Halo 5: Guardians
Halo 5’s slightly obnoxious, Matrix-aping opening cutscene depicts Jameson Locke’s Osiris Squad leaping, tumbling, and vaulting down a snowy mountainside, taking down random, arbitrary designations of the vast army ahead of them in a manner akin to gun-toting luchadores. It’s flashy and dynamic, but ultimately delivers little of meaning, and doesn’t seem to entirely grasp the point. It’s a perfect introduction to Halo 5’s campaign.
This isn’t a bad game. And when it fails, it does not fail for the reasons many suspected. The campaign’s permanent, four-character squad does not particularly intrude upon the flow of combat, as feared - except when part of the inanely ill-considered, AI-(mis)managed revive system. Across-the-board weapon scoping? Halo’s combat has rarely been built for scoped play, and things haven’t changed enough in Halo 5 that you’ll actually feel compelled to zoom terribly often.
But that disconnect between intent and practical purpose is Halo 5’s problem all over. Because while Halo’s traditional, core gameplay still imparts a rather high minimum level of enjoyment, Halo 5’s attempts to evolve it deliver a great deal of promising, isolated ideas, but a notable lack of cohesion. Simply, it’s a game that’s at its most interesting and fresh when it’s at its least successful.
The new version of that combat model, for instance. On its own, it’s a brilliant design, an entirely logical, vertical extension of Halo’s gleefully freeform lateral combat. It applies a typically buttery and responsive treatment to the act of fighting upward and downward, the near faultless mantling system turning many an early environment into a giddy jungle gym of high-velocity lethality once your brain clicks to the new possibilities.
This disconnect between combat and environment is felt more greatly when things go big. In theory, the vast, open-air environments of the game’s first half are a great fit for the new means of traversal. And Halo has always excelled at big, stand-out battles. But there’s little of that much loved vehicular carnage here, and even less of the dramatic, dynamically shifting interplay between differing scales of conflict. Instead, Halo 5’s biggest battles take the form of, well, more expansive versions of its normal ones, which feels a little one-note, and slightly ill-advised. With linear objective points strung through such wide terrain, too much of the game becomes background noise
Fortunately, things get much better when you venture online. While the new combat mechanics rarely get a look-in due to impracticality (the dash-punch takes too long to activate, and the ground pound leaves a Spartan far too exposed in mid-air for far too long), even traditional Halo multiplayer is still a very hard experience to beat. The versatility, malleability, and sheer scalability of the core shooting just translates into so many richly varied, cerebrally satisfying situations and game-modes that there’s nigh-endless fun to be had here, whatever your preferences.