Maybe it is because of the introduction of seven new characters to which you need to provide a history and motivation for, but Halo 5’s story just felt dry.
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“Guardians” represents the second mainline “Halo” game from developer 343 Industries.
Guardians is available now, only on Xbox One.
They were meant to be lies.
Warzone, which has been the biggest surprise and my greatest joy of Halo 5, is a game mode in which two teams of 12 battle it out for dominance of three control points. From the Halo: Nightfall series all the way to the final episodes of Season 2 of the HUNT the TRUTH podcast series, 343 Industries is trying to set up that a cover-up might be happening. For a series that is most well known for her story elements and most recently being one of the last few FPS games that offer a campaign, it is sad to see her drop so low in this regard. The team somewhat changed how a Halo campaign should work and the result was horrendous.
The Halo franchise has over the years been a key player in making the Xbox line of consoles what it is today.
In terms of the campaign, you get to be a part of one of the two four-four Spartan teams, Jameson Locke’s Fireteam Osiris or Master Chief’s Blue Team. This could be seen, if you look at Halo 5’s marketing as ONI spin, as another way to peg the Master Chief as a traitor, willing to kill another Spartan. This kind of design makes Halo 5’s campaign ripe for replaying, and well suited for the convenient drop-in, four-player (online-only) co-op it’s clearly made for. In Halo 5, you have at your disposal massive machines, aircrafts and tanks making everything feel a little larger than life. Unfortunately, Halo 5’s marketing doesn’t help in that instance. The Microsoft-owned 343 Industries is more capable as it proved itself in Halo 4, but it does not address what went wrong in Halo 4 such as an unexplained main villain, or doing more of what it did right like the emotional storyline and a varying gameplay.
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“Guardians” release date had already passed, and its gamers have already been itching for a new story-based downloadable content, or DLC, for it. With a story that is entirely dependent on players listening to all the audio-dramas, reading the books, watching shows, and checking out comics, Halo is turning into a franchise with an expanded universe that seems more important than the games themselves. And that itself is cause for Halo 5: Guardians to be simply an outline on how the Halo narrative is told moving forward. Neither does Halo 5 pretend to be anything it isn’t: “it is Halo multiplayer through and through, win if you can, survive if it lets you, using strict arsenal provisions”.
