As it turns out, I was just as insightful in 2012 as I am in 2019.
Also, I was right on the money about both the first Dishonored and Dead Space 3.
(and should probably get around to reviewing the Tomb Raider games at some point)
But, perhaps, I'm being unfair. A new creative team could potentially mean a fresh take on everything, perhaps taking the series in directions that have not yet been explored and could perhaps bring things back into a more cohesive whole as far as the plot goes.
...stop laughing, you jerks!
Halo 4 actually doesn't begin with the return of the Master Chief and Cortana, but with an aged Dr. Catherine Halsey - Cortana's template and the head of the Spartan project that created the Master Chief and others like him - being interrogated for her part in the Spartan program...which apparently has been revealed to have involved kidnapping children and is overall some really, really shady shit to quote one Walter Peck.
It...doesn't connect to anything (except maybe for the appearance of some Spartan IIIs later) and we never come back to it. I assume it's set up for Halo 5, but at the time of writing I have no idea.
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| Your HUD has cleaned up a bit since 3. Cortana does some great work! |
The actual plot picks up with the bit of Forward Unto Dawn that was left floating in space after the destruction of the Ark...floating around in space. It's been four years and when a bunch of magical lights come sweeping through the ship, Cortana freaks out and decides to wake up the Master Chief, with a nice echo of his words to her at the end of 3.
In fact, there's a lot more talking from the previously near-mute Master Chief this time around, as most of the plot revolves around the relationship between the Master Chief and Cortana. As he wakes up and Cortana informs him of the nothing that has happened in the four years before they got a sensor sweep, the Chief must navigate his way through the broken remains of Forward Unto Dawn and make it to the bridge, where he hopes to get a better grasp on the situation only to find that Covenant have boarded...from a Covenant fleet that is swarming them.
Although these Covenant are apparently not the same Covenant that humanity has a truce with - that being the faction under Arbiter after the death of the Prophets - and that's all the explanation that we're really given as to why we're fighting the Covenant again. At least in-universe. Out of universe, they wanted a familiar face for the players to stomp their boot into. The player can do this with a variety of weapons, grenades, and attacks to the back in melee...which pop up with a Skyrim-esque killcam of the Chief brutalizing whoever he fights.
But after crashing on a Forerunner planet, the Chief realizes that Cortana is going through rampancy - a state that AIs in the Halo universe eventually devolve into after so many years of service. The Chief theorized that, if they can get back to Earth and Doctor Halsey, then she can potentially save Cortana and everything can be hunky-dory. Given how Halsey appeared in the prelude to the game, you may think that this is what the game is leading up to.
NOPE!
Because we have some pointless Forerunner nonsense to do!
Running around on the planet, Requiem, we also learn of a UNSC ship called Infinity that is making its way to it and gets caught up in events so that we have a bunch of human weaponry to keep in the mix. As with the other games, I find the human weaponry is just about the best to work with, although along with the Covenant's armaments (some old and some new - I rather like the Storm Rifle in particular), we also get some Forerunner weaponry that serves essentially the same function with different names and you'll be fighting a lot of their constructs so ammo will be pretty much be readily available wherever you go.
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| "Hey, human! Have I got something in my jowls?" |
And for the record, no, I don't care for the new enemy types in the Forerunner constructs - Prometheans. They just look really overdesigned. Why is it we haven't ever seen these before? Were the Sentinels from the previous games just not good enough? I feel as though having these on the Halo rings might have helped out with potential Flood outbreaks in a big way. Or did the Forerunners just have a sense of fair play with the Flood when it came to anything but them taking over the universe?
Speaking of things that are probably covered elsewhere, we have a new villain in the Diadect. Further proof of the Covenant being around primarily for fanservice, the big bad of the game is a Forerunner survivor known as the Diadect. Apparently, he has a strong disdain for humanity and believes they all need to be contained. Of course, because the Master Chief is the Master Chief, he can't stand for that and sets out to stick a grenade up his rear end just to watch him go boom.
Why exactly he wants to do this apparently involves some sort of Human-Forerunner conflict in the distant past and-seriously, do you even care at this point? Because I don't. The original Halo had a plot, but it wasn't so needlessly complicated. "Hey, there's a war between humans and aliens, there's this ring called Halo and really bad things will happen if we don't stop it from firing". Simple, succinct, and to the point so that we can get to the shooty-shooty without too much issue. I know I may be harping on this way, way too much (as I have through all of my Halo reviews), but this is really a major problem for me.
It's not as if playing previous games would help you build up some kind of background for all of this suddenly being thrown at us at top speed. The game does actually try to bring in some explanation through collectibles and terminals and the like that play special cutscenes of exposition...but what use it that, exactly? You need to weave exposition into the narrative, 343!
Getting back to the gameplay, however, I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that you have some of the old and the new hotness as far as weapons go. Human pistols are scoped and thus are pretty awesome once again in a nice contrast from 2. Combat is as involving as ever, that is you point your gun and shoot until your enemy is left in pieces and/or has their blood smeared all over any surface in splattering radius.
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| I do like the redesigns of the Covenant, shame they drop out about two-thirds of the way through the game. |
The Prometheans, as I mentioned before, are an overdesigned enemy type. There's an interesting variety of them, but it really doesn't amount to much besides how many shots it takes to get to the center of their Tootsie Roll pop and a few of them team up to give a teammate a shield that no-sells any attack you make in what I call blatant asshole-ism. Which brings me to the Armor Add-Ons. Following on from Halo 3's power ups, they basically serve the same function only with repeatable effects instead of being deployed and then not being used again, usually with a cool down time.
This does, by the way, include jet packs. Awesome! Shame it's in the tail end of the game and that's too little too late for my taste.
On the whole, Halo 4 isn't bad. Mechanically, the game is fine. It's in the plot where it suffers. Of course, if you're not big on the plot then the game provides. Maybe you'll even get a kick out of the multiplayer if you're one of those insane extroverted people that believes game development companies don't have quite enough money. What does sell it for me is the relationship between the Master Chief and Cortana being expanded on greatly in this game. Steve Downes gets more voice work than ever this time around, showing us Chief's affection for Cortana and portraying well his desire to get back to Earth so that he can save her from rampancy.
It's been said that Downes and Cortana's actress Jen Taylor recorded their lines together for the first time during Halo 4, and I believe it. The pair have a great chemistry that really carries it. Maybe that's enough? Sadly, given what I already know about Halo 5, it's soured somewhat.
And yes, I will be reviewing Halo 5. At some point. Not now. I've just spent the last four reviews covering this as a retrospective when I could have been doing something topical like covering Far Cry New Dawn.
...so next time, we'll be recovering a reader request and something that most definitely isn't Far Cry New Dawn!
Halo 4 is available from 343 Industries and Microsoft Game Studios for Xbox 360 and Xbox One and is available on the Master Chief Collection from the Xbox Store.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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