Halo 5: Guardians (Xbox One)
Halo 4 wrapped up the Halo series’s tenure on the Xbox 360 with a somewhat confused plot about the AI intelligence Cortana decaying while a robotic race of ancient beings known as Prometheans carried the action, but despite its faults in storytelling it was still as enjoyable as any game that had enough of this first person shooter franchise’s basics intact. Moving onto the Xbox One though would come with questions about how the series would attempt to evolve, and with Halo 4 not quite capturing the same magic as the original Halo trilogy, even more pressure was placed on the development of what would become Halo 5: Guardians. Many changes to the Halo style of play are immediately evident the moment you first step into this science fiction universe once again, but at the same time the game can seem even more confused about what it wants to be compared to its predecessor.
Halo 5: Guardians is not just the story of the series’s usual cybernetic Spartan supersoldier Master Chief fighting aliens that threaten the universe, as this time around there are actually two sets of playable characters. The campaign involves the player shifting between two squads of four characters as the story is told, one lead by Earth’s savior Master Chief and the other by a man who used to be in the business of hunting Spartans, Locke. After Cortana’s disappearance at the end of Halo 4, Master Chief is surprised to hear the closest thing he’s ever had to a friend suddenly speak to him from across the stars. Immediately shifting away from his work with Earth’s interstellar military forces to go and find Cortana, his dereliction of duty and the fact he brought three other soldiers with him for his quest leads to Locke and his crew being called in to hunt down Master Chief. However, it soon becomes clear that Cortana is not so much the damsel in need of rescuing but actually a potentially enormous threat to the universe, the AI creating an army of enormous hawk-like metal beings known as Guardians who each have incredible destructive potential. Her end goal and slip away from the humanity she had developed in previous games lead to the rising stakes later in the plot, but unfortunately the game ends right after a huge and impactful event occurs that could have very well served as a bombastic midpoint or even the start of another title rather than a cliffhanger that feels like it serves as the finale solely because the game didn’t want to keep going.
Strangely enough, much more of the game is spent as Locke and his team rather than playing as the face of the franchise, but Master Chief’s squad is the shallower of the two and might have been sidelined to focus on the characters with more depth. Blue Team are said to be Master Chief’s old team from when he was starting out to explain why they’re assisting him now, but none of them have much of a personality nor do they stand out. Instead, they’re mostly there to allow for four players to play cooperatively, although this can only be done online thanks to the unfortunate removal of local multiplayer from this installment. Locke’s team has a bit more life to them partially because they have more time to show off who they are, and while they’re not too complex either, there are at least some hints at character backstories and they interact with other important characters in the Halo universe. Perhaps one of the nicest surprises of Locke’s team is Buck from Halo 3: ODST making his return, and unlike in that game, his comedic quips are infrequent enough that they provide some levity without feeling like the game is trying to force you to like him. A few squad-focused features have been added to the campaign as well such as being able to order your allies to attack a specific target and even AI members of the team able to revive a fallen comrade provided they do it in time. While perhaps lacking in personality for the most part, your squadmates end up an enjoyable addition save for the moments they might jump off a cliff or get stuck in level geometry due to some funky AI.
The course of the story events definitely feels all over the place sadly. The first thing the game does is wrap up the loose ends of Halo 4’s long Spartan Ops storyline unceremoniously, but it also has entire sections of the story focused solely on exploring an area free of enemies to take in the location and find optional data. These combat-free missions can actually include some interesting locations like a colony run by the deteriorating AI Govern Sloan on a planet that had been turned to glass by the Covenant alien’s superweapons. Sloan’s suspicious behavior makes Locke’s team on edge while trying to learn more about the area from the human residents, but the time you spend with the Covenant defectors on the home world of the Covenant Elites has the opposite tone as these former enemies are made out to be personable and with more complexity to their lives than just being the troops you might fight in a gun battle. Even the action sections usually do a decent job of changing up the feeling of the areas you explore, from tight interiors aboard a spaceship to wide stretches of the glass planet you can cover via vehicle to the areas steeped in the Forerunner technology the Prometheans and Guardians are tied to. It does feel like it is lacking in major memorable setpieces and the overall concept of a location shines brighter than specific segments, but even though the campaign’s writing isn’t always that compelling, there are moments that can entertain the player either through solid shooting setups or story segments with unique tones and background details.
