Halo: Fireteam Raven (Arcade)

While the Halo franchise of sci-fi first person shooters has its fair share of spin-offs, an arcade game made in 2018 still stands out as a rather unusual choice. Arcades were on the wane when the Halo franchise began and the parent company behind it, Microsoft, doesn’t have the kind of historical ties to the arcade that would make producing a game in that space feel like a logical jump. Funnily enough though, the year Halo: Combat Evolved was released and kicked off the wildly successful franchise was also the year arcade manufacturer Raw Thrills was founded. Based on the making-of video it seems Raw Thrills got the ball rolling and found that there were people under Microsoft’s umbrella who wanted to make a Halo arcade game for years though, so Halo: Fireteam Raven was born, Master Chief and the world of Halo finally having entered the same stomping ground where many gaming legends were born.

However, Halo: Fireteam Raven does not star the supersoldier Master Chief, instead taking a story direction that can both hit on nostalgic memories of the first game in the series and provide a new perspective on the action of Halo: Combat Evolved. In this cooperative light gun shooter, players will sit behind the attached gun controllers of the arcade cabinet assigned to the different members of an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper team known as Fireteam Raven. Since the cabinet comes in two gun and four gun variants the game experience can vary a bit, mostly the action being spread across two large screens all players can aim and fire at if you are playing on the four gun cabinet. However, it seems to mostly stretch the action out rather than drastically changing it, the two gun version still including the same encounters but a full set of four players will find more enemies to deal with as they are individually targeted. No matter how many members of Fireteam Raven you have active though, their goal remains the same: support Master Chief’s efforts to eliminate the Halo superweapon by repelling the alien Covenant forces who threaten that objective.

Halo: Fireteam Raven is a fast-paced six mission affair so Victor Ramos, Ava Lang, Ethan Graves, and Marcus Hudson aren’t really characters so much as identities for the players so they can be differentiated on the end of level scoring screen that tells you how many kills you earned and how accurate you were. However, since the adventure is hewing pretty closely to the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, you do get to benefit from the environmental variety featured in that game, visiting recognizable locations like the interior of the Pillar of Autumn spaceship and areas found on the artificial Halo world like an island, an icy canyon, and a fair few all-out battlefields devastated by the escalating war. Sometimes Master Chief will weave directly into the action for a bit of action spectacle, but the game certainly isn’t lacking in visual flair as Fireteam Raven is often weaving through devastation as vehicles explode or huge armies of foes enter the screen to really nail in that your support in this war effort is definitely needed.

The movement in the game is handled automatically but the team will often come to a stop to engage in a gunfight until all foes are eliminated, the focus often on holding your own against enemies who don’t delay too long in firing back at you. Taking shots ends up practically inevitable since many gunfights present a few more enemies than you can immediately deal with and even though you do need to focus down the harder to kill or more powerful foes first, the little ones will pepper you with their weapons before you can get to them. Luckily, normal weapons fire doesn’t hurt you too much, the game seeming to plan around this smaller damage but there still being great risk in leaving a weak enemy on screen for too long. Rather than being worn down by small shots over time it will usually be the heavier attacks that actually force you to put more credits into the machine to continue playing, but having that small bit of damage does seem to emphasize the danger better than enemies patiently waiting to fire in what is depicted as an often chaotic battlefield.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the enemy types that make the Halo franchise so interesting are just as important to this arcade first person shooter’s enjoyment. The Covenant’s alien forces are your main form of opposition with the Grunt being the weakest member, but since you don’t control your movement they can actually make themselves a bit more dangerous here than in most games. Their numbers pad out enemy groups and deal a lot of those small shots mentioned earlier, but if you ignore them too long then you will pay the price. More pressing though is when they run at you with grenades in their hands, little packs of them harder to deal with when you’re standing in place trying to gun them down before the explosions can be within dangerous range. Jackals pack energy shields that can be broken with sustained fire but better play would have you aiming for their barely exposed bodies to clear them more quickly, but the Elite soldiers take a lot more punishment before dying and often pack the kind of weapons that will leave a mark if they aren’t killed first. The large Hunter enemies with their shields and powerful arm cannons introduce one mechanic the game uses often, the strongest of attacks always having a caution meter appear on the enemy that can be depleted to cancel an attack that will really hurt if you aren’t quick enough. Even Hunters rarely come alone though and coordination with the other players will likely be needed to hold back the attack, but that caution meter adds some appreciated depth to facing foes you’d just try to sustain fire on one at a time otherwise.

When the parasitic Flood enter the picture there is a much bigger focus on being able to take down a large group of enemies quickly, some firing at you with guns and others moving in for melee strikes and the management of the crowd much more important since these attacks can add up much more quickly. Little crawling creatures will come in swarms while the hulking brutes among the Flood can easily distract you from a more humble gunman zombie who makes himself known by taking off a large amount of your life. Their injection into the action definitely helps the game stay fresh as the Covenant troops’ tricks do become fairly familiar after the early missions, but there are some other ideas at play to help keep things varied as well. Despite being set during the events of the first Halo game, Halo Fireteam Raven ropes in enemies from later installments. The Drone aliens give you zippy flying foes who complicate how you’re going to target a group that better covers the breadth of the large screen, the enormous walking Scarab tank is turned into a final boss encounter where you need to blast it apart bit by bit, and even a rejected Flood variant that never appeared in the games before, the Flood Juggernaut, appears as one of the larger foes who has whipping tentacles tied to the caution meter system. Other vehicles crop up as targets as well, Ghost hoverbikes hard to nail down to their speed and the Wraith tanks easy to hit but having devastating attacks if you don’t prioritize them properly, but the Banshee aircraft are a bit of a mixed bag. A bit too often the game will cut to a section where Banshee ships will fly in from above, usually there being one per player to worry about and their maneuvering making it slightly hard to hit them but the segments are often much slower than the usual shooting and rather plain. Usually the game can manage its level of danger and excitement well so you aren’t overwhelmed but are constantly stimulated by speedy battles but these Banshee segments can seem oddly low key and pokey amidst it all.

