{"id":23157,"date":"2015-09-23T06:23:54","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T11:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/?p=23157"},"modified":"2015-09-23T06:23:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T11:23:54","slug":"halo-5-first-impressions-gamesradar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/halofanforlife.com\/?p=23157","title":{"rendered":"Halo 5 First Impressions: gamesradar+"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a reblog from gamesradar+: (The vid at the end was my fav part of this article)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Halo 5: Guardians\u2019 campaign isn’t as Call of Duty-esque as you think<\/strong>
\nby Joe Skrebels<\/p>\n

Halo is approaching \u201choly text\u201d levels of significance in people\u2019s minds by this point. Bungie\u2019s famous 30-second combat loop doctrine is the unimpeachable, transformative sacrament, those wide-open, blood-spattered sandboxes our promised land, with shiny, shiny Master Chief standing above it all, a faceless gunmetal Messiah. Suggest that any of these elements be changed or, Cortana help you,\u00a0be the one changing them<\/em>\u00a0and watch as conservative zeal rains forth like so much 140-character brimstone.<\/p>\n

And hey, why not? Halo\u2019s pretty cool. These days, the series is less interesting for setting the standard for FPSes on consoles and more for being the genre\u2019s steadfast stick in the mud – a loping, strategic shooter in a world of twitch-shooter, Twitch-friendly insta-death bloodbaths.<\/p>\n

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Which makes the not-insignificant maelstrom of flack that 343 Industries has been copping for how it\u2019s treating the franchise it was created to protect (I\u2019ll spare you the lengthy, unpleasant metaphor for the Catholic church here – just know that, yes, I considered it) rather interesting.<\/p>\n

From the outside, those changes look widespread, and deep – seen most in the series\u2019 most revered relic, the Campaign. Halo\u2019s long-standing love affair with split screen co-op is over, jettisoned into the heavens to make room for a 60fps flow. The Chief is now only half of the single player experience (and is conspicuous in his green-hued absence from the game\u2019s opening cinematic), with players taking up position behind the eyes of Luciferian good-bad guy, Spartan Locke. Perhaps most damning of all, the first showing of Campaign gameplay came with a set piece-heavy vertical slice at E3.<\/p>\n

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Locke was running through corridors both tangible and invisibly-walled, following conspicuous story waypoints and [spits] having some control taken away as a platform collapsed and he slid along on his bum for a few seconds. It was different. It was was constricted. It was Call of Duty.<\/p>\n

Which is weird, because when I played it last week, it felt more or less like good old Halo.<\/p>\n

Two new levels were on show, Blue Team\u2019s first playable mission – efficiently titled \u201cBlue Team\u201d – and \u201cEnemy Lines\u201d a mid-game Fireteam Osiris mission. While their cast of characters and locations differed wildly, they\u2019re connected by a single philosophy – both are faintly obsessed with funnelling you into an enormous space, filling it with enemies, and letting you get on with good old alien hunting in whatever fashion you deem fit. By which I mean \u201cthey\u2019re Halo levels\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlue Team\u201d takes place through the corpse-strewn interior of an out-of-contact ONI ship – Chief and his squadron of grim, all-business Spartan IIs make their way through hangers and down elevators, discovering more and more evidence of a Covenant plot (and some more surprising events that are so spoilery I literally had to sign a bit of paper written by a lawyer to say I wouldn\u2019t spoil them for you right now). While it comes with the route-one macho storytelling that 343 rung in with Halo 4, the level design certainly draws on the older games for inspiration.<\/p>\n

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One section leads you into the back end of a warehouse setting so massive that it takes you a Battle Rifle zoom to realise that those flecks of light on the other side are a group of jetpacked Jackals blasting from platform to platform towards you – and then the old decisions kick in. Do you snipe them from your vantage? Grab the shotgun glowing bright blue (you can\u2019t miss dropped items these days) beside you and sneak around the crates to smash the weaklings in a rear assault? Or press Up on the D-Pad to order your AI squad to deal with them and run past to the Elite-shaped prizes no doubt backing them up? It\u2019s pleasingly freeform stuff and, barring one or two story-heavy interludes, the level continues in this vein, escalating to the point where you\u2019re told to destroy the ship\u2019s reactor cooling system, given a full complement of Banshees and told to go (literally) nuclear.<\/p>\n