Halo 5: Guardians’s shooting systems will feel familiar enough to returning players, but new features definitely make it stand out some from its predecessors. You can still sprint like you could in Halo 4 to get around, but being able to clamber up surfaces you leap towards gives a new angle to your otherwise simplistic jump that adds a bit to area navigation and avoiding incoming fire. Players can now do a charging tackle, get a brief boost of speed with their armor thrusters, and slam down on foes with a ground pound, these seemingly subtle changes having more impact than you might at first believe as they open up new movement options and a few new attack strategies. Players all have energy shields that will absorb the damage a player takes until before leaving them vulnerable, this shield automatically recovering if you can avoid damage for a bit and thus encouraging the player to participate in the fight when they’re fully protected but adding an important defensive consideration as you must retreat and recover if you can’t end the fight swiftly. Your weapon crosshairs will now use colors and symbols to indicate when your gunshots make contact and when you’ve successfully killed a target, and overall it feels like a lot of little systems have been altered to try and make the action feel distinct from other Halo games without abandoning the effective parts of the formula.
The weapons and vehicles featured include plenty of familiar options, but some have received some vital changes to make them stand out more. The Promethean weapons particularly benefit, these visually impressive robotic guns now having their machine gun equivalent, the Suppressor, have a light homing feature for its rapid fire shots, the Binary Rifle’s sniper functions changed so that it instead fires a lingering laser beam that deals incredible damage if enough of that beam hits, and the Splinter Grenade now going from making an area slightly inconvenient to linger in to creating an actually lethal blast radius. In addition to new ideas like the Hydra rocket launcher that lets you fire multiple rockets quickly that move to hit any target you lock onto, there’s a good mix of standard weapon options like assault rifles and the sniper rifle while more unique alien weaponry brings some options to the table like the Plasma Grenade that sticks to foes it makes contact with before detonating, the Needler that pierces foes with spikes that can explode, and the powerful melee options like the smooth and efficient plasma sword and the bombastic shockwave-generating Gravity Hammer.
Robust weapon options encourage different play styles that gel with different situations and multiplayer maps in a variety of ways, but the vehicle variety is solid as well. Aerial vehicles like the Banshees and Wasp, battle tanks like the Scorpion and Wraith, a variety of Warthog jeeps with different weapon turrets on the back, and options like the Mantis battle mech spice up the action in select locations while all having their weaknesses and perks compared to using a different vehicle or fighting on foot. Even the Prometheans now have a vehicle to call their own you get to climb in, the flying Phaeton packing two weapon types and able to do short range teleportation so it has its own niche to fill as well. The interplay between all these battle options means combat can come in many forms without ever feeling like it overly skews towards one type of battle tactic being the clearly superior approach, and the shifting power dynamics are especially beneficial to the multiplayer modes where they can more clearly impact the successes and failures of players based on how much they can diversify their strategies.
Most multiplayer modes focus heavily on scavenging useful weapons and vehicles when thrown into a large battlefield together, the available maps changing on which of the two major multiplayer types you choose to play. The more traditional modes focused on killing opposing players more or avoiding being killed yourself includes options like Team Arena’s 4 vs. 4 matches, Breakout’s elimination focused battles, and the Free For All mode being about every man trying to earn the highest kill count themselves. These feature many variations within their own rulesets to better find the most exciting way to play, and the maps featured do try to draw out different strategies with how open spaces and cover are placed in relation to the available weapons and vehicles. Warzone is the game’s new big mode though, this multiplayer mode having up to 24 players competing in teams of two to take down AI opponents and complete objectives before the other players can. These have variants as well such as Warzone Firefight where it is more about cooperating to survive waves of foes than completing tasks before an opposing side, and while the effectiveness of these modes can shift based on who is better at handling AI opponents, it still provides another unique avenue for how you can play this game competitively online. Halo 5’s Forge also allows for custom maps and modes to be made within certain limitations, further increasing the longevity of a game that already tried to ensure there were many ways to play its online multiplayer.
