"Halo 5: Guardians" Single Player Review

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Halo 5: Guardians is the tenth game in the signature XBox gaming console series that spans 3 generations of consoles and the PC.  (Halo: Wars, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, Halo: Spartan Assault, and Halo: Spartan Strike are unnumbered editions).  This year, on October 27, the game was released following a seven hour live stream.  I was very excited about this game, having preordered the special edition XBox One to play it on.  After getting home from work, I tapped the XBox One and was greeted by the futuristic power up sound, and sat down to dive into the game.

Halo 5: Guardians Limited Edition XBox One

Blue Team: Linda-058, Frederick-104, John-117, Kelly-087

Halo 5 introduced a lot of new features to the game.  One drastically changed the way the game is enjoyed from the way almost every other Halo game was played.  This was that the developers removed the classic split-screen cooperative mode, sometimes referred to as 'couch co-op.'  Instead, the developers choose to integrate a co-op system which forced players to connect over XBox Live, and giving players the choice of controlling one of four characters in each level.  This system led to a change in the style of play the game had, because even when playing the campaign alone, like I did, the four characters were in each level.  Instead of being a one man army fighting the hordes of aliens as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, the levels had either Fireteam Osiris, a team of four newly introduced SPARTAN super soldiers, or as Blue Team, some of the original SPARTANs led by John-117, making the game more of a squad based tactical FPS.  However, your squad members become little more than bullet sponges that are passively useful as they chase after you shooting at enemies with far less sophistication than most of the artificially-intelligent enemies they encounter, leaving you to do not just the heavy lifting, but babysitting them to keep them going.  This squad system also introduces a new 'death' mechanic.  Instead of having to respawn after being taken down by enemy fire, like in every other Halo game, instead you can 'save' your fallen teammates, and they can save you, keeping you from having to endlessly replay the same tough segments and offering you a chance to keep progressing if you and your team can keep you standing.  (If the AI teammates die, they respawn with no adverse affect on your progress, but player teammates must be saved.)  The problem is that when playing alone, your teammates will charge directly to you in order to save you, sometimes getting themselves killed themselves, and resulting in you respawning from a previous checkpoint.

Fireteam Osiris:  Tanaka, Locke, Vale, Buck

As for the campaign itself, you start off playing as SPARTAN Jameson Locke (Mike Colter), a former Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) acquisitions agent, and his SPARTAN Fireteam Osiris, featuring Halo 3: ODST star Edward Buck (Nathan Fillion).  They are sent to recover Dr. Catherine Halsey, who was kidnapped by the Covenant Remnant in Halo 4's Spartan Ops side story.  After killing the leader of the Covenant Remnant, Locke & Co discover that Halsey has found that someone is raising the Forerunner constructs known as Guardians.  These Guardians are the focus of the campaign, as where they're coming from become, what their purpose is, and who is controlling them is the big reveal of this game.  

Now, the second mission has Blue Team investigating a missing ONI ship, which you find out was researching biological weapons to use against what's left of the Covenant.  The ship, however, is overrun with Covenant forces trying to steal technology.  Master Chief and his Team are forced to destroy the vessel.  While in the process, Master Chief is knocked unconsious, and the game starts to take a turn toward the a mystery:  Cortana beckons John to the planet Meridian, saying "the Reclamation is at hand."  Since Cortana was reported lost at the end of Halo 4, you wonder if John is just hallucinating, but John is convinced he has to follow her call.  At the end of the mission, he learns Osiris is on their way to investigate, and John decides he has to get their first.

I'll stop the spoilers here.  The above summarized the first two missions.  That said, I found the rest of the game somewhere between awesome and good.  The story is intriguing, but at parts it feels like it could have been so much better.  Having the two groups of characters makes the game feel too different from the Halo games you love.  In Halo 4, the death of Cortana set up a great story arc that could have been used to develop the Master Chief, the generally 'personality'-less protagonist meant to allow the player to feel like they're the hero, instead of just playing a hero.  Instead, they spring seven new and vaguely interesting characters, and you barely play as the series chief hero, pun intended.  Instead, the game ultimately comes off as just a huge ad for Halo 6, the inevitable sequel, where the feeling of wanting what's to come is greater than the satisfaction you should feel from a well experienced story.  Halo 4 leaves you heart-broken for Chief after watching him lose what could be called his "True Love" (because lets face it, Chief and Cortana had a thing despite one being a inside of a machine, and the other being an Artificial Intelligence) Do you see what I did there?  Halo 5 just leaves you going "Man why couldn't we play THAT game now?"  The plot twist is rather surprising, and I actually saw part of it coming after learning about the Composer and how the Forerunners tech worked in Halo 4, so it's worth while, but it's not done well enough to be a real shocker by the time you get to it.  (Bioshock's plot twist was epic in its reveal and how it made you feel)  Instead you're just like, "Okay that makes sense," and ready to move on.  The 'best' part of it is sadly at the very end, and by then you want so badly for a certain outcome that is clearly not going to happen.