Weapons will inform how you fight back against the Covenant and Flood though, and while all of them are aimed with the physical gun peripheral attached to the cabinet, these weapons have different considerations to make their use more engaging. At set parts in the adventure you’ll do a weapon swap, many of the options requiring reloads so you need to try and land your shots and plan around your clip size. A Plasma Rifle can fire quickly but its reloading phase is a lengthy one you’ll need to slip in well to avoid leaving yourself vulnerable, but something like the Needler with its low clip size reloads fairly quickly. Most weapons do fall into an automatic mold, the default assault rifle’s rapid machine gun fire not varied from too much even as the weapon swaps come in. The plasma pistol is mostly known for its charged shot capabilities in the Halo series, but here it is just a rapid fire energy weapon. That isn’t to say all weapons are reduced down to different looks for a similar gun, the shotgun deals heavy damage and the high rate of fire makes for a very thrilling twist to the usual drawbacks of such a weapon, but when you get the rocket launchers and can start blasting apart vehicles and groups of enemies with ease you really get to enjoy a power trip noticeably different from the more focused fire required of normal weaponry. For certain segments you will also be given grenades that are great for quickly clearing away a group of enemies if you realize you can’t eliminate your foes quickly enough, the amount of these very limited but since they’ll be taken away at story moments if you don’t use them you’re also encouraged not to sit on them for very long. Every weapon in the game does functionally have infinite ammo, but certain turret segments remove the need to reload as well, this helping the Banshee segments since you can keep firing to clear them more quickly but also giving you better means to handle moments where the game deliberately goes overboard with enemy numbers. Perhaps too much variation within an arcade light gun shooter could put off casual players, but within the mold of rapidly firing weaponry, Halo: Fireteam Raven still finds room to give you new toys to play with that are at least usually mildly different.

THE VERDICT: Halo: Fireteam Raven tells an explosive side story to the first Halo title that manages to emphasize its danger without feeling like its taking cheap shots. While you will be hit by incoming fire, the health bars are designed to weather it and it not only works as a decent warning system on who to prioritize but doesn’t often factor into the actual sum of damage that will lead to the need to put in more credits. Some slow moments involving Banshee shooting aside, Halo: Fireteam Raven keeps up a quick and thrilling pace as you shoot your way through new enemies with a set of reliable but slightly different weapons. The moments you can let loose with something like a shotgun or rocket launcher are balanced by the moments where you need to spread out your damage against large enemy groups or clear caution bars before you take heavy damage, making for a more robust light gun shooter that delivers well on the idea of a Halo game in an arcade format.

And so, I give Halo: Fireteam Raven for arcade machines…

A GOOD rating. There’s a fair bit of depth to the Halo series’s gunfights inevitably lost when positioning and movement are removed from the equation, but Halo: Fireteam Raven transfers many of its strong ideas into the arcade light gun genre. Enemy hostiles come at you quickly and with strong weapons, but quickly figuring out where your priorities lie is important to avoiding the kind of damage that can have long term consequences. The action doesn’t lean on many enemy or weapon types for too long save for those odd recurring Banshee battles, some weapons only briefly appearing and others like the turrets often given new situations to handle when they do pop back up. The progression of battle types means you are thinking about how you’re shooting and the reload and grenade systems demand a bit more activity than pointing at what you want dead sooner. That extra level of thought beyond target priority makes things a bit more involved without overcomplicating the play, the caution meters also a nice way a chance to repel heavy damage rather than just going for an easy way to draw more quarters out of players. It is a bit of a shame the whole adventure is just performing back-up for the guy who is really getting things done, but the perspective also has you weave into huge group conflicts that provide some impressive flash and spectacle, the visual fidelity not only making those moments of bombast more effective but also making it so that even if you are playing across the large two-screen version of the game you can still spot even far off and smaller enemies across the entire display.

In the same way that Halo: Fireteam Raven does try to fit many of its weapons into an automatic fire mold so the shooting won’t break from its core design too much, the game itself does feel a bit like it’s happy within the expected arcade light gun shooter design. It doesn’t go for any big ideas or demand much outside of the norm, the premise here seeming to be to just bring the Halo universe into the arcade. It does do so effectively, both roping in plenty of the elements a franchise fan will love to see but making the action exciting and easily understandable for a player who never touched the series before. It could have been interesting to see how Halo series ideas like driving vehicles or having a regenerating shield for health could have been included in a light gun shooter, but the safe path taken here is still enhanced by all the enemy types and varying weapons it can cycle through quickly to keep up the frenetic but diverse play. This Halo spinoff was released during a bit of a dry spell for the franchise and probably won’t be played as much as other titles in the franchise since it’s an arcade-only experience, but it still provides a good bit of support for the brand, bringing the name into new territory while still feeling like a natural fit for the format.