Promise me you'll figure out which one of us is the machine.
I like to try and form my own opinions when I come across a game, which is why I can look past things like the ingrained general dislike towards Death Stranding to find a genuinely special experience that I resonated with there, or through the unconditional love for the original Halo games to conclude that Halo 3 didn't quite live up to it's direct predecessor in my opinion. I intentionally avoided reading opinions and pieces about Halo 4 and assumed it was just going to be a more modern take on the franchise that would push things one step further than Reach did, given that this was a newer game. So in that sense I hope you can understand that what you're seeing here actually is my own opinion and not words implanted in my mouth from diehards of the franchise. I'm not a diehard, I'm hardly 3 weeks into my own discovery of these games. Take that to heart as you read through my review, and bare in mind I won't hold back on spoilers because they are important to discussing a lot of my feelings on this entry in particular, and jump to the summary if you don't want details but still wish to know my overall take on the game and grade.
Gameplay
The clear and obvious pursuit of 'modernisation' lies at the heart of many of the design decisions that went into Halo 4, and whilst they may have been criticised over the years as 'attempts to copy Call of Duty', I think a desire to be as accessible-as-the-competitor-shooters was the real driving intention here. For one, this is a game that smothers you in waypoints the way any other shooter would, distinctly different to the way that Halo has, up until now, been a series with notably few waypoints which instead relied on it's general level design to point you where to go unless the objective is really out of the way. (Which has lead to the occasional moment of being utterly lost on some more sprawling levels in the past.) Also new are 'gameplay cinematics' in which something special will happen when you press a Quick Time Event button. There aren't too many of these in Halo 4, but in the places they do appear, it's just as lacking in impact as this practise has often been criticised for. (The final boss is three QTE's away from death; talk about anti-climatic) And then there is the sprinting.
Fans of the Halo games will tear each other's throats out over opinions regarding whether sprinting should be in the series; or rather whether it should be as accessible as it is here. In Halo Reach you could pick up a sprinting power-up, but that would lock you off from the other potential powerups the game had to offer, making it a toss up. And that implementation sort of made sense when you consider the fact that you're piloting a heavy Spartan suit of armour, the light-jog movement of typical Halo play conveys a little bit of that weight. In Halo 4 you can just sprint, whenever you want and with whatever other powerup you want, and I'm fine with it. It brings the movement suite of this FPS in line with other modern FPS', and whilst there is the matter of narrative inconsistencies it's mere presence raises, I don't think it ruins the feeling of the game at all. If anything it added an extra movement tool for dealing with more deadly enemies such as Hunters. Others may disagree that the franchise was free without running, but I don't think the spirit of the series was disgraced in anyway. Topic resolved? Good, let's move onto the weapons.
Halo 4 introduced a whole suite of new weapons, including reworks to all the existing ones, but it's here where some of my problems start. First of all, there's a big continuity error in that these new models of USMC guns appear in the first level despite that mission being set in The Forward Unto Dawn ship-half which has been floating abandoned in space for the past four years; it shouldn't have these new models stocked. Secondly, 343 went out and recorded real gun sounds to try and change up the suite of weapon noises in the game, and in doing so made every single gun sound weaker. Let this be a lesson that realism doesn't equal quality; because so many weapons have had their 'punch' totally yanked out of the all-important sound design that it feels a bit criminal, too many classic weapons flounder whilst lacking that all important satisfaction factor. (There's nothing wrong with sprucing up sounds in the editing bay, come on guys!) At least the new SAW sounds good and the shotgun actually works as something worth a damn again. I haven't liked the shotgun this much since 'Combat Evolved'.
