I’ve got a love hate hate relationship with Halo 5. I am inexplicably invested in a series where the main character emotes less than a block of cheese. Since Halo 3 I’ve been hooked. The teenage power fantasy of being that power armoured super soldier still appeals and probably always will. I’ve played all the games to some extent and 10 months after Halo 5 was release it’s about time I wrote some words about it.
These are of course my opinions so they’re tacitly full of shit.
The story. 4 left the plot in quite a nice place. There’s some new bad lads and the whole “The Chief is more of a robot than the AI” thing was pretty cool if already well trodden sci-fi stuff but at least you played as The Chief. Part of my buy in with the Halo franchise is playing as The Chief. Reach was a great action film where each character tried to out die their mates while all not being quite as cool as The Chief. 5 has you fucking about as some other bloke half the time. I’ve still not finished the story, I can’t see myself going back to it.
So why am I still thinking about it? We’ll it’s because my bunch of friends go to shooter. Even over Overwatch. We grab some beers or other alcohol and fire up Halo and shoot stuff over Xbox Live. It’s the epitome of the dude-bro shooter.
We’ve played it a hell of a lot. More than the game deserves I think. There are so many things that just aren’t right. These problems are mostly about the Warzone Firefight mode because that’s the only fun mode.
- Guns. Everyone has their favourite gun in Halo. Mine is the DMR because I’m a try hard who likes to get headshots. I can’t however select this as my load out straight away nor do they appear on the map. First you semi-randomly unlock the ability to use them via levelling up. Then in game you have score sufficient points to select it in your loadout. I still haven’t unlocked it DMR. That makes me sad.
- Promethians suck. Well. I don’t like them. They have cool animations but we’ve had so many games with the Covenant that I’ve been trained to love that shield pop animation. Do that and you know they’ll be dead next hit. Promethians just aren’t the same. They glow red and get a bit grumpy but there’s nothing like the shield pop.
- The entire Requisition system. It’s a game in the 201xs so of course you have cards that unlock stuff that you can either get randomly or buy. These determine what guns and vehicles you can get in various game modes. The problem is there are a handful of things I enjoy using so when I open a pack and get another energy sword that’s just wasted points. This pack system also determines how you unlock any cosmetic items. They are annoyingly rare and by far the only interesting things in the packs.
- Armour design. I’m a 40K dork. I love big pauldrons. Pauldrons so big you could house a family under one. Halo generally doesn’t have armour design that gets me but I feel it’s getting further and further away from anything cool. All the armour has twiddly useless shit with some weird muscle fibre mesh bits. Give me big slabs of ceramite. I feel that older Halo games had, not plausible, but hot looking power armour. Those times are gone.
At this point I’m pretty sure at this point the only reason I’m still playing and enjoying Halo 5 is because my friends haven’t picked up Overwatch.