343 Industries’ first new Halo game, Halo 4, was underwhelming to say the least. Much like I said in my review, it looked good and it certainly tried to tell a more complex character driven story than the previous Halo titles did, but it fell flat because of sloppy execution. So does Halo 5: Guardians recover from this and go on to achieve greatness or does it repeat the same mistakes of its predecessor?
Hunt the Truth. That was Halo 5’s whole marketing schtick. We were given snippets of information relating to Master Chief having gone AWOL, glimpses of Chief raising giant Forerunner structures from the ground, and introduced to the man tasked with finding out just what Chief is up to, Spartan Locke.
Following the conclusion of Halo 4’s Spartan Ops, Spartan Locke and Fireteam Osiris have located Dr. Catherine Halsey and her captor Jul ‘Mdama, leader of the splinter Covenant army you battled throughout Halo 4, after months of searching. Upon rescuing her and slaying ‘Mdama, Halsey informs you that the attacks on colonies throughout the galaxy have been a result of Cortana accessing Promethean technology and raising ‘Guardians’.
Meanwhile Master Chief and the members of Blue Team are busy clearing out ‘Mdama’s forces from a UNSC base when Chief is contacted by Cortana. Having believed her to be dead, Chief backed by Blue Team goes AWOL in search of answers.
You then play as both Locke, and Chief as you both work towards the same objective of finding Cortana, although for two very different reasons. Chief wants to recover Cortana, stop her from raising the Guardians, and take her to Halsey who he believes will be able to help. Whereas Locke seeks to destroy Cortana before she does any more damage.
In many ways it feels reminiscent of Halo 2’s campaign as it tells the story from two opposing perspectives and also has a mighty big cliff-hanger for an ending that feels as though half the game is missing.
This is the problem, I really like Halo 5’s story, but it is rather short and ends just as it starts to get good, so I can understand where many of the criticisms come from.
Halo 5 does a very poor job at actually telling you what the story is about, or who all the new characters are. However, it’s actually an incredible story if you have ingested almost all the extended universe material like books, films, and comics. I won’t use that in defence of the game not properly explaining itself but I will say that you’ll certainly enjoy the game more if you go into it prepared, rather than just being confused from the off when you suddenly have all these characters that have never been in the games before being in major roles with no explanation as to who they are.
The squad members in Fireteam Osiris and Blue Team are not very well fleshed out over the course of Halo 5 and they don’t feel present a lot of the time. Whilst Blue Team has certainly had a lot of stories involving them in the books, this is the first time they turn up in the game and they don’t really do anything. Honestly if Chief was on his own it would make a whole lot more sense because they follow him just out of blind loyalty rather than any personal investment in what he is doing.
Fireteam Osiris meanwhile is a mixed bag. Locke was introduced in the Halo Nightfall series, so if you’ve seen that you get to know a fair bit about him there, but his character doesn’t really develop beyond that. Buck is instantly recognisable to anyone who’s played Halo 3: ODST, but again he doesn’t get any character development and we don’t really know how he because a Spartan after formerly being an ODST. Then you have Olympia Vale and Holly Tanaka who are given no formal introduction in any Halo related material (prior to Halo 5’s launch) from what I can tell and also don’t do anything in the story. We’re given mere morsels about who they are but it’s not really enough to form a character out of these people.
Halo 5 is all about the scale and spectacle and leaves the characters on the side-lines in stark contrast to Halo 4’s comparatively much smaller scale, character focused story. So, whilst the events of Halo 5’s story are pretty great, the people that take you through it feel generally devoid of character and purpose.
Hunt the Truth. That was Halo 5’s whole marketing schtick. We were given snippets of information relating to Master Chief having gone AWOL, glimpses of Chief raising giant Forerunner structures from the ground, and introduced to the man tasked with finding out just what Chief is up to, Spartan Locke.
Following the conclusion of Halo 4’s Spartan Ops, Spartan Locke and Fireteam Osiris have located Dr. Catherine Halsey and her captor Jul ‘Mdama, leader of the splinter Covenant army you battled throughout Halo 4, after months of searching. Upon rescuing her and slaying ‘Mdama, Halsey informs you that the attacks on colonies throughout the galaxy have been a result of Cortana accessing Promethean technology and raising ‘Guardians’.
