I have paid for and played all the halos before this one. In fact I liked halo 1 so much I think I bought at least 3 copies (PC, xbox, replacements...) I don't play multiplayer.
Halo 4 was the most boring. Too much cinematic. The fighting was just dull -- the weapons are too weak
and unavailable with a sprinkle of super weapons with long reload and small clips. I spent much of the campaign backtracking and scrounging for ammo. You should be able to hammer a few bad guys without having to reload let alone running out completely and going back to scrounge. The final climatic battle was the biggest let down of any FPS. Mainly because there wasn't one. Bad guy killed by a single grenade and its all cinematic --- no player action.
Clearly a lot of effort in the graphics and so on. In fact as far as I can tell most of 343 is graphic artists
of various kinds. However, what about the actual game! Think about this: super technology with teleportation, hard light and auto assembling weapons. And what do they do with it? Make grunts that are dumber than convenant who run up and shoot you weapons that are just standard fare with new graphics. They aren't even evolved enough to be immune to normal weapons? Where is the forerunner super technology in this? The forerunner-fighting gameplay is actually less interesting than convenant.
I see this as a near total failure of imagination in the game-play design.
Look at it this way -- I still play Quake 3. It is huge fun 10 seconds in and just continues to deliver. Play Quake 3 and compare it to Halo 4 game play. See what FPS have lost...
In addition, Master Chief is a moron. Nothing he did in this game is what I would have done in his place. Gee -- big sphere pinned by two beams. Lets turn them off -- what could go wrong? Totally new race who are probably tech superior to me whose planet I am invading -- lets shoot them and break their stuff. Makes sense to me. At least let someone else make the bad decisions and don't pin it on the player's character. I don't mind being the clean-up guy for other people's bad choices.
The plot is silly and attempts to be profound but is just incoherent. A lot of the cinematics aren't
even relevant (like the Halsey prologue). Sure its cool to think about how the spartans get made but
that sounds like a thing unto itself (its own game plot-line, or its own movie ....)
Why was it there? Unfortunately, I think I know ...
Look guys (343), I know you'd all rather be working for James Cameron/Weta/Pixar and making movies.
But I didn't shell out my cash to watch your movie. I wanted a game -- with good, fun game play.
Halo 1 was laugh out loud fun and funny and the plot was cool with twists. Halo 4 was pretty but tedious.
I think the franchise is dead. Of course that's just my 69.99.