And now we come to the elephant in the room, the one thing we have to talk about when mentioning Halo 4's gameplay; the enemies. The Covenant return, for a reason hardly even mentioned in the entire main campaign, which is welcome even if they didn't bring their Brutes. This Covenant are lighter dressed than the old guard, which might explain why they're generally so much easier to take down, and the Sniper Jackals now sport a helpful red glow to their rangefinders so you can spot them when they're bearing down on you. Grunts still can't survive a headshot (Reach's Grunts are laughing somewhere) and Elites felt much rarer and didn't appear to ever show up in groups like they once did. But the Covenant are such a diverse and fun enemy, it's never not-fun to go up against them, so even when they're not exactly at their toughest I still like stomping their face in. Oh, and their new guns are alright additions, nothing crazy. (I much prefer the new Human gun; the SAW.) But those aren't the enemies we need to talk about. No, it's the Prometheans.
A brand new race added to the lore for this game, or rather an expansion upon the Forerunner guardians that 343 liked to deploy in the original trilogy; the Prometheans are a synthetic race with their own new design and arsenal of weapons, taking on the 'third species' slot from the, presumably-now-extinct, Flood. They are awful. In every way. Their visual design sports this shard-like cobbled together look that is indictive of other 'vaguely advanced alien races' in fiction, and it doesn't look good. It makes shape edges indistinct and ensures that enemies, weapons and the environment (all of which sport this design theme to some degree) meld into one gloop. Their 'white with glowing orange' colour scheme doesn't excite the palette of the game at all, and each level sporting their architecture made me want to fall to sleep just from looking at the uniform chaos of their form. But it gets worse.
The enemies themselves are a nightmare and nowhere near as fun to fight as the Covenant, or even Halo 3's Flood. (I consider Halo 3's Flood the most frustrating out of their iterations. CE's were my favourite to fight.) The dog-like crawlers shoot endlessly out of their head-turrets, climb walls and come in packs of 8 of more. Their heads are instakills, but their bodies are bullet sponges, meaning that whenever you lack a precision weapon you're in for the fight of the week. Knights are beetle like forts that act totally unreactive to any form of player interaction aside from when their shields breaking and the moment they die. They eat bullets like no-one's business, teleport when they're in trouble (and can hang around in non-spawn space just to screw with your rhythm) and can create a drone robot which will respawn them if you don't break them too. And they immediately disintegrate on death, meaning you can't even have fun in piling corpses on the floor.
But at least you get their weapons! Only they all suck too. They have that shard design thing going on making them all indistinct, they sound weak when shooting, don't appear to have anything new in function to introduce to the franchise and for some inane reason a few of them have this really long 'forming' animation every time you pick them up. I assume it's meant for the first time you find them to show how 'new' and 'different' they are, but for certain weapons the animation plays everytime and gets old pretty-much instantaneously. All and all, I hated fighting these annoying, ugly designed, and boring enemies and their prominence in Halo 4, to the point where they even fight alongside the Covenant a lot of the time, makes me actually not want to play through a single mission of Halo 4 again. So that's not a good start considering I haven't even touched on the narrative yet.
Narrative
This part is the kicker, because I had no idea what this game's story held for me and so was just as caught off guard as most fans likely were when this sequel took the Master Chief trilogy and veered far off-course. So far, it fact, that it felt like the writers wanted to make their own franchise and got lumped with a Halo sequel, and so they decided to just try and morph Halo into the Science Fantasy story they wanted to write instead. All of it puts me in this strange position where, by itself, the story that I experienced was a fairly competent tale that neatly introduced a new (admittedly rather lame) enemy with a new style of threat and resolved it, but when placed against the frame of the series it's a part of, it all comes across as an intensely short-sighted and ill-fitting story that fights in poorly with it's integer peers. Even for someone who didn't spend hours reading the volumes of, now pretty much essential, reading material that plagues this franchise; I could tell something was plainly wrong with Halo 4.
The problems really start with the Forerunners coming into the story, this time in the flesh through this enigmatic megalomaniac called the Didact who is trying to- what again? He wants to... umm... use the Composer to turn humanity into Promethean robot constructs in order to... oppose the Flood? Which is, by all intents and purposes, currently deceased? But- that can't be right, he seems to just want to microwave humans in revenge for the accidental war they were involved in 10,000 years ago. Wait, 10,000 years? I thought this game was set in 2500... dammit, did they bring out another book of essential lore? Seems it doesn't matter who's running the show, Bungie or 343, basic storytelling techniques elude them. (Okay, to be fair they do actually give a tiny rundown, but it was so barren that I had to look up a book synopsis online to learn that there was a species of space-faring proto-humans 10,000 years ago who were forcibly devolved by the Forerunners in retaliation for the war.)
