Tag Archives: Halo series

Halo 4

Remember that time when I played Halo 3 and called it a science fiction trilogy? So it turns out that a new studio got their hands on the property and made a new game, so, trilogy no more I suppose. To get the obvious parts out of the way, gameplay is identical to the previous games, so if you liked those, you should ought to like this too. I reckon that the same is true for multi-player, but I haven’t hit it up yet, so I cannot say for certain. But the important questions are: new studio? new plot entry in an already complete story? seriously, someone thought this was a good idea?

Except, in contravention of all known wisdom on the topic, this may be the best Halo of all of them. It’s like, yeah, the new story absolutely relies on everything that has gone before and would never work as a standalone tale, and what has gone before is a pretty cool story that had lots of highs and lows and dramatic tension and tragedies and triumphs, and I stand by all the good I’ve ever said about it. But Halo 4 relates two very personal, small-scale struggles, and it wrestles on multiple fronts with a question as old as the very genre of science fiction itself, what does it mean to be human?

There’s also an entirely serviceable sci-fi plot to hold up these philosophical delvings, about which I’m glad, because you have to have a working plot, and a working plot about the historical forebears of all the cool tech floating around in the galaxy is always of interest. But mostly this game was about the emotional resonance for me, and I have not had this much investment in a specific videogame outcome but a handful of times previously. (Aeris in Final Fantasy VII, the shocking climax of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and my fierce protectiveness of Tali in the Mass Effect games are all I can think of.) Honestly, there’s a specific line of dialogue that haunts me days later, and I don’t think any of the others have managed that. (Aspects of the Portal games haunt me too, but not in the same way.)

Halo 3

It occurs to me to state for the record that I did finally finish playing Halo 3. A few weeks ago, I guess? I forgot it was a noteworthy event, as it happens. The Halo games, as you may or may not be aware (but probably you are), chronicle a three-way war between humans (led by Master Chief, a genetically improved guy in a big metal powersuit), um… a confederation of aliens that I distinctly recall having a name that escapes me at the moment (led by religious fanatics), and the Flood (about whom the less said the better in the unlikely event that you care about spoilers for a game that is almost a decade old). The war is fought in a variety of places, but mostly on giant terraformed rings called Halos which figure prominently in the fates and histories not only of the aliens and the Flood, but of the galaxy itself.

In this game, a first-person shooter like the others, you control the Master Chief as always, and up to three other players in co-op play, which at the time was pretty new. Other games have made good roads into that space in the meantime, but, that’s how it goes. And you continue to fight against the other two sides of the war and try to save the galaxy and all. Also, there’s some pretty fantastically customizable multiplayer components to the game.

Despite the disinterested tone of the review, it really is a great game. It doesn’t have quite the strength of storyline of Halo 2, but the game play is equivalent and probably improved, so, decent tradeoff. If it weren’t for the fact that the game play in the original game was iffy, I could unreservedly recommend the whole trilogy as a pretty good sci-fi yarn wrapped around finding a bunch of guns and using them to kill things. Which, I mean, they’re aliens. That’s why they’re on the screen!