Halo CE has the best campaign/story, partially because of the grand scale that it presented in some missions (honestly, all of the games have a scene like the one where you first got a glimpse of the ringworld horizon), but mostly for those fastballs that it pulled ("Reclaimer" mystery, and that tension leading up to the first time the Flood appear).
Halo 2 vastly improved the multiplayer shinanigans and sort of spawned the Halo multiplayer following, imo, which makes it certainly significant in that regard. Halo 3 seemed like they tried to cram almost too much into the game, the campaign almost seemed to drag on, despite having some honestly amazing things (Forge and those vehicle types, man!). The multiplayer was roughly on-par with Halo 2 (maybe a little less silly in some regards, but that might just be me remembering how many exploitable bugs were in Halo 2). ODST is pretty much the same as Halo 3 but added firefight, which was a good decision, I'd say.
Reach, in my opinion, has the best multiplayer. The story was kind of what I expected, and I did enjoy it, but there were a fair number of anticlimatic moments. That being said, the level of Spartan customization, the new and updated weapon types, the introduction of some solid class types (armor lock was only one that I felt was openly exploitable, and it honestly wasn't that bad), and the great game modes all came together beautifully for Reach, and I felt that it showed that Bungie really wanted to give their franchise a good final sendoff.
For me, Halo 4 has had a lot of irksome flaws, partially from the story being told assuming you've read the books and doesn't so much as cover the plot holes that these assumptions create (the Didact never introduces itself before Cortana starts calling him that, without explaining where she pulled the name from). It also bugged me that they threw away all of the Human-Covenant developments of the third game in favor of creating a separate sect that is pretty much back to being "alien bad guys" with neither a voice or a face, and doesn't make mention of any of the Covenant who are supposedly allied with Humanity (you'd have thought they'd like to be in on studying the Composer, but instead the research base is Human-only...). That combined with the numerous modern warfare-inspired designs that seeped into both campaign and multiplayer, makes me a little cautious as to 343's plans for the franchise. They may have succeeded in making their Halo game feel fresh as a Halo game, but it also feels like it's moving a little too close to the highly repeated themes of other large FPS titles, which could result in the loss of Halo's identity as a franchise.
Log in to comment