All this comes to muddy a fairly straightforward premise that the game already had; Cortana has been in service too long and is undergoing a degenerative AI process known as 'Rampancy', so you need to find your way back to humanity in order to have a chance to save her. Throw in an inexplicable new breed of Covenant in the way and you have a basic kicking off point for a story. But then this Didact gets involved and suddenly the fate of the universe is in the balance and we just sort of forget about the Cortana thing until it becomes too bad to help. I'm not opposed to this style of story, where new stakes slide in to trump the initial ones, but it always creates this uneven feeling to the narrative progression which brings me back to the waviness of Combat Evolved at times. But the biggest issue with the narrative is pretty obvious; it's the Librarian.
Not long after the game settles into it's real plot are we treated to some quick series-changing exposition being shoved down our throat by a godlike Forerunner digital-echo-thing called 'The Librarian', during which we are given a decidedly questionable revelation. This Composer has power over all people except for Master Chief- why? Because the Librarian, presumably when humanity was sent to the stone age, imbued genetic markers in humans to guide the evolutionary process through multiple reiterations until he would be born. Yes, 343 turned Master Chief into the chosen one. Ew. Yes, they would try and argue it's a 'deconstruction' of the chosen one trope, because there were more than one 'chosen one's throughout the history of this plan, but a deconstruction typically demands exploration, and even if there were some sort of clever insight here, none of that distracts from the obvious fact: this doesn't really fit in a Halo game.
Now let me just say that I have no problem with the 'Chosen One' trope, nor tropes in general; I think they become repeated because they are cool ideas and building upon them allows new people with new ideas to glean new shades from them. But they belong in a certain type of story. Science Fantasy stories. Your Dune, your Star Wars, series' of that ilk. Halo tried to give us a Science Fiction lite world, with military dogmatism and interstellar warfare, throwing a messianic prophet-figure in there (even though it thankfully hasn't been too heavy headed on the symbolism so far) suddenly reframes everything the series has done up until now and trivialises it. Think- really think about the events that have led up to Halo 4; do they matter now that Chief has been destined to this? 343 bent over backwards to assure us that "of course they do, this isn't a prophecy!", but it is oh-so hard to have your cake and eat it. The mere introduction of determinism in this hazy god-like framing device cuts through all the excuses and faux-deconstructionism the writers have erected in defence, and turns this story into something it wasn't before; a universe where the everything revolves around Master Chief.
Now the Chief has always been important, a symbol of the strength, perseverance, and of course 'luck', of humanity; but this revelations alters that. Instead of being a person made special because of the lengths he goes to, the actions he does and the achievements he earns, now he's special just because of who he is. Because some space goddess ten thousands years ago rolled some dice and said "This one- this is the saviour!" In fact, our Librarian even implies that the technological tools that you take advantage of, your armour and the AI Cortana, were also preplanned by these Forerunners, so suddenly all of human knowledge no longer belongs to it. In a way, it's almost worse that the series wasn't brave enough to commit fully to this concept, because if they did then perhaps there would be space to explore shades of the concept of 'fate' and 'free will', and explore if all the trials of Humanity, the wars, the suffering, the Covenant, were necessary evils too. You know, do the stuff a 'deconstruction' would actually do. But instead we have this limp half-hearted jab at the idea, aimed to try and take ahold of the series narrative, and not really amounting to much of anything. I mean, what does Chief really do with his 'destiny' in this game? He jams a grenade in some dude's chest in a bad quick-time-event and watches him fall off a bridge; truly the sort of stuff that needed several thousands of years of genetic guiding to achieve!
