At last, we complete not just Halo 4, but the entire Master Chief Collection. Every mainline Halo game’s campaign, except Halo 5, which has yet to come to PC as of the time of writing, is now solidly on my list of accomplishments. I’m only sad that it took so long.
Thumbnail by Sam Callahan.
As a said in the final thoughts, Halo 4 seems like a game one needs to suffer through in order to get to the gold gems that are hidden underneath a layer of padding and question plot/enemy design.
This game is at its strongest when it explores the nature of Master Chief and Cortana’s relationship, especially as Cortana begins to run rampant. Even without the weight of the history players have with both characters, there’s a real sense of deftness, subtlety, and nuance that permeates all of their interactions. Though the Chief speaks more here than he ever has before, there’s still more to read from what he doesn’t say than from what he does. That part still shines through.
While it is unbecoming of me to muse as candidly as I said on the state of mind of the writers for the game, my assumption that someone on the team was caring for an Alzheimer’s patient wasn’t too far off the mark. In this GDC postmortem of the game, franchise creative director Josh Holmes revealed that his mother was diagnosed with dementia early on in the process. When you see how the two characters interact as Cortana increasing starts to break down, barely recognized who she is and what she’s doing, you feel that care that comes from having personal experience with the subject matter. And much like real life, it’s not something that can be cured, no matter how hard one might try. Seeing the Chief realize he can’t save his friend, and struggle to come to terms with that is impactful, perhaps even more so because he’s a character that has otherwise never failed.
It is a shame then that the rest of the game around it does not live up to those lofty heights. That final push in particularly really highlighted how unfun the Prometheans are as enemies. Not only to they move in awkward ways that make them hard to hit, but they also swarm us to make it hard to catch our breath. Additionally, most of their weapons don’t have the impact that human and Covenant weapons do, impotent both in terms of damage output and in how it feels to fire them. It feels so much better to fight the Covenant then the Prometheans, and we rarely get to do so.
Even worse, the writing between Master Chief and Cortana is the B-plot. The A-plot deals with the Didact and the Librarian, and neither one of those characters is remotely interesting. There’s no meat to hook into as far as they or the human military are concerned. It’s part of why I began to loose focus and interest in the main story for most of my time playing the game. Both in this stream and the one before, I completely lost the plot, which is something that I’ve never got through with a Halo game before.
It’s such a shame, because there’s such strong writing in the B-plot that everything else comes off as a let down. I don’t envy 343 for the herculean task they were given, but nor can I say that I particularly enjoyed the final product of their efforts. To me, this is definitely one of, if not the, weakest games in the franchise.
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