There is a tension in this kind of myopic storytelling. The story stays laser-focused on Chief and Cortana and rarely stops to expand, ponder or overly explain what’s going on beyond the here and now right in front of Chief’s face. However, while 343 proves it is capable of crafting these sorts effective story beats, there are surprisingly few of them. The crew at 343 clearly loves the Halo universe, but it’s a universe that’s been built almost exclusively outside the games themselves There is a surprisingly effective scene about halfway through the game between Chief and a research scientist that’s told almost entirely through facial expressions and pregnant pauses, something I thought I would never say about a Halo game.
#How long to beat halo 4 series
The addition of human faces that don’t look like horrible mutants - also a first for the series - probably helps. The last time we saw Spartan John-117 he was floating cryofrozen in half of a demolished space ship after saving the Galaxy from annihilation at the end of Halo 3. Speaking of narrative, Halo 4 marks the return of the series’ iconic star, Master Chief. Unlike many of the earlier Halo games, you never get lost in a set of confusingly similar hallways or lose your direction in the middle of a hard-to-parse jungle. Each level smoothly transitions from one combat event to the next and from one story beat to the next. In fact, it wasn’t until the recent Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach that the company seemed to find a good rhythm for what was supposed to happen between combat situations. Article content FOLLOW POST ARCADE ON FACEBOOKĪlthough Bungie was excellent within the “30 seconds of fun” template, the studio sometimes struggled to string those engrossing combat encounters together. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. This is especially impressive considering this is the first game in the series to incorporate a wholly new set of enemies into the mix, ones that have a completely different set of tactics from either the classic villains of the series, The Covenant, or the somewhat annoying (and thankfully absent) Flood. 343 had to prove it was worthy of assuming the Halo mantle And all this needs to work just as well if there is another person on the other end of the battle instead of the game’s built in artificial intelligence. Every sound needs to give you more information. The controller must let the player respond exactly the way they intend to.Įvery action needs to have a tactile, meaty bite to it. Weapons must have a recognizable set of strengths and weaknesses, and there needs to be a tactical reason to switch between them.
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The enemies have to be smart enough to offer a tactical challenge, but predictable enough to strategize against and defeat. It sounds simple, but thousands of tiny details go into those 30 seconds.