Halo 5 610/22/2023 Another of the 15 story missions provides some welcome, arrhythmic downtime in a Covenant outpost (you can now, in fact, talk to the monsters). In one level you fight successive waves of enemies on a tarrying lift, while the main action, which is taking place elsewhere on the planet, is recounted to you over the radio. This suggests that the game, despite its development cost, is still a little undercooked. There is also a great deal of repetition and too often the designers fall back on identikit boss battles. These highlights call to mind some of Bungie’s best work, but there’s little here that is truly 343’s own. In another you must board a gigantic Covenant spider-like contraption, destroy it from the inside and escape before it falls into a ravine. In one, a multidirectional battle on the alien planet of Sanghelios, you fight alongside Halo 2’s Arbiter. There are, meanwhile, only a few standout set-pieces (an unexpected, Uncharted-esque light puzzle, midway through the game hints at an alternative direction). Only much later in the game do you enter wider spaces. There’s nothing like the first Halo’s seminal level, The Silent Cartographer, which gave us a rounded island on which to knock about freely. Call of Duty’s funnelling approach to level design can also be seen here. Fixed at 60 frames per second, graphical texture and detail has been sacrificed for speed of movement, another example of where the multiplayer portion of the game is, for the first time, leading Halo’s design philosophy.Ĭombat feels more brittle and Call of Duty-esque – a feeling heightened in the campaign by sections where control is wrested from the player to allow for a canned animation, or a short, unavoidable sequence when, for example, you are forced to fall from masonry onto a lower platform. One button is given over to an evas ive dash (a little less stylish than Destiny’s equivalent slide, alas) while, your character can clamber, cat-like, on to ledges in a flowing motion. You can now ground-pound, like Super Mario, and dash forward with a volatile melee attack. Master Chief’s familiar, arcing jumps have been quickened, no doubt to add speed to the competitive portion of the game, which Microsoft hopes will become a fixture on the esports scene. The feel of the combat and movement has been tweaked to update halo’s traditional motion style Photograph: Microsoft Here you must weakly call for them to come to you, and hope that they survive the lingering seconds its takes to revive you while under fire. There you are able to crawl toward a comrade’s position in cover. The system comes from Gears of War, where it’s better implemented. More usefully, they are able to revive you if you fall in battle – providing they make it to you within five or so seconds. They keep the airwaves thick with chatter (although you’ll be hard pushed to tell the identikit characters apart). Now you roll with three computer-controlled space marines, dressed in similar tin-suits to yours. Before you battled alongside a loose knit band of US marines – cheery cannon fodder, really. But it’s clear that this is now a series playing catch-up, lifting ideas wholesale from rivals. The $100m Halo 5 now finds itself as the underdog.Ĭertainly, the game is vibrant and exquisitely rendered its vistas vary from humming desert lands to rolling green hills, flecked with purple flowers and wind-beaten crags. The blockbuster shooter must have what it takes to become a competitive sport (or at least a corporate-sponsored simulacrum of one). No longer is a 10-hour storyline followed by a breezy multiplayer mode enough. The FPS scene is shifting too, with the rise of eSports. Activision’s annual Call of Duties are among the most expensively marketed entertainment products ever made, and the genre-splicing Destiny is made by Bungie, a studio whose nous and skill neither time nor success have dulled. The console-based first-person shooter (FPS), which Halo both defined and popularised, has become one of the most valuable creative real estate in video games. It’s not the only question Halo’s current developer, 343 Industries (a company named after one of the series’ characters and which, until 2012, had only been allowed to re-master Bungie’s classic work) has been forced to reckon with. Can he save a beleaguered video game system? Master Chief routinely saves the universe. The Xbox One has lost considerable ground to Sony’s PlayStation 4, which is seen by many as the superior, cheaper and, in its vibrant sweep of games, more relevant machine. Sixteen years later, Microsoft hopes Master Chief can repeat that trick with Halo 5.
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