Ultimately, I'd give the game about a 7.5 out of 10.  I don't like the changes to game-play, as despite the rescue mechanic saving you some time, it ultimately makes you wait even longer when you severely screw up for a chance to try something else.  Also, many of the levels play the same way, and instead of facing a variety of opponents with tactics that adapt to your playing, like in previous games, you either fight the same enemies fighting the same ways, or huge hordes of enemies you have to wade through and hope your AI partners can pick up some of the slack.  The game is probably awesome with friends, as the squad mechanics would allow for actual tactics to be used, and the banter between the characters is enjoyable, but nothing matches Sergeant Johnson's gung ho Marine chatter or Cortana's sharp sarcastic wit.  All we really have left from the original three games is Chief, and he's an observer in his own story.

For those looking for a Halo 5 Review

Hey just a quick post.  For those looking for the Halo 5 review, I'll try to do that this coming weekend.  I didn't get to play it this weekend and I still have to dig into the Multiplayer.  This weekend was not kind to my free time, or my productivity.  Also Happy National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  I'll let you know my plans for it tomorrow.

Off Topic: Halo

Video Games!

So yesterday, after I got home from work, a nice little box was on our front porch.  Inside sat my new game system, in all it's silvery-black glory.  I know that Microsoft did an unboxing so if you want to see what's inside, I posted the video below.

So after letting the system update all night and all the next day, I'm looking forward to playing with it.  But the bad news?  Halo 5 isn't playable until next Tuesday.  So instead, I'll be "blastin' and relaxin'" with The Halo Master Chief Collection... once that downloads.

Halo is an interesting story.  I'm not going to even try to summarize over a decade of world building that I still don't know everything about.  However, I love the story too much not to talk about.

When I first played it I was drawn into the world not so much by the theme, or the gun-fighting, or the level design, but by the atmosphere created by Bungie's brilliant decision to not make the protagonist a strong personality.  So what do I mean by that.  Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, the grand hero of the series, was practically a blank slate in the first game.  Sure, he talked.  He wasn't the silent Doom hero who just grunted as you blasted demons.  But instead, what little you got from him allowed you to project your self into his Olive Green armor.  Bungie pulled you in by making you feel like the Hero.  No past was offered.  He's not even referred to by name until the second game.  Everyone called you Chief, and that's who you were.  The only Spartan left.  Some NPCs even suggested you were a robot.  Maybe you were!  There were no novels yet.  No animated shorts.  No Halo Channel or Sequels or ODST spin offs.  Just "Halo: Combat Evolved."  The first game most Xbox players owned because it came with most consoles.  And while all the critics talked about how Xbox had no chance of standing up to the Playstation 2, hundreds, thousands, millions of people were blasting Covies and saving the universe from the Flood, probably one of the most terrifying things I'd ever seen in a video game at the time, and I used to play Resident Evil 2 in the basement at night.  (Once the power went out while I was playing and I flipped out.  When the flood first poured out of the floor in The Library, it was daytime.  I still flipped out.)

That's why that box was sitting on my porch.  The game- no the story got me where Bungie wanted it to.  Right in the "You can be a hero and save the world" part of every teenagers heart and mind.  That "you can do anything" mentality that makes classics stick with people for so long.  And now over ten years later (nearly 14 in fact) I still love Halo.  The story has gotten deeper, wider, multileveled.  Instead of the idealistic Humans vs Aliens story of the first game, pitting the human spirit of survival against a genocidal confederation of alien races, it's now much more.  Now the good guys aren't so good, the bad guys aren't so bad.  Maybe it's because the world has changed.  The post-terrorist universe of the early 2000s has been replaced by skepticism and a world were it's hard to really know what's best, and who's good, and who's bad.  But I promised no politics, so I'll just leave by saying that Halo has evolved with the times.  They've created a fascinating world that's as multifaceted as our real world.  But under it all, that fantasy of being the hero remains.  John-117 stands as the consummate hero in a universe filled with treacherous covert organizations, dangerous terrorists both alien and human, and the ever present threat of the unknown, and fights to bring those who value "the greater good"  together to keep the innocent safe.

Went from idealism to realism back to idealism.  Most of the great stories do that the best.  I hope my own tale can touch on this.  I'm sure my first novel won't have even close to the depth of a franchise 14 years in the making, despite being almost as old (in concept, at least).  So one day, when readers have a copy of my novel in their hands, digital or paper, I hope someone gets as inspired by my work as many were by Halo.