HALO 4:(XB360)
Four years after the previous Halo incident, the AI unit Cortana activates in the ship Forward Unto Dawn. It has long been abandoned and has been drifting in space. She reactivates Master Chief and informs him that they are approaching the Requiem and they are about to be boarded by Covenant forces. The ship is caught in Requiem's gravity well and draws the ship crashing down to the planets surface.
Cortana is experiencing some temperament issues because of increased rampancy. She explains that the AI's average lifespan is 7 years and she currently in her 8th. Its causing her to be less functional as if thousands of her are arguing in her head. Chief tries to console her and let her know it can be fixed. They also pick up the signals of UNSC Infinity which picks up the Dawn's distress call.
Chief then goes to try to stop the gravity well from pulling in the Infinity from crashing into the planet as they have, but inadvertently releases the Didact from imprisonment, who assumes control over the Covenant and the Prometheans and begins an assault on the Infinity, and then to earth.
Now, truth be told, I didn't play much of Halo 3 or ODST. The last game in this series I played for any reasonable length was Halo 2 and it was because I succumbed to peer pressure. So for the most part, I have no idea whats really going on.
But one thing that kind of bugged me right off the bat is pretty much as soon as the game started I was fighting against the same grunts and elites I have been playing against in the previous versions. I understand that they are this series primary antagonists, but seriously. These are the same fucking enemies I have faced in every previous versions of Halo.
To make matters worse though, is the weapons didn't seem to change either. As I marched through the early levels of the game I realized I was using the same rifles and covenant weapons I was familiar with too. Same rifles, same pistols. If I didn't know any better, I could have just been playing a remake of Halo 1 or 3. They did eventually throw a new weapon at me in the Saw, which feels like a massive Tommy Gun style of machine gun, although it seemed a bit weaker than the Assault Rifle in exchange for more shots.
Perhaps because I was coming off the high of playing my first realistic fps title, but as I played through the first few levels I kept wondering where all the enemies were. I would fight like 5 grunts then spend 30 minutes walking along the map looking for the next set of guys to shoot. It would give you a destination marker on occasion but only when you are like 5 feet from the location, but it never seemed to come up when I was actually lost.
I did like how the map was open and non-linear because too many games basically have you follow a straight line from cover to cover (see Gears or War). But I'll be honest here, it was at this point I was ready to pop the game out and go back to playing Dark Souls. This is exactly the same reason I didn't like Borderlands, walking around for 20 minutes looking to shoot a single enemy can get boring.
Things did get a bit more interesting when the Prometheans came out. New fast moving enemies with different attack patterns? Now things started to feel newish. Sadly these feelings didn't last because after I got through about 4 different enemy types of Promethean the game threw its hands up and said: "Whelp, that's it for new enemies. Were out of ideas, this'll do." Seriously? Fuck you Halo. If the game is going to be as long as this is, you can certainly do better than about 8 enemies to shoot at.
My feeling quickly turned that way with the games weapons as well. As soon as the Prometheans started dropping their weaponry, I got foolishly excited and tried to use them. Within seconds that crushing disappointment hit me again, because all of the new weapons are just different colored versions of the same fucking weapons I've already been using. The Scatter shot is just a shotgun. The Suppressor is just the Saw. The Binary rifle is the just the Carbine or Battle rifle. They are the same fucking weapons.
Let me stick on this issue for a bit. You know why I liked Resistance 3? Because it had interesting boss fights and fun to use weapons. I could tag a guy with a bullet and then run around a corner and open fire to watch my bullets fly around the wall and kill the guy. I could shoot them with a blob and watch enemies vomit themselves to death and in turn their vomit would make other enemies vomit to death. I could fire my Auger and hit an enemy through 3 walls of cover. That shit is new, interesting, and fun to play with because they are new and different. All of Halo's weapons are the same variant of the stupid normal human weaponry with the options of wintergreen or orange burst.
I will say that this game has a pretty exceptionally long play time to it. I think it took me almost a whole day to get through the campaign on normal mode. That's another thing. My friends are constantly telling me I need to play the game on legendary mode. Why? I died in this game a fucking lot just on normal mode. 90% of the time it felt like an aggravating cheap death that there was nothing I can do about, but I'm willing to let this slide because I know I am not great at shooters.
Fucking nothing about this game felt new to me. Not a god damn thing. I don't know how this series continues on so successfully. This is almost Mario game level of stagnation. Same characters, same general enemy types, same weapons. Aside from the graphic updates and some of the colors of the weapons, Halo 1, 3, ODST, and 4 all felt like the same fucking game. At least 2 had dual wielding and introduced the sword.
The only thing that really drove me forward was the actual story. And really, I can't even say that the story is very good. For the majority of the time I barely even understood what was going on with the Didact and the Prometheans. I was able to deduce that Captain Del Rio was a dick, but really I had no idea what his ship was doing out there or what his problem was.