Meanwhile Master Chief and the members of Blue Team are busy clearing out ‘Mdama’s forces from a UNSC base when Chief is contacted by Cortana. Having believed her to be dead, Chief backed by Blue Team goes AWOL in search of answers.
You then play as both Locke, and Chief as you both work towards the same objective of finding Cortana, although for two very different reasons. Chief wants to recover Cortana, stop her from raising the Guardians, and take her to Halsey who he believes will be able to help. Whereas Locke seeks to destroy Cortana before she does any more damage.
In many ways it feels reminiscent of Halo 2’s campaign as it tells the story from two opposing perspectives and also has a mighty big cliff-hanger for an ending that feels as though half the game is missing.
This is the problem, I really like Halo 5’s story, but it is rather short and ends just as it starts to get good, so I can understand where many of the criticisms come from.
Halo 5 does a very poor job at actually telling you what the story is about, or who all the new characters are. However, it’s actually an incredible story if you have ingested almost all the extended universe material like books, films, and comics. I won’t use that in defence of the game not properly explaining itself but I will say that you’ll certainly enjoy the game more if you go into it prepared, rather than just being confused from the off when you suddenly have all these characters that have never been in the games before being in major roles with no explanation as to who they are.
The squad members in Fireteam Osiris and Blue Team are not very well fleshed out over the course of Halo 5 and they don’t feel present a lot of the time. Whilst Blue Team has certainly had a lot of stories involving them in the books, this is the first time they turn up in the game and they don’t really do anything. Honestly if Chief was on his own it would make a whole lot more sense because they follow him just out of blind loyalty rather than any personal investment in what he is doing.
Fireteam Osiris meanwhile is a mixed bag. Locke was introduced in the Halo Nightfall series, so if you’ve seen that you get to know a fair bit about him there, but his character doesn’t really develop beyond that. Buck is instantly recognisable to anyone who’s played Halo 3: ODST, but again he doesn’t get any character development and we don’t really know how he because a Spartan after formerly being an ODST. Then you have Olympia Vale and Holly Tanaka who are given no formal introduction in any Halo related material (prior to Halo 5’s launch) from what I can tell and also don’t do anything in the story. We’re given mere morsels about who they are but it’s not really enough to form a character out of these people.
Halo 5 is all about the scale and spectacle and leaves the characters on the side-lines in stark contrast to Halo 4’s comparatively much smaller scale, character focused story. So, whilst the events of Halo 5’s story are pretty great, the people that take you through it feel generally devoid of character and purpose.
Halo 5: Guardians sees the greatest shift in gameplay mechanics since the series first released. Whilst Halo: Reach introduced armour abilities, and Halo 4 made sprinting permanent. Halo 5 adds in iron sights, and a permanent jet booster ability which allows you to evade incoming fire. You can also pull yourself up onto ledges to give the game greater verticality.
You’ll often find yourself sprinting and boosting from cover to cover in order to climb to a higher vantage point to be able to take enemies out from a greater distance. This simultaneously speeds up the pace of gameplay, whilst also breaking the flow. Because you can now aim down sights at your targets your traditional firing mode is considerably less accurate than usual. On top of this your shield recharge tends to take longer than it has done in any Halo game prior, and if your health completely depletes then you go down rather than die, even when playing solo, as you always have three teammates with you at all times. In solo play these are controlled by the computer and it’s among the dumbest friendly A.I I’ve ever come across as it’s incapable of having anything more than one task on its mind at any one time. All squad members will attack the same enemies, or if someone goes down, stop shooting at anything and walk over to revive the squad member. Nine times out of ten going down is a death sentence anyway because your teammates will be either too slow to react to you being downed, or just get themselves killed in the process of trying to revive someone because they won’t defend themselves whilst they go about this task.
