Halo 4 Review

The long wait has finally come to an end.  Halo 4 is here.  As the first Halo game developed solely by 343 Industries, the stakes are very high.  This game should be a good indication of how the franchise will be going forward.  Will the Halo universe continue on in greatness or have we already seen its peak?

Halo 3 concludes with Master Chief and Cortana lost in space.  They had just saved the galaxy but their heroics left them cutoff and stranded.  The game ended with Master Chief entering cryonic sleep.  Halo 4 picks up roughly 4 years later.  The remains of the ship they are on have drifted towards a forerunner planet named Requiem.  Cortana awakens Master Chief when they are suddenly attacked by Covenant ships.  They end up getting caught in a gravity well created by Requiem and are pulled down to its surface.  They are left to figure out both the significance of where they are and how to return home.

Even after quickly dabbling through the different gameplay options available in Halo 4, it becomes very apparent that Microsoft and 343 Industries went all in for this game.  The biggest indicator of this is the level of polish that exists.  It is very common for developers to run out of time before publisher-mandated release dates which leads to their games getting released in a semi-rough state.  This usually means that there are a lot of good ideas, but things just don’t run smoothly or feel intuitive.  This does not apply at all to Halo 4.  This game is a great example of where everything has a beaming aura of professional quality.

Certain aspects of the game are absolutely phenomenal.  Gameplay mechanics have been tweaked and smoothed over to allow for an even greater playing experience.  Because of this, Halo 4’s multiplayer is the best we’ve ever seen from the franchise.  Back-end matters such as match-making and character customization run very smoothly.  Though multiplayer has always been a strength of Halo games, the bar has been raised yet again.

Halo 4’s single player campaign sadly falls short, literally.  The most crushing blow against the game is how short the campaign is.  Taking around 5 hours to complete, it feels much more like Halo 3: ODST than Halo 3.  It is impossible to have any sort of meaningful story arc in a 5 hour game.  Aside from one particular cutscene roughly halfway through the game, the entire plot feels very vanilla.  There is a bad guy and your job is to stop him.  There are no twists, no turns, and not much to be excited about.