Today’s game is Halo 4. I continued my playlist with my friend and we started on this. Upon replaying it, i think i may have been too harsh on my initial decision against the game (though i’m not going to 100 say it for sure). I know it seems obvious, but playing on normal as opposed to legendary really makes it a bit more tolerable. Don’t get me wrong, it’s Halo 4, but it’s come from like a 5.5/10 to a 6.5/10 for me.
Today’s lag seemed extra atrocious though. It ended up being the reason i only played 2 levels. On one part seen above, the game froze for so long i got to study the closeup of a plasma grenade. Usually you only get to see that for a few seconds.
I will also add that, on retrospect. I am not a fan of the Forerunner designs in Halo 4. I’m not sure what it is but i do not like it. Too many colors I think. Something about it also just seems samey too me. I can’t really tell any of it’s sections apart like i could with the Bungie games. Though i may also not be the best judge of that due to my face blindness.
Like mentioned before me and my friend only did the first two levels because the lag got that bad. For some reason my WiFi card struggles anywhere beyond 10 feet from the router. So my signal is abysmal. I actually tried to replace it today with an AX210 which i heard works great on linux, but the card is completely dead, so i have to return it.
My problem with the Forerunner stuff in Halo 4 is the same problem I have with all the aesthetic changes in 4 and 5 - it’s extremely busy. 1, 2, and 3 have a sleek and simple design language that makes it very easy to tell what’s happening in chaotic combat. The vibrant colors and shiny materials even give Halo 3 an almost heroic fantasy vibe. They deliberately went the other direction with Reach to enhance the grim tone of the game, but environments are still relatively simple so that enemies stand out. 4 and 5 put excessive lines and greeblies on absolutely everything. It’s all so packed with details that you sometimes lose enemies in the background and it can be difficult to tell what you’re looking at.
That was another complaint I had about 4 and 5. It’s just too busy for me to pick out any enemies. I thought it might just be a me thing with my lack of glass but it’s reassuring to here someone bring it up
I recently replayed 4. Although I kinda like the gameplay, I found the story to actually be pretty boring. I like the Didact as a concept, but he’s incredibly underused imo. The Prometheans are just incredibly annoying to fight, and Spartan Ops gets very tedious because of them.
I like some things like the added sprint (fight me, if any game should have sprint it should be Halo, at least in campaign) but another thing is that the story feels so incredibly short. Like it ends right as it’s about to get good.
I will say the Spartan armor and elite designs have grown on me since it first came out. It does make me want to replay Halo 5, and I am disappointed that it’s not going to be brought to PC pretty much ever.
I like how Reach handled the sprint. You had it, but you could swap it out for a different power up like the older games. It felt like a balanced way to handle it.
I can’t say I share the same fondness for the armor though. It’s more of a personal thing though. Something about the armor feels very clunky to me
It definitely is clunky, but I feel like if you look at designs fairly closely you can see some evolutionary jumps. Maybe not with some helmets like Hazop, but you can with others like Rogue and Recon.
Imo I kinda liked 4’s version of sprint. It was there, everyone had it, but it was limited and had a sort of cool down similar to other armor abilities. I do also like the gameplay of 5, with the other added Spartan abilities like slam and clamber; imo it made me feel like a lethal killing machine moving around the battlefield.
Halo4 is really weird. Forerunner design became all busy and plastickey (the plastic aspect is due to the material/shader and the business comes from stark changes in the design language). The new enemies are not interesting in terms of behaviour and the new weapons are literally the old ones with a slightly different appearance. Also for some reason the game starves you of ammo and weapons dropped to the ground disappear after a few seconds, which makes legendary… a legendary slog.
Yet they did something really cool with Cortana and Chief. But that’s not nearly enough for me to ever want to replay it again, which is a terrible thing to say about a Halo game…
In co-op though it must be fun, I never tried
Speaking of the weapons. I absolutely despise using the forerunner weapons. Like. The UNSC Weapons and majority of the covenant weapons control fine, hell, I’d say a few of them control really well. But then the Forerunner weapons feel like they have no impact. It’s some sort of combo of how the Forerunner enemies are and the lack of any sort of haptic feedback.
Maybe it’s just a me thing. It did take me a while to figure out the needler actually needed the shields to be down to explode. So maybe I’m missing something
The updated Forerunner architecture designs seem directly lifted out of Tron. I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that Halo 4 released just 2 years after Tron Legacy.
You kinda need to play it with bandanna to enjoy it. But even then, anytime you die after you’ve gotten some nice weapons from enemies, you have about 10 seconds to run over and pick them up before they’re gone.
I don’t mind the loadout system for Spartan Ops, but I can see why they’d be a pain in the ass to deal with in multiplayer.
I’ll have to replay Halo 4 at some point. I remember liking it more than most people seem to, and I probably would have rated it like a solid 7/10. Not amazing, but not quite mediocre either.
Then again, I haven’t played it since it first came out, and I was far less critical of games back then.
I imagine I sounded a bit harsher than I meant, but I did somewhat enjoy Halo 4. It’s not the scum of the earth I hear people say it is. But it’s definitely no Bungie Saga either