\u201cEnemy Lines\u201d, set on the Elite homeworld of Sanghelios, takes a similar – if slightly trickier – approach. It\u2019s set amidst a battle between factions, as friendly Covenant ships fill the skybox with explosions trying to take down an enormous, techno-squid weapons platform called a Kraken – while Locke and his Fireteam Osiris have a slightly smaller scale challenge. You\u2019re on the hunt for a lost Forerunner artifact\/weapons system ignition key, leading you through ancient architecture more reminiscent of Indiana Jones films than Halo games. Multi-leveled temples form your sandboxes here, and are peppered with snipers, gun turrets, even secrets (certain walls can be smashed down with Spartan shoulder charges, and certain uncovered passages contain amusing little audio logs made by bored Grunts).<\/p>\n

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On harder difficulties, your team absolutely has to work together to get through – there are simply too many enemies to deal with alone. Here lies my only real problem with the game\u2019s new systems. The AI squad controls only go so far, and aren\u2019t always effective. There\u2019s something vaguely humiliating about ordering my team to take down a Wraith tank, only to be told \u201cI\u2019m busy with a Grunt here!\u201d, and asking to be revived (possible in all but the most explosive deaths) sometimes makes the AI blind to the fact my soon-to-be-cadaver is surrounded by the Hunter mini-bosses who took me down, instead leading to multiple casualties. They also appear to be aware of their functional immortality – \u201cEnemy Lines\u201d ends with you escaping a collapsing Kraken, but in my case I made the escape alone, then watched my colleagues tumble into a canyon with the machine, seemingly aware that only I had to be alive to finish the level. Seeing three eighths of the game\u2019s cast die because they can\u2019t be bothered to move rather breaks the immersion.<\/p>\n

Human companions are definitely preferable, and my time coordinating with a friend on how to take down a group of tucked-away Jackal snipers (answer: one of us sneaks up to their camping spot, the other pins them down with Shade turret plasma fire) was absolutely the best fun I had with the game in hours of play. That sense of being a supersoldier just\u00a0slightly\u00a0<\/em>out of their depth has always led to Halo\u2019s greatest moments – the slow battle up the Silent Cartographer beach on Legendary springs to mind – and that teetering balance of power and recklessness is here in full force on many occasions. The Spartans might be considered more nimble metahumans than before, equipped as they are with thrusters, ground pounds and, shockingly, the ability to climb over small ledges, but they still ultimately feel like graceful man-tanks, stomping about, stopping for a shield recharge and stomping anew, an oom-pah rhythm of death.<\/p>\n

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In fact, their biggest alteration is in just how chatty they are – in audio terms, this is easily the busiest Halo game to date. Fireteam Osiris in particular are action-movie quipping constantly, dynamically congratulating each other on kills and generally having a good time of it all. Even the terse John-117 is forced into discussion on many occasions – Blue Team might be rather more stoic than their Spartan IV hunters, but they still find time to discuss mission parameters and express wearied collective shock at finding\u00a0another<\/em>\u00a0galactic threat as you battle.<\/p>\n

That feeling extends to both sides of the fight – Grunts are as adorably put-upon as ever, but Jackals hiss insults, Elites tell their squads to shut up in case of an ambush (spoilers: you ambush them) and Hunters\u2026 well, Hunters don\u2019t say much because they\u2019re made of hundreds of symbiotic worms. The beauty here is how this stuff feeds into the sandbox warfare – with lines often playing out according to your actions, I feel as though they\u2019re entertaining enough to act as supplementary rewards for playing your way.<\/p>\n

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Predictably, 60fps play makes everything feel characteristically smooth, and sets off 343\u2019s hidden best work – making all of their weapon animations quietly spectacular (my personal favourite being when activating a Needler\u2019s \u201ciron sights\u201d pops out a hologram projector that beams a proprietery UI in front of your widening eyes).<\/p>\n

Personally, I don\u2019t play locally enough for that split-screen sacrifice to make me lament the trade-off, but this is always going to come down to personal preference. At the very least – and barring any Master Chief Collection-style disasters – being connected to Microsoft\u2019s cloud servers should make for a seamless online multiplayer experience.<\/p>\n

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As to the impact of the dual-character campaign, it\u2019s hard to judge on such slender evidence. The \u201chunter\/hunted\u201d vibe seems to be pointing in some pretty obvious directions right now, and it\u2019s going to be a full wash of grandiose sci-fi nonsense as always, but the difference in tone between both squads was welcome, and could even lend the game a storyline pace and relatable humanity that Halo\u2019s sometimes struggled for.<\/p>\n

Any change to a series as storied as Halo is likely to bring about a glut of comment, but it\u2019s probably more surprising just how much of the core game feels familiar. Unless 343 has pulled the nano-wool over my eyes and gone out of its way to show off the only two campaign sections that lean towards the religious tenets of Old Halo, I\u2019m happily able to report that that original gameplay trailer is an outlier, an indulgent scrap of story-guff that sits among long stretches of pleasingly traditional fare. Amen.<\/p>\n