Halo 4 review

[Uli]

enemy AI also frequently gets stuck in scenery... which can be troublesome in Spartan Ops...




let's hope 343i will address these problems with a patch.

[moonwhistle]

I really wanted to like this but I just finished it and found it all a bit underwhelming. I can't say I enjoyed it any more than the equally lacklustre Halo 3 or Reach. The new graphical design did nothing me and often the effects just get in the way. The amount of lense flare is utterly ridiculous imo. The music so critical to the atmosphere was mostly boring and non descript. The new enemies are kinda rubbish and the weapons are carbon copies of existing weapon sets. I didn't find the gameworld interesting or evocative.

I really think that Bungie fluked the outstanding quality of the first game as they consistently failed to evolve or even recreate it in their sequels. 343 have done ok I guess, hopefully they can make a better halo game in the future.

[k0pp0]

I'm still trying to plow through the SP.. It looks lovely and everything, but it's just not grabbing me..

[DANGEROUS-3]

Having previously played through Halo (still the best) H2, H3, and skipped on ODST, Reach and Anniversary, I picked up H4 over X-Mas and completed the quest on heroic last night. Overall I really liked it and thought it was the most enjoyable campaign since the first game. The new enemies were great, the level architecture was often stunning, the basic gun/vehicle action was still very satisfying and I dig Cortana's sexy new look.

My gripes-

1) This game feels to linear. This is not a problem so much with the indoor levels, but when I am outside and I want to explore the landscape but I can't because I get the 'return to the battlefield' countdown, that REALLY BLOWS. A big part of what Made the first game so great was that if you wanted, you could just go off and explore. the greatest Halo level is still The Silent Cartographer because aside from just following the natural progression of enemies through the level, you also had a whole frikkin island to explore, where every part was accessible if you knew how and that freedom just felt amazing in an FPS.

2) Bottomless pits. These are cheap deaths in videogames on the part of developers and in Halo 4 they are spammed WAY too much. If I'm outdoors running around on the edge of some highrise installation, fine. But when numerous indoor environments feature bottomless pits it is just pure lazyness on the developers part and also unrealistic.

3) The game cheating. On mission 8 there was a section where I hoofed it over a bunch of enemies to jump into an active portal, only to be shot dead after passing through it. In other words although the portal was the highlighted objective, it would not activate until I had slain all the enemies of the current area. Part of the fun of previous Halo games for me was about bending the rules and seeing what was possible. When the developer forces you to play the game the way THEY want you to play it, that takes away a lot of the fun.

Anyway I'll get stuck into disc 2 later today, and I'd kinda like to do co-op on Legendary so holla if anyone's up for it. Live tag- Radioactive1980

[EvilBoris]

You are right though, I can't sy I've ever visited an alien citadel on the inside of an artificial planet and seen a bottomless pit.
343i need to do their research next time!

[Colin]

I haven't liked Halo since the original, but have to say i've been really enjoying this.

[Brad]

Re: Halo 4 review

Yeah I did the massive jump off the moving platform to reach the exit only to find the game required me to kill all the enemies on a platform on the left before it would trigger. Stuff like that is crap and I expected more from a Halo title. Overall I felt Halo 4 was a very good console fps but only an average game.

[EvilBoris]

Halo's campaign has always been a bit by the numbers, especially when it came to the objectives.

I got sick of having to disable more than one console/relay/tower/bridge/door. Halo 4 was pretty bad for it with so many interior levels.
I went back to play some co-op with a non-halo playing friend and was trying to pick a good level for warthogging fun. I couldn't find one.

I wish they would of kept more crazy heroic stuff like the Scarabs and the jumping from space with a Bomb etc.

[DANGEROUS-3]

I'm playing through the campaign on Legendary solo now, and another gripe is how weapons I drop and corpses vanish when I back track through checkpoints. I'm sure the earlier games kept a lot of the corpses and especially weapons on the floor.

[DANGEROUS-3]

yo can anyone answer me this... i just finished mission 4 of the campaign on legendary and a little sign popped up to note this with 3/8 despite having just completed mission 4.wtf. am i still going to get the legendary achievments? they are all listed as cleared on the highest difficulty.

[k0pp0]

yo can anyone answer me this... i just finished mission 4 of the campaign on legendary and a little sign popped up to note this with 3/8 despite having just completed mission 4.wtf. am i still going to get the legendary achievments? they are all listed as cleared on the highest difficulty.

You made sure you watched/played through the prologue?

[DANGEROUS-3]

You guys will be relieved to learn I just completed the campaign on solo legendary and got the achievments.

[DANGEROUS-3]

Also the aim assist f**king sucks.
It does not help at all, it just screws up ur aim when there are loads of crawlers about, and even if it did help I would not want any assistance. The fact you can't turn it off is joke. I hope 343 fix this (remove it) for H5.

And the disappearing weapons is really lame.

That section in mission 8 campaign where you have to run the gauntlet through a horde of crawlers, well when you first teleport to that area you are in a the end of a corridoor. In that section I dropped my incineration cannon to pick up a supressor;- watching it fall to the ground. I then shot a few crawlers, go to pick up my incineration cannon and it's vanished! WTF.
This never happened in Halo:CE.

....And why does my spartan record say I have only completed 4 legendary campaign levels when I have done the whole game on Legendary? sigh.

Also how did Master Chiefs armour change from Halo 3 when he was stuck in a chamber in cryo sleep trhe whole time?

Halo 4 is a great game overall but it does not have that Bungie level of polish.
I went and downloaded the demo for Reach, a game I had orginally skipped on and just playing through it the whole thing felt so much more smooth, refined and complete. So I've just ordered it.

[Uli]

Halo 4 has many many flaws and glitches which could easily be patched (disappearing weapons and corpses, non existent AI of far away enemies etc.) but i would be surprised if 343i would fix this. after all, Halo CE Anniversary is still a buggy glitch fest, so obviously 343i gave a **** about the fans' complaints.

[Family Fry]

I don't think disappearing guns and weapons fall under glitches. If may have been designed that way due to memory restrictions, can you imagine just how crap the game would run if you had all dead bodies onscreen and weapons just laying around.
As for non existent AI of far away enemies, well I don't know how to explain that but I'm sure there is some reason for that that goes over my comprehension of computer game programming.