo is so rigid in its linearity that the player is forced to learn gunfight sequences by rote - remember where the snipers are, make sure you find the Watcher quickly to put him down, memorise where extra ammo is.

There's very little reactive gameplay, because the path of least resistance is by way of recall. It's reminiscent of arcade games where players chase high scores - like a Bullet Hell game if you don't remember exact positions you risk being overwhelmed quickly. This has its own appeal - especially on the harder difficulties - but instead of rewarding players with bragging rights (by way of high scores), for the average player Halo 4 rewards you with a mediocre story.

This is reinforced in the rigid way some sections of the game insist you kill everything before you can move on does it no favours either - to play Halo 4 is to complete a chore, and that chore is murderous xenophobia.

Still, the game does feature some gorgeous set pieces and wonderful concepts. When you pilot a Pelican from one massive spire to another, Halo 4 evokes a sense of scale unrivalled in any other game. The missions on the Mammoth - a massive three story vehicle - are awesome in the literal sense of the word too. It's just a shame that so much of the game winds up being Master Chief moving from gunfight to gunfight along endless alien corridors.



The sound of Halo 4 is way off base. Not the soundtrack - a beautiful orchestral score worthy of the previous games in the series. No, I mean the sound effects. The way the boop-boop-boop warning of your depleted shield is drowned out by the sound of battle, the way the laser weapons of the Prometheans all sound the same in the generic way they Pew, Pew, Pew things to death. The overly dramatic way that Cortana emotes - and when Rampancy takes hold, the way she occasionally becomes unintelligible.

It's a stark contrast to the visuals, which must surely be pushing the Xbox to its very limits. The cutscenes are gorgeous - they fully convey the Space Soap Opera feel of the story through a rich use of colour and almost realistic human figures. In-game things continue to look great - though obviously not as good as the cut-scenes. The fact that the game requires two discs - one for the seven hour long singleplayer, one for the multiplayer - makes sense when you see the game looking this good.

Speaking of multiplayer, some things don't add up. There's an underlying sense that at best the only new elements to the game's MP are borrowed. The Ordinance is clearly a nod to the Call of Duty series' Killstreak system, though the streak continues when you die. So too, the leveling system is the sort of carrot we've come to expect from Activision's game (though it obviously didn't start there.) The worst thing is that these are unnecessary additions to the game - people might appreciate the very obvious way they can track their progress, but it's not exactly a pure Halo experience, is it?

There are other elements where the game makes curious decisions for reasons I can't fathom. In a match of Infinity Slayer (Team Deathmatch) - where the goal sees each team race to 600 points, the points earned by each player on each team at the end of the game added up to 980 to 900. Obviously the game was only adding points for kills - but why? Why have us race to a point total when we're really counting kills?

If you ignore these issues (and the last one is quite nitpicky), the multiplayer is great. The addition of the Sprint button (carried across from single player) moves the game along at a lightning pace, and the way spawns put you all over the map means your death can come from anywhere at any time. In games like Battlefield and Call of Duty you almost always know where your enemy will be, but thanks to good use of speed and verticality, you do well to check your six every now and then. It's not as fast - or as vertical - as Tribes Ascend, for example, but burdened with the controller it seems like it's as fast as it should be.

Also in multiplayer is the impressive Spartan Ops - a story-based co-op game designed to extend your game beyond that of Master Chief. You revisit areas you play from the singleplayer campaign - now battling through them for different reasons and with other players. It's promising new content every couple of weeks and it's more Halo, which is exactly what some people want. Free content is free content - and there's nothing not to like about that.

If you look at Halo 4 as a handful of experiences - the great moments you have in multiplayer, the handful of awe-inspiring set pieces from the singleplayer - it will certainly stand the nostalgic test of time. This is what some people want, I guess - which is why they look back at Halo as a series which hasn't had as many downs as it has ups.

I look at the series as one which never lived up to its potential. It changed the way people looked at consoles when it first came out. It proved the impossible possible. Since then though, the games have been content to give us more of the same - mistaking reverence for Halo as awe for the story and the game world when it was really just well-deserved respect, slowly diminishing. 343 Industries had the opportunity to abandon the burdens brought by Bungie's attachment to the series, but they didn't seize it as they should have.

Making a Halo game must be an incredible burden. The series made so little progress during Bungie's tenure that now any changes might feel like a violation - the game wouldn't feel like Halo. Even in this review I criticise their attempts to grow the multiplayer while criticising the single player for failing to grow at all.

Yet where I praise the game - for doing things Halo has always done - don't make the mistake of thinking I'm praising it for being like Halo. Those things I praise - the gorgeous Pelican mission, for example - are 'Halo elements' because the first game delivered missions of that grandeur, and they are now universally recognised as excellent elements to have in a game. The praise isn't for being like Halo - it's for featuring parts of a good game. Similarly, when I criticise the multiplayer for moving away from the Halo model it's not for the movement, but more that it copies the steps of other games (which do it better, and are now abandoning that dance for something greater.)

The greatest praise and strongest criticism I can level at Halo 4 is that it sure is Halo.



An edit has been made to this review - the word more has been added while describing Armour Abilities. I apologise for this mistake.