There was only one real sympathetic character in this whole game, and that was Cortana. Pretty much at the start of the game, she tells you that she's already outlived her life cycle and she's basically dying. Through the whole game you see her losing control of her personality and splintering off into fragments of rage. You get to hear her struggle with her rampancy as she tries to come to grips with whats happening to her while still trying to be useful to Master Chief.
And even her tragic ending (spoiler alert) you genuinely feel for her as you learn she had this long standing desire for some kind of actual physical contact with Chief, and the only time she got to fulfill this desire is the moment before she's gone for good. It was pretty heart wrenching to watch and if I had actually followed the entire Halo story from game to game, I would imagine this probably would have had an even stronger emotional impact than it did with me. Cortana was the most human character in the game, and she's not even human.
But this is complete marred by the fact that Master Chief is probably the worst fucking character in the history of video games. Fan boys can fight me on this series and this character all day, but so help me they are fucking wrong. You have a main character to with no face, no emotion, no tonal range his speech, and doesn't have a line of dialog that exceeds ten words. Cortana pours her little digital heart out that she's basically coming apart at the seams and the only thing Chief can say is "it will be alright". Fucking weak. Don't believe me? Take a look at all the fucking Emmy award winning lines of dialog provided by IMDB in some of the previous Halo games. Some real fucking winners in there.
I'd be more ok with this if Chief was an actual silent protagonist, but he's not. The best he achieves in the script is Nail Gun Massacre style one liners (IE: one liners meant to be cool or funny, but are neither). Game Informer magazine had the nerve to give the end of Halo 4 one of their top moments of 2012 and said "It personalizes Master Chief in a way no Halo game has done before, Making us care about the man behind the armor as he struggles to set aside his own desires for the greater good".
Permit me to disagree GI, but you are out of your fucking minds. He doesn't show any growth as a character, he doesn't show any emotion. He can't even stammer out a genuine desire to save Cortana in her last moments. At best he shows mild annoyance he is helpless but we don't know for sure because all we have is a stupid emotionless visor to go off of and three broken sentences that don't reach 10 words. I had this problem in Halo 2 as well because the Arbiter had this great fall from grace and rebirth story line that we only got to see sparingly because we had to break to watch Master Chief spit a 3 word one liner and then shoot Covenant.
So here we are. Much like the Skyrim review I did and I find myself faced with the task of ranking this game and despite is popularity in the media and with its fan base, I'm going to give the unpopular opinion: Halo 4 sucked and was boring. It's a stagnant series of games and an overall boring franchise. Maybe the novels paint the universe as more interesting, but as a game it does less than nothing for me.
Shooters like Bioshock, Resistance, Doom 2, Left4Dead, Portal, Painkiller, Half-life, Hexen (I liked Hexen, eat me), and so on are shooters I was willing to give a try and in some cases enjoy because they offered something new (at the time) or different to me to shake up the FPS genre a little. But the Halo Series and this installment specifically just goes out of the way to show how generic, samey, and boring a shooter can be.
Halo is only popular because when the original Xbox came out in 2001 it was one of the two titles that were worth playing in the incredibly weak launch lineup. So their the entire fan base would relentlessly defend it to rationalize their purchase. Since pretty much every Xbox owner was part of this cult, its fervor naturally spun and manufactured this radical popularity. Much like Mario and Link, Master Chief being in a game makes shooter fans wet their jeans from gusset to ankle with glee every time he appears in a new game regardless of how little its changed from installment to installment.
I TRY to go into games like this with an open mind, and give it an opportunity to change my opinion. Sometimes it happens, I mean Black Ops 2 was able to do so somewhat. But Halo 4 only reinforced my theories and feelings towards the FPS genre. It was not fun for me. Look, If people genuinely enjoy Halo and all its samey installments, then more power to you. But there is no argument you can give me to make it sound like its pushing the boundaries of gaming. Its not. Halo 4 is not a bad game by technical standards, but everything that it boasts has been done and done better by the other more competent and interesting shooters I have mentioned above.
The only good things to come out of this series as far as I am concerned is its soundtrack, Red vs. Blue, and Grifball.
Chief then goes to try to stop the gravity well from pulling in the Infinity from crashing into the planet as they have, but inadvertently releases the Didact from imprisonment, who assumes control over the Covenant and the Prometheans and begins an assault on the Infinity, and then to earth.
 |
| Through the game, Cortana will snap into these rage fits and scream at you. Something I can totally relate to. |
But one thing that kind of bugged me right off the bat is pretty much as soon as the game started I was fighting against the same grunts and elites I have been playing against in the previous versions. I understand that they are this series primary antagonists, but seriously. These are the same fucking enemies I have faced in every previous versions of Halo.
To make matters worse though, is the weapons didn't seem to change either. As I marched through the early levels of the game I realized I was using the same rifles and covenant weapons I was familiar with too. Same rifles, same pistols. If I didn't know any better, I could have just been playing a remake of Halo 1 or 3. They did eventually throw a new weapon at me in the Saw, which feels like a massive Tommy Gun style of machine gun, although it seemed a bit weaker than the Assault Rifle in exchange for more shots.
