When I played through Halo 4 at a review event in early October, other press finished the campaign in six to seven hours. This could be the nature of so many new enemy and encounter types, paired with changes to existing weapons and equipment, but I don't think so. Normal has in turn been bumped up in difficulty. Halo 4's Heroic setting is considerably more difficult than it has been in previous games, at least for an initial playthrough, sitting close to the original game's Legendary setting. 343i has been silent on difficulty levels, and the lack of messaging could be a problem. My default assumption, then, was that Heroic would be the way to go on my first playthrough of Halo 4. It made the enemies more challenging, and gave them time to survive and demonstrate more complicated behaviors. Original Halo developer Bungie made a point of emphasizing that the series was best played on Heroic, the third of four difficulty settings. Virtually every Halo game since Halo 3 has sought to make substantive additions to that triumvirate - Halo 3 added equipment, which didn't work so well, while Halo: Reach added armor abilities, which often felt superfluous outside of situations designed specifically around their use. The emphasis on interplay between guns, grenades and melee attacks is still there. Halo 4 uses the basic design tenets of the series at large to underpin some larger changes to the "combat sandbox" that original developers Bungie coined in 2001 with Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo 4 is easily the best campaign experience in a shooter or action title this year. You might do what I did anyway, though, and go out of your way to play again. There's a lot of meat present for hardcore Halo fans, but less invested players might blink and miss something important - I played through the campaign twice before everything clicked. These provide almost half an hour of exposition and explanation of the forces aligned against the Master Chief and humanity that are otherwise only hinted at in the game proper, and I can't see a good reason for information that useful to be buried where most players will never see it. I had the benefit of seeing all the history locked inside of Halo 4's hidden terminals, eight of which are scattered throughout the campaign. As a fan of the series only passingly familiar with the external Halo fiction - the story and history developed in the books and comics - I barely clung to comprehension here and there. I encountered a few "wait, what?" moments throughout the story that Halo 4 presented in a strangely cavalier manner. The story is actually the only real stumbling point for Halo 4, minor as that stumble may be. How did the Covenant find the Forward Unto Dawn? You'll need to find a beat-up Covenant computer to find out. It works for the most part, though it leans more heavily than I'd like on finding supplemental pieces of information to get a fuller picture of exactly what's going on. The story in Halo 4 is more developed than it's ever been, because it's more present than it's ever been. Cortana has always been the more human of the pair - which Halo 4 also explores - and her arc over the course of the game resonates more deeply than you'd think. It sounds silly, the joke that Halo is a love story between a cyborg and an AI, but 343i sells that relationship in a surprisingly respectful way. The omnipresent AI companion's impending mortality adds more emotional weight to Halo 4 than previous entries have seen. In the Halo universe, artificial intelligences have a lifespan of seven years before they're decommissioned in advance of "rampancy," where said AI thinks itself to death.Ĭortana's been in service for approximately eight years. But the standard Halo race against time - which, let's be honest, has powered every game in the series - has a more personal urgency this time around. I'll leave the details vague, but Halo 4 explores the nature of the Forerunners, the extinct alien super-intelligence whose technological bones have haunted the Halo series from the beginning. Open it does, and the Chief and Cortana are pulled into Requiem, a world with, if you'll pardon the cliche, a sinister purpose. The Master Chief is yanked from his cryogenic sleep to find the Forward Unto Dawn on the precipice of the massive artificial world Requiem and a Covenant expeditionary force waiting for it to open. Set several years after the ending of Halo 3, Halo 4 opens in the wreckage of the UNSC Forward Unto Dawn, the ship that the Master Chief used to escape the destruction of the Ark, an ancient command center capable of firing all of the Halo rings across the galaxy at once and destroying all sentient life in existence.
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