Halo 5 releases in two weeks and I’m here to tell you how I feel on the upcoming game from the series I used to love. That first sentence should be your first clue that I don’t have a great feeling toward Halo anymore.
I think that in the last few games, since the license switched hands from Bungie to 343, the story has gotten progressively worse the gameplay has changed from a competent game in its own side of the first person shooter genre to a more Call Of Duty like game. Honestly the Halo license has been deteriorating since Halo Reach and this is 343’s last chance to save it for me.
Now this may come as a surprise to you but the Halo story line is not only in games but also in a host of books comics and movies that span 14 years now of backstory. These “extended fiction” as they are called are not video games so I will not talk about them here, but it is worth noting that these also have been getting slowly worse since Bungie’s leaving of Microsoft. In the rest of the article I will mention the name of a game and talk about these games one by one.
Halo 4 is by far the moment when I realized that Halo was starting to get bad. Halo 4 suffered from a horrible plot, a villain that only fans who read the books would recognize and those fans who did read the book would notice that his reason for being a villain was flimsy at best.
If you were to throw a Call Of Duty visual skin on the game, the multiplayer would become almost indistinguishable as a Halo game rather than the next yearly installment in a series that is trying to mine creativity in a land that has been mined dry back in 2009.
Halo: Spartan Strike/ Spartan Assault
Back in 2009, Bungie gave the rights to a Halo game to a different company for the first time. This company was called Ensemble Studios, a since defunct studio that brought us the much loved, Halo Wars. This was the first time that we had seen a Halo game release in the format that Halo was originally designed in, the RTS. (For those that do not know, when Halo was first being designed it was an RTS similar to one of Bungie’s other series, Myth, and has development went on it became the FPS that we know today).
However 343 tried to do a similar thing with Spartan Strike and Spartan Assault, two handheld games that turned out to be a mess of nothing and not worth talking about let alone purchasing.
The Master Chief Collection
I do not understand why this game is as bad as it is. By all accounts it should be amazing. It’s 3 amazing games (4 if you count ODST for an extra 15 bucks) and one kinda cruddy one. Three of the 4 games were already completely made and ready for a solid up scale and thats it. Halo 2 obviously needed more work to be considered the “Anniversary Edition” but even that should have been amazing, but guess what?
This game on release was a buggy, broken mess that fumbled on almost every section. It had crippling frame rate issues, mass amounts of almost game breaking bugs. This game was incredibly broken.
So that’s what I feel when I look at Halo 5. It’d better be fantastic or I am dropping the series entirely.
To read more from Checkpoint, check out the post Video Game Movies.