Ultimately, it feels wrong, short sighted, and fangless of a narrative turn. As a result, what was an alright campaign with a villain that was boring, but at least new; becomes overshadowed with this ugly time-bomb of a plot point, ticking away in the back of your head to infect just about everything else about the series. Oh I want to play ODST, but the Chief isn't in it and now that this universe revolves around him, I guess that game's whole narrative isn't really important anymore. Noble Team died on Reach, but their sacrifice is nowhere near as important as Master Chief's life, so I guess it's weird to care about them anymore. It's a frighteningly obvious consequence for this sort of story twist, but one which Halo 4's writers I guess didn't see or just didn't care about. The more I pondered it, the more crappy this little twist felt, and considering my only relief from thinking about the story was going up against those bloody Prometheans; it's fair to say I didn't have the best time whilst playing Halo 4.
Characters
Finally, a section that I can mark as a genuine bright spot; because in character I actually found Master Chief and Cortana to be at their best yet. Both have considerably more lines than they did in previous games, and both get to become a little more fleshed out because of it; even if the whole 'love story' aspect between the two of them does veer dangerously close to a doomed romance at some points. (Which felt like something this series was not going to do previously. Made me a tad uncomfortable.) Cortana's decent into rampancy is startling, and hearing genuine fear come out the vocal synthesisers of our typically cocky AI co-pilot, rings with a vulnerability I didn't even feel when rescuing her from The Gravemind and whatever he was doing to her. (Seriously, did the Gravemind take a coding course? How could that organic fungal growth mess with the mind of an AI?) The Chief has a harder edge to him as well, dedicating everything to protecting his partner, even going so far as to stand up to a superior officer, thus clearly marking the line between morality and duty which had never even been tested before. I genuinely think this might be our protagonists' best characterisation yet. Oh and Cortana apparently dies for the second time in this franchise, but I've read the box description for Infinite, so it's safe to say it had absolutely no impact on me. (The consequence of reviving the dead in future entries; you ruin your previous emotional highlights.)
We also meet the crew of the Infinity as secondary characters, which gives us Sarah Palmer, another Spartan for the first time in forever, but she isn't around too much, Captain Del Rio, who's a typical cranky 'superior officer' trope that exists to be a wall for the heroes to butt up against and Lasky, the plucky young fellow who has our back when nobody else does. Kinda. They were mostly generic and under explored, I literally had to look up the kids name because I forgot him so badly. Then we have our villain, The Didact, and I honestly don't even know what he wanted. I mean I know he wanted the Composer so that he could use it on Humanity- but why? I know he considered Humanity a threat and didn't want the 'mantle' of protecting the universe to be passed onto them- but why use the Composer to turn them into dust? The Flood aren't a problem, so this can't be about transforming Humanity to fight that virus. Why not just set off a Halo? Surely a Forerunner can do that, right? Maybe there's some 5-part book series that goes heavy into every single last note of Mr Didact's goals; but I needed to know them during the game, because he's dead now so I don't care anymore. 
Level Design
As far as raw level design goes, divorcing the god awful Prometheans who show up in a lot of them, I think the levels were very fun and diverse, ranging in both visuals and objective just like I want from my Halo games. But I didn't quite feel the spark of creative diversity from each level like I did from Reach. Even in their raw design, all the Promethean levels just felt the same. (Except for the special Gondola ride section of course! Halo 2 called: it wants it's level back.) Still I found highlights in the level 'Reclaimer' (that Mammoth section is a literal dream set-up for me, I adore the moving-base-of-operations idea and wanted more.) The Broadsword battle section of Midnight was wild and I simply loved all of it's hectic chaos. And pretty much any fight against the Covenant was okay. Just okay. No miniboss fights to speak of, but then Halo Reach didn't have any either so I'm not exactly running thirsty here; I'm used to Halo 2 and 3 being the exceptions.
But then there are the Promethean levels; and you can likely already tell that I hate them. Numerous sections of enemy spam, aesthetically bland locales and typically no substantial variation in environment. They hardly even played around with verticality at all for those sections. (Unless you count the way the Crawler-dogs would jump on the wall just to be annoying.) Even Covenant filled-Promethean levels felt more annoying to fight through, just by merit of the wide-open bland-but-busy platforms they were all hanging around on, doing nothing on. If I could exorcise all Promethean content from this Halo game, we might have a 'Halo 3 level' contender on our hands here- as it exists now though- the chaff brings the whole package down.