I did like how the map was open and non-linear because too many games basically have you follow a straight line from cover to cover (see Gears or War). But I'll be honest here, it was at this point I was ready to pop the game out and go back to playing Dark Souls. This is exactly the same reason I didn't like Borderlands, walking around for 20 minutes looking to shoot a single enemy can get boring.
Things did get a bit more interesting when the Prometheans came out. New fast moving enemies with different attack patterns? Now things started to feel newish. Sadly these feelings didn't last because after I got through about 4 different enemy types of Promethean the game threw its hands up and said: "Whelp, that's it for new enemies. Were out of ideas, this'll do." Seriously? Fuck you Halo. If the game is going to be as long as this is, you can certainly do better than about 8 enemies to shoot at.
Let me stick on this issue for a bit. You know why I liked Resistance 3? Because it had interesting boss fights and fun to use weapons. I could tag a guy with a bullet and then run around a corner and open fire to watch my bullets fly around the wall and kill the guy. I could shoot them with a blob and watch enemies vomit themselves to death and in turn their vomit would make other enemies vomit to death. I could fire my Auger and hit an enemy through 3 walls of cover. That shit is new, interesting, and fun to play with because they are new and different. All of Halo's weapons are the same variant of the stupid normal human weaponry with the options of wintergreen or orange burst.
 |
| Really these were designed well enough to be a good horror game, shame it wasn't though. |
Fucking nothing about this game felt new to me. Not a god damn thing. I don't know how this series continues on so successfully. This is almost Mario game level of stagnation. Same characters, same general enemy types, same weapons. Aside from the graphic updates and some of the colors of the weapons, Halo 1, 3, ODST, and 4 all felt like the same fucking game. At least 2 had dual wielding and introduced the sword.
There was only one real sympathetic character in this whole game, and that was Cortana. Pretty much at the start of the game, she tells you that she's already outlived her life cycle and she's basically dying. Through the whole game you see her losing control of her personality and splintering off into fragments of rage. You get to hear her struggle with her rampancy as she tries to come to grips with whats happening to her while still trying to be useful to Master Chief.
And even her tragic ending (spoiler alert) you genuinely feel for her as you learn she had this long standing desire for some kind of actual physical contact with Chief, and the only time she got to fulfill this desire is the moment before she's gone for good. It was pretty heart wrenching to watch and if I had actually followed the entire Halo story from game to game, I would imagine this probably would have had an even stronger emotional impact than it did with me. Cortana was the most human character in the game, and she's not even human.
 |
| Shame you never got to see his face either. |
I'd be more ok with this if Chief was an actual silent protagonist, but he's not. The best he achieves in the script is Nail Gun Massacre style one liners (IE: one liners meant to be cool or funny, but are neither). Game Informer magazine had the nerve to give the end of Halo 4 one of their top moments of 2012 and said "It personalizes Master Chief in a way no Halo game has done before, Making us care about the man behind the armor as he struggles to set aside his own desires for the greater good".
Permit me to disagree GI, but you are out of your fucking minds. He doesn't show any growth as a character, he doesn't show any emotion. He can't even stammer out a genuine desire to save Cortana in her last moments. At best he shows mild annoyance he is helpless but we don't know for sure because all we have is a stupid emotionless visor to go off of and three broken sentences that don't reach 10 words. I had this problem in Halo 2 as well because the Arbiter had this great fall from grace and rebirth story line that we only got to see sparingly because we had to break to watch Master Chief spit a 3 word one liner and then shoot Covenant.
 |
| Just watching action take place elsewhere. |
Shooters like Bioshock, Resistance, Doom 2, Left4Dead, Portal, Painkiller, Half-life, Hexen (I liked Hexen, eat me), and so on are shooters I was willing to give a try and in some cases enjoy because they offered something new (at the time) or different to me to shake up the FPS genre a little. But the Halo Series and this installment specifically just goes out of the way to show how generic, samey, and boring a shooter can be.
 |
| You get to fight in a mech suit for like 6 minutes. The game rips out of it when it realizes this is actually innovation to the series and sticks you back behind a rifle. |
I TRY to go into games like this with an open mind, and give it an opportunity to change my opinion. Sometimes it happens, I mean Black Ops 2 was able to do so somewhat. But Halo 4 only reinforced my theories and feelings towards the FPS genre. It was not fun for me. Look, If people genuinely enjoy Halo and all its samey installments, then more power to you. But there is no argument you can give me to make it sound like its pushing the boundaries of gaming. Its not. Halo 4 is not a bad game by technical standards, but everything that it boasts has been done and done better by the other more competent and interesting shooters I have mentioned above.
The only good things to come out of this series as far as I am concerned is its soundtrack, Red vs. Blue, and Grifball.
Halo 4 Xbox 360 is my favorite game for all the time
ReplyDeleteHALO 4 Free DOWNLOAD || Download Games PC Full Version