Halo 5 claims to contain 15 missions, but there are actually only 12. Missions 4, 9 and 11 only earn their title in the sense that an Achievement pops up when they’ve been completed. At around 90 seconds in duration apiece, they each demand that players press X to trigger a conversation or two before the screen slowly fades to black. Even before the realisation arrives that one fifth of this campaign is essentially an illusion, it’s already clear that Halo 5 represents a fairly brutal fall from grace.
Of course, everything is relative, and if the rest of the story mode was filled with captivating gunfights and awe-inspiring setpieces, a white lie about 15 levels wouldn’t offend a soul. But Guardians’ campaign is a muddled and confusing afterthought, and the experience is often downright depressing. Halo has always been the most plentiful and consistent package in the FPS arena; it’s a series that has bundled essential campaign with essential multiplayer time and time again. But in this era of capped budgets, microtransactions (yes, they’re here too) and tokenistic, box-ticking gameplay features, it’s perhaps unsurprising to observe how sheepish and safe Halo 5 feels. What isn’t comprehensible is how profoundly it manages to misconstrue its own ancestry.
Bungie’s Halo games offered up a masterclass in delivering essential visual and aural feedback to players, which is why the combat was often so absorbing. Bizarrely, 343 Industries has chosen to file away at some of the series’ core systems, to the extent that prolonged stretches of Guardians’ campaign feel as if they were modelled on sections from a flagship Activision shooter. And we’re not talking about Destiny.
Your shield’s iconic audio blips, used as near-subconscious shorthand for when to jump in and out of cover, are now drowned out by the rest of the audio. Your energy bar is an inconspicuous sliver that’s occasionally borderline invisible during really intense battles, and nowhere near prominent enough in the game’s cluttered and intrusive head-up display. That trademark thrill of micromanaging your health, as enemy assailants furiously chip away at it, is completely gone. The situation is exacerbated because the number of things that can kill you instantly – even on Normal difficulty – is exasperatingly high. Cloaked Elites with their insta-kill melee attack are out in force, the (arguably too numerous) bosses all decimate you in a single swipe and one level appears to be partially based around the concept of Grunts appearing from out of nowhere to commit suicide next to you. Halo has always been about fighting to stay alive, but Guardians is about resigning yourself to relentless and occasionally inexplicable death.
To make things worse still, if you play the game alone, you’re lumbered with a trio of squadmates whose AI could have been programmed solely to deface Bungie’s ground-breaking legacy. When they aren’t running after you like discombobulated toddlers, they’re completely ignoring you when you’re downed, occasionally even sprinting into battle over your still-breathing corpse. When they actually do come to your aid, they’re completely blind to their surroundings, and often just queue up to get killed by whatever killed you. What’s more, the game’s revival system can only work in co-op games in which everyone is communicating, because the head-up display and the audio barely highlight downed players at all, bar the (very) occasional morsel of NPC dialogue, which is often made inaudible by the ongoing pandemonium – like almost every other crucial element of the sound design.
Your three lunk-headed minions aren’t even capable of creating a worthwhile distraction. At least three of the game’s bosses can only be defeated by being shot in the back, and those bosses only ever focus on you, making this a tiring task. Directing your AI squad’s fire towards said boss, even when that fire comes from behind them, rarely distracts their attention away from the only real player on the battlefield. Victory often involves a lot of skulking and waiting before you get a chance to get a few rounds off. After that you just rinse and repeat, ensuring all the while that the excitement doesn’t kill you. It’s more than clear that Halo 5’s campaign has been optimised for co-op play, but playing alone would’ve been far more entertaining with the co-op systems removed.
For all of its moment-to-moment frustrations though, what sinks Guardians’ story mode is the fact that it barely qualifies as a Halo game at all. Master Chief barely features, and for the first half of the plot, the action is almost entirely restricted to tight corridors and small plains, housing around a dozen enemies at a time. It isn’t until the eighth mission that the brassy Halo magic of old returns, and players are treated to mad spectacle, strategy-inflected vehicle sequences and levels so vast that the number of available tactical options constantly beggars belief.