A little bit on Spartan Ops
Yes, this game has a secondary campaign in the co-op focused Spartan Ops mode which 343 had big intentions for! These little mission packs were released in episodes and chapters, with each episode being fronted by a meaty well-made animated movie starring characters like Sarah Palmer, Lasky and even Dr Halsey! (Remember her from the introduction? She's important again!) Whatsmore, this mode actually explained who these new Covenant are and where they came from; doing the main game's job for it. If only the gameplay had any effort put into it. It's just a shooting arena where the game throws stupid amounts of enemies at you with no fail state. If you die, you just respawn. Honestly, this might make a decent shooting gallery mode, if it wasn't for the fact that the damned Prometheans infect this mode with their stink too. I couldn't bring myself to stick it out, nor watch the hour worth of professional-grade cutscenes supplied with the package. 343 discontinued the mode after season 1 and scrapped a reported year's worth of content and lead-in footage to Halo 5. Wise move in my eyes; this package was not the mode they wanted it to be. (Cool idea for a semi-live service system though. I hope they don't scrap that concept forever more.)
Summary
Mechanically Halo 4 is on par with the best of the series yet, and it's character writing honestly surpasses previous games soundly and there's a couple of stand-out missions. Too bad everything else is a bit of a mess. The substance of the story veers from decent to awful, the new third faction of 'The Prometheans' are designed terribly, not fun to fight, and take up far too much of the attention for this game and the main villain is pretty boring. I came into this game wanting, and somewhat expecting, it to be the roaring embarkment of a brand new Halo journey, and what I got was sort of a disappointment after all the serious powerhouse games I just played through. Were it just about one of these problems I mentioned, or maybe even two, I would be able to look past it; but all three and I seriously don't know if I want to ever play this game again. (At least not by myself.) I want to give it a passing grade because the shooting is good, but when even the Covenant feel lacklustre because more effort went into the Prometheans, that effort into nailing the shooting doesn't really have a purpose, does it? The range of problems on display, offset by the competence behind a lot of the backbone of the systems leaves me in the peculiar position where I'm giving this game a C- Grade, which the game just ekes out because I liked the character work, even if the wider story it happened in was poor. Honestly, I can't really recommend this as a Halo game, unless you have friends to play with an simply don't care about the story whatsoever. I did not enjoy myself and if people are saying that 'Halo 5: Guardians' is worse than this- than maybe it's a good thing that 343 are dragging their heels about adapting that one for the Master Chief Collection.
Be that as it may, this marks the end of my Halo journey for the immediate; maybe to be picked up again if Halo 5 ever becomes playable on the PC. And I must say that despite the disappointing latest entry, I found this to be an absolute blast of a franchise to play my way through and totally fell in love with the core pieces of these games. The Covenant might go down as some of my favourite FPS enemies ever, for their variety and personality, and I'm just itching to go mod some of those cool traditional Halo weapons into one of my mainstay games like Fallout, and go shoot up the Commonwealth. I was surprised by the sparse nature of one of gaming's longest lasting love stories, but I suppose when Cortana and Master Chief are two figures you've watched grow together across the space of over two decades, the mind crosses the emotional shortcomings in the storytelling all by itself. It's fair to say that this collection has scored the series a new fan, and I'm actually so invested I might go to pick up Halo Wars someday and see what those strategy games are about. Or maybe... maybe it's about time I break my fast and see what Destiny 2 is up to; see the series that Bungie iced the Chief for... Hmm, we'll have to see if I'm anywhere close to forgiving Bungie yet, and currently I'm not so sure... thank you for reading along with my little journey and I hope my reviews have helped guide you on your own journey to discovering this classic gaming franchise. See you again for this Halo review series in maybe never, depending on that PC port.
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