This Halo (Halo 4) is 1/3 Halo 3, 1/3 Halo: Reach (aka how to get revenge on Microsoft and have them pay you for it) and 1/3 Call of Duty. I only like the first 1/3 of this equation. I love CoD. But not in my Halo, which I love more. If you have no sense of humor, please discontinue reading.
1) I dislike spawning into a game that I am losing and have no chance of winning. This was never a facet of Halo. It is, however, a mainstay of the CoD Franchise. There is no benefit to staying in a game where you are losing or outnumbered in Halo 4. There is no deterrent to leaving. You gain NO extra xp for being a gamer with self-respect. Just like in CoD. Also I have begun more games down a man in Halo 4 than in all of my previous Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo: Reach games combined, in just the first four days since its release. It's like they paid Infinity Ward (not Treyarch, those boys know how to make a game) for their MW2 matchmaking formulas.
2) I dislike the ease of which you die in this Halo with the DMR (it appears even more so than in Reach) and overall. Halo (prior to Reach) was all about skill, individual battles and balance with the conventional weapons. In Call of Duty you can kill quickly when you spot someone on the map, well before they have time to respond. This seems to be the way that they are bringing it in line with the CoD engine. Every time I kill someone unfairly with the incineration thingamajigger, I'm sure Cortana dies a little inside.
3) The vehicles are not easy to kill. On a map with vehicles, there is not a plethora of weapons to destroy them with. I have stuck the Ghost twice in succession and not killed it or the driver. Usually there is just one rather clunky Spartan Laser to fight over. And they spawn too many times in a game. I've had the Wraith 3 times in a game.
4) If I wanted to play a game where I had lag/connection/matchmaking issues, I'd play Call of Duty.
5) If I wanted to play a game where I died repeatedly on my spawn or spawned in the crosshairs of the enemy team, I can just pop in Call of Duty. Seriously the spawns seem to have been generated by monkeys flinging their own poop on a large copy of the map. They can't actually claim any intelligence went into the spawning can they? My impression of the only meeting they had discussing it went as follows:
"That spawn makes no sense and it stinks in here. He's..."
"Silence! The monkey poop has spoken."
6) The sniper Rifle stays zoomed in even if hit. This leads me to my closing statement. The people who made this game were NOT Halo fans, at least not before Reach. They either were CoD fans, or were trying to get people who buy CoD to buy this game. There is no point in buying future Halo games unless you loved Reach (WHO ARE YOU? Seriously who liked halo 2 and 3 and then Reach? If you liked it then you are at the 'Gump Line'). If you love CoD and want to play a futuristic Call of Duty, then this is your game BLOPS2 will be out soon. So get your brooms out, it is time for Shennanigans.