The computer-controlled enemies featured both in the campaign and Warzone don’t include too many new variants, but they often benefit from the way their specific abilities line up with the way they use the same weapons you draw from. Prometheans have a new basic ground troop in the form of the surprisingly generic looking Soldiers who mostly look and act like robot humans, but this means the Knights are freed up to be more powerful foes with their frequent teleportation, strong melee strikes, and frequent assistance from the flying Watchers who can add shields to Promethean forces or even revive them. Crawlers have been toned down since Halo 4, the dog-like machines still relying on swarm tactics and speed but not packing the same punch as they’re more easy to keep your distance from this time around. Certain Prometheans will favor moving around with powerful explosive turrets or sniping from spots you can’t reach, but the Warden is the biggest addition to their forces, this consciousness across multiple bodies able to take plenty of punishment before going down and being more aggressive and intelligent than his underlings. The Covenant who are still opposed to humanity mostly just bring their already effective enemy types to round out the roster, the shield carrying Jackals, the cannon fodder Grunts, the durable Hunters, and the Elites who act like a human player breaking up the battles with the Prometheans so neither enemy type wears out their welcome. Enemy placement can actually make some fights a bit difficult if you rush in too eagerly, so prioritizing targets and keeping yourself safe is a vital part of firefights in addition to using your attack options to the best of your abilities.
THE VERDICT: If you judge Halo 5: Guardians by its campaign, you’ll find yourself with some enjoyable and occasionally difficult firefights but no memorable setpieces and a story that sometimes seems confused about what it should be doing. The characters in the two squads are mostly flat or not given enough to do, the cliffhanger leaves off at a strange point, and its better moments are often tied to the ambient storytelling rather than the poorly structured plot. Looking over at multiplayer though and you can find all the wonderful weapons, vehicles, movement options, and enemy types working together to make for some exciting and varied ways to fight. While there were many changes to fundamental systems between Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians, many for the better even, it still feels like it copied that game’s issue of having a poorly composed plot but having exhilarating gameplay and battle systems to still make it worth playing.
And so, I give Halo 5: Guardians for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. Some people may chafe at playing more of the story as Locke than Master Chief, others might find the cliffhanger too egregious too forgive, and many might just outright forget much of the plot because it doesn’t do enough to make it engaging outside some of its quieter moments, but Halo 5: Guardians is still packed with enough incredible content when it comes to the action both in and out of the story that it should be dismissed because of it’s story’s struggles. All of the small refinements to weapons, enemy types, and even the basics of combat mean that Halo 5: Guardians packs a lot into the ways you can play even when plenty of its concepts were carried over from older titles. None of the directions the story heads in are bad enough to taint the experience to the degree that you can’t enjoy the first-person shooting, so besides perking up your ears for better segments like investigating Sloan’s colony or walking among the Covenant defectors, Halo 5: Guardians can still be enjoyed as a fun action game if you decide to tune out how it botches its main plot.
On a technical level, Halo 5: Guardians includes many improvements and interesting changes from the Halo games made for the original Xbox and Xbox 360. On the other hand, some of the older titles blow it out of their water with their worlds, characters, and writing. The way the varied combat options interact here leads to plenty of enjoyable moments that feel distinct thanks to the customization options and important balance between what’s available in a mode or map, so Halo 5: Guardians still manages to maintain the franchise’s phenomenal approach to gunplay because of strong fundamentals that received safe but interesting additions.