To say that the second half is superior to the first is an understatement of colossal proportions, but the experience maintains a strange, cover version hollowness even in its most dazzling moments. The outright dearth of ammo, for example, removes your ability to plan ahead, which has been a quintessential trait of Halo’s gunplay since day one. You have no choice but to discard almost every weapon the moment that the clip runs dry, which would be less of an issue if all of the weapons were gratifying to wield. The Boltshot and the Incineration Cannon both have their pleasures, but the wimpy and scattershot Suppressor is barely preferable to a kamikaze melee spree. It would certainly be interesting to know how regularly Promethean weapons are picked up and used during multiplayer skirmishes, if at all.
Like practically every other shooter on the market, Halo is now all about multiplayer. 343’s ambitions for Guardians as an eSport were plainly evident during the game’s beta cycle, but the studio has been wise to listen to numerous complaints from the fanbase since then. While the beta showcased a game that was a little too fast, the finished article has maintained that uncharacteristic sense of speed but counterbalances it with brisker shield replenishment and gunplay that feels slightly less brutish. As a result, despite its ferocious pace the multiplayer feels genuinely authentic, and once you’ve acclimatised to the accelerated hustle, the rousing drama of Halo materialises with satisfying regularity.
Online play is split between two separate sectors: Arena and Warzone. Arena is comprised of high-intensity 4v4 game-types like Slayer and Capture the Flag, while Warzone is Halo’s flagship new mode: an initially baffling blend of Battlefield, League of Legends and Titanfall for up to 24 players. However, Arena doesn’t really offer up many surprises, and the visual style of the maps is particularly disappointing. While there are a couple of outliers (the sunset beach of Orion, the bright and uncluttered Coliseum) almost every 4v4 map is a dark, shadowy facility of some kind, replete with a grey and blue colour palette. The design of each environment is exemplary, but it’s difficult not to hanker after the glistening green grass of Valhalla or the sun-blasted facade of Sanctuary. The brand new Breakout mode is arguably the highlight of Arena, and offers a round-based game of TDM with no respawns and a flag in the middle of the map, which acts as an alternate route to victory as well as a priceless means of distraction. Guardians’ future as a lucrative eSport begins here.
Warzone is a different beast altogether, a sprawling mess of borrowed ideas that is actually a good deal of fun once you’ve realised how it works. Rules and pointers are extremely scarce, so understanding Warzone is a merciless trial by fire that’s not for the impatient. It turns out to be quite simple, but the lack of instructions and the messy, confusing player interface do an excellent job of disguising the fact. The Conquest-style clash over a trio of bases reaches endgame when one team captures all three, and the opposing team’s shield core is exposed to attack. Until that point, the goal is to get your team to 1,000 points first; by capturing bases, killing enemies (both AI- and player-controlled) and taking out the tenacious Promethean and Covenant bosses that land in the battlefield seemingly at random.
Even more daunting at first is the Requisition system. Requisition packs are periodically rewarded as you play, and contain everything from weapons to vehicles. Once you have, say, a Banshee in your inventory, you have to accumulate the relevant number of Energy Points before you can summon it. Ongoing success means a choice between shelling out for good weapons and perks, or braving the storm until you can afford a potentially game-changing attack vehicle. REQ packs are dispatched to you at a very generous rate from ranks one to 15; whether they slow down once you get beyond that (culminating in a hypothetical situation in which paying cash is your only option for acquiring vital single-use cards) remains to be seen.
Both online and off, Guardians handles large-scale action in a confident fashion, with everyday issues like slowdown and audio stutter conspicuous by their absence. There’s no doubt that 343’s commitment to maintaining a consistent 60fps gives play the urgency it needs, but it isn’t difficult to see why Microsoft has relied so heavily on pre-rendered cut scenes and lightning-fast edits during the launch campaign; for a potential system seller, this is one ugly meal ticket. Those obsessed with aesthetics are going to unleash absolute hell on it. With jaggies, retro textures galore and surfaces that are persistently free of detail, there are times in which Halo 5 looks like a down-scaled, fan-made mod of itself. The decision to stubbornly target gameplay performance over visual clarity was the right one, but youthful Xbox fans for whom the console war still rages on? Prepare to spend the remainder of 2015 with your fingers in your ears.
When 343 added post-match high fives and fist bumps to multiplayer earlier this year, fans were understandably perturbed. Those animations (now removed) implied that the studio didn’t wholly understand the property that it was working with, and the final product doesn’t even come close to quashing those suspicions. Halo 5: Guardians exists only because it had to. It isn’t a bad game, it’s just a catastrophically uninteresting one.