Because of the increased firepower at your disposal, you will face larger numbers of enemy forces. Thankfully the Covenant forces behave no differently to how they did in Halo 4 and are a joy to battle against (apart from Hunters who are massively overpowered in this game). The Promethean enemies have had some alterations, however. Crawlers now come in two varieties, one has more health and so takes more bullets to kill being the only difference. Then comes a new enemy variant, the Soldier. These are basically the equivalent to Halo 4’s Knights but aren’t quite as strong. The Knights also return but this time round are now basically invulnerable from the front (similar to Hunters), plus they can still spawn in Watchers which really ruin everyone’s day because they will shield everything and throw all your grenades back at you until you destroy them. The Prometheans are more fun to fight in Halo 5 than they were in Halo 4, but I think it’s because you have other people fighting alongside you. Promethean encounters in Halo 4 were very overwhelming even early on in the game so to have more than one gun shooting at them this time is very helpful.
You’ll often find yourself sprinting and boosting from cover to cover in order to climb to a higher vantage point to be able to take enemies out from a greater distance. This simultaneously speeds up the pace of gameplay, whilst also breaking the flow. Because you can now aim down sights at your targets your traditional firing mode is considerably less accurate than usual. On top of this your shield recharge tends to take longer than it has done in any Halo game prior, and if your health completely depletes then you go down rather than die, even when playing solo, as you always have three teammates with you at all times. In solo play these are controlled by the computer and it’s among the dumbest friendly A.I I’ve ever come across as it’s incapable of having anything more than one task on its mind at any one time. All squad members will attack the same enemies, or if someone goes down, stop shooting at anything and walk over to revive the squad member. Nine times out of ten going down is a death sentence anyway because your teammates will be either too slow to react to you being downed, or just get themselves killed in the process of trying to revive someone because they won’t defend themselves whilst they go about this task.
Because of the increased firepower at your disposal, you will face larger numbers of enemy forces. Thankfully the Covenant forces behave no differently to how they did in Halo 4 and are a joy to battle against (apart from Hunters who are massively overpowered in this game). The Promethean enemies have had some alterations, however. Crawlers now come in two varieties, one has more health and so takes more bullets to kill being the only difference. Then comes a new enemy variant, the Soldier. These are basically the equivalent to Halo 4’s Knights but aren’t quite as strong. The Knights also return but this time round are now basically invulnerable from the front (similar to Hunters), plus they can still spawn in Watchers which really ruin everyone’s day because they will shield everything and throw all your grenades back at you until you destroy them. The Prometheans are more fun to fight in Halo 5 than they were in Halo 4, but I think it’s because you have other people fighting alongside you. Promethean encounters in Halo 4 were very overwhelming even early on in the game so to have more than one gun shooting at them this time is very helpful.
Halo 4’s visuals were among the best part of that game, but unfortunately Halo 5 doesn’t seem to have progressed much further despite being built for the Xbox One instead of the Xbox 360. Skyboxes are significantly more complex, there are more enemies on screen, and environments are larger than in Halo 4, but the visual fidelity has not markedly improved. The score this time around is composed by Kazuma Jinnouchi and despite still not being as memorable as Marty O’Donnell’s work on the Bungie Halo titles, it’s pretty good for the most part. It gets the sense of scale across pretty well, and the combat music makes your blood pump faster, but I can’t say I necessarily remember any songs in particular that stand out.
Halo 5 is a mixed bag. It’s my least favourite Halo to play because it feels the least Halo. If anything, it plays more similarly to the sci-fi Call of Duty games than it does Halo. But the story is among my favourite in the series. I can understand how to some it’ll be their least favourite as it does little to explain much of what’s happening, but if like me you’re a fan of the books, films, comics etc. then you’ll have a good time with Halo 5’s story.
Halo 5 is a mixed bag. It’s my least favourite Halo to play because it feels the least Halo. If anything, it plays more similarly to the sci-fi Call of Duty games than it does Halo. But the story is among my favourite in the series. I can understand how to some it’ll be their least favourite as it does little to explain much of what’s happening, but if like me you’re a fan of the books, films, comics etc. then you’ll have a good time with Halo 5’s story.
STORY: 7/10
GAMEPLAY: 6/10
PRESENTATION: 9/10
LIFESPAN: 6/10
SCORE: 6/10
Whilst I prefer Halo 5 to Halo 4 in many ways, it still pales in comparison to the Bungie titles. I’m not holding out much hope for future 343 Halo titles, but I do keep my fingers crossed that one day the series will return to its former glory.