Halo 4 Review
Developer 343 Industries
Publisher Microsoft
Platform Xbox360
Release Date Out Now.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it is the age old saying and it pretty much sums up the whole Halo 4 experience. If you are coming to the series after not liking the previous Halo games then you will find nothing here to change your mind. If on the other hand you are a huge fan and you love everything about Halo then you will be delighted with Halo 4 as this is a pure Halo experience.
It is not an overly ambitious first attempt from the new team at 343 Industries as it doesn’t deviate far from the decade old formula but it still does a very good job of putting any doubts to bed that the series is not in very competent hands.
Barring one or two exceptions (or re skins) it has the same old enemies you have been shooting all along, it has the same level designs seen previously with some tight linear levels aboard space ships mixed with the more open world missions on planet surfaces. More or less the same weapon types, same vehicles and the story while entertaining is not particularly mesmerizing …you get the picture…but so what? We still really like it.
I will put it out there straight away nice an early in the review I like Halo but I have not followed any of the books or other material that would give many fans a far greater insight into the story as such I am sure there have been parts that went right over my head. So please do forgive any omissions below.
The first thing 343 Industries did was to bring Master Chief back to his rightful place as the main hero of the series. They also open up another side of the series, the concept of the Spartan program and that it has its own moral complexities. As a group of super soldiers they saved the human race from attack but should they have ever been created in the first place? This is a question introduced in the opening sequence of the game and one that hopefully will blossom over the series.
At the end of Halo 3 Master Chief was set adrift and Halo 4 picks up a number of years later. All this time Chief has been asleep and his AI companion Cortana has been suffering alone. Her normal life cycle is coming to an end and she has started to develop “Rampancy” which sees her programming degrade with a number of terrible knock on consequences not too unlike a form of dementia.
Chief awakens and decides the only way to save her is to get back to earth. Despite his supposed lack of humanity Chief shows a lot of compassion here, but before he can set course for earth the ship is boarded by those pesky Covenant (despite the apparent treaty) and once again it is time for Chief to teach them a lesson. During the first opening battle the story takes a massive twist as you along with the Covenant are pulled onto a Forerunner planet’s surface to face a new enemy the Prometheans.
The Prometheans follow a similar structure to the Covenant (who also pose a threat throughout the game) with small easy to kill enemies, mid-sized drones and bigger more impressive Knights. They bring along a new array of weapons for Chief to pick up and use. The arsenal available is one of the biggest we can remember in any Halo game even if the similarities in the weapon structures are obvious.
Visually the game is amazingly impressive, it was hard to put a finger on just what looked so good as everything is amazing to look at. The game is polished, edges are smoother, colours are more vibrant, animation is top quality and draw distances were very impressive. Overall the game looks and plays incredibly well.
Multiplayer: Some reports are coming in suggesting that the inclusion of kill streaks and item drops are too close to Call of Duty for the hardcore fans, and since Halo is one of the finest console shooter ever made it should be setting its own path not following others. This still remains to be seen as it is early days for the online components but from our point of view it has been incredibly solid on pretty much every front.
The story mode offers its own multiplayer twist in 4 player co-op and along with the Spartan mode there is a lot of content included in the package. Halo has always been about playing with or against friends so it is good to see it infiltrate every corner of the game.
Overall: We feel 343 Industries have done an amazing job and it was not an easy one. They had to pick up the mantle laid down by Bungie and rebuild the franchise back to where it should have always been.
In doing so they had to stick to a lot of the core principles as if they changed too much it could have lost the core fan base. In doing so 343 created something that is too close to Combat Evolved to be considered a brand new game and you do get serious bouts of déjà vu throughout.
In saying that it was a necessary step that needed to be taken. Looking forward this is only the first step in the new trilogy and a lot of the donkey work that needs to go into setting up a trilogy has been done.
The foundations are in place which will allow 343 to easily build and expand on to make the next two titles very much their own.
It is Halo but that’s ok because Halo is actually really really good!
SCORE 8.5/10
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