Admittedly, I’m a little rusty on my Halo lore, but I wouldn’t want to spoil anything related to the story anyway, so I’ll try to avoid anything that could be considered a spoiler.
Advertisement
As an outsider to the series, it doesn’t feel particularly welcoming. Master Chief has excelled in his role as saviour before, and if there is anyone who can do it, it’s Master Chief. So far Halo 5 has a more active feel to it, with more seeming options at any given moment due in part to the new abilities at your disposal at any given moment as opposed to the sort of revolving door of temporary abilities that Halo: Reach or Halo 4 would bestow upon you.
That said, it doesn’t seem fair to judge a game’s story elements when you’re not playing from the beginning.
Another improvement made is that every weapon in Halo 5: Guardians has been given an aim down sight function, which has been incorporated into your helmet rather than your gun.
I’m not sure whether or not Halo 5’s campaign is going to make me invested in the story once again after years of indifference, but I can say with certainty that I’m more intrigued about Master Chief’s journey, and the journey of those surrounding him, than I have been since Halo: Combat Evolved. Yes, it might be hard to jump right into the universe if you’re new to the series, but from a gameplay perspective, Halo remains as tight a first-person shooter experience as you can get. Perhaps most damning of all, the first showing of Campaign gameplay came with a set piece-heavy vertical slice at E3. In particular, each mission had a lot of depth. If you knew nothing about Halo, you would’ve assumed that these were two separate and isolated missions by two teams of space marines operating like all-business Navy SEALs.
On top of the screenshots, trailers, and dev commentary, there’s also a radio drama called Hunt the Truth that’s about to get a lot of attention from Halo and sci-fi fans alike.
Still, I wouldn’t characterize the single-player experience as anything unexpected, nor was it particularly engaging or all that hard .
Starting off with the campaign, Halo 5: Guardians has, sadly, scrapped split-screen co-op and have instead opted in for a brand new 4-player campaign mode that makes up for the loss of a friend sitting next to you on the couch. They were just there. The game ramps up the difficulty to account for your human-controlled companions. After hopping in the ultra-maneuverable Phaetons, we took out as much weaponry as we could from the exterior of the Kraken before boarding, shooting the reactor and escaping before the whole thing exploded behind us. But you can give your fireteam contextual commands like “Go To Location, Attack My Target, Use Turret or Vehicle”, even if they’re acting more like distractions or decoy for enemies. The relief and feeling of success after getting past these tough sections was palpable – something that didn’t come across while playing solo.
He continued: “I think that’s fine in that kind of space, but for what we’re doing with our franchise and service ambitions with the Xbox and Xbox Live, having something that has the diversity of Halo and the characters and both the complexity but ease of game play is a unique asset for us”.
Advertisement
Would Halo 5: Guardians be enough to get me to buy an Xbox One? And the intertwining storylines of Master Chief and Agent Locke don’t feel all that different from the dual narratives of The Arbiter and Chief. It’s just one of the myriad Spartan abilities that are meant to set Halo 5: Guardians apart from its predecessors.
