Halo: The Master Chief Collection

If you're deep into Halo, you don't need a review to tell you you've already bought this and are having a great time. The broken crouch is a bummer, but hardly notable unless you love crouching in competitive, and the game looks a little bit worse than you remember (even with the enhanced graphics on) but it's some Halo ass halo, and if you're into that, it delivers.

For everyone else, the TLDR is that its an old game that if you didn't love it then, has little to offer you now in a featureless package with a ton of grind. The shooting feels slow and unsatisfying, the movement is ACHINGLY slow (with sprint, you have something like 10 seconds of 50% boost, and then get to wait another 10 to do it again), it looks like an Xbox 360 game with a few weird new issues (character movements seem weirdly framey, like they were made in 15fps and forced into 60 with no additional frames added, things people hold move around in their hands like they're experiencing physics that the rest of the model isn't). The campaign is largely untouched (save for the rewards that used to come with its completion, but more on that later) and all the characters come off as frustrated that they have to be in the game at all and then expects you to feel sad they sacrificed themselves to save you from the enemies you then just mowed down. The multiplayer has been pared down to a few select queues, to force as many people into a few hoppers as possible, and suffers from no vanilla or middle ground experiences (Firefight is either Arcade, with a handful of skulls on to be goofy, or Hardcore, which is extremely hard and I have never completed at the time of this writing). But the true bullet in the brain is the Season Pass, which takes an experience in nostalgia and forces you to stare into the deepest, darkest aspects of your life and question why you ever liked Halo in the first place.

So, graphically, basically no options. You have Old Graphics, which look muddy and low res, or New Graphics, which look muddy and low res, but slightly less so. I wouldn't call it a lazy port, but its hardly a new game and with almost no options at all (no ability to turn off in game chat? really?) it feels like the 'no compromises' port we were promised never appeared. It somehow manages to look worse than video you can see of it running natively on an Xbox 360, perhaps due to the lower bit rate and resolution on the 360. With few to no graphics options to fiddle with (hot tip: turn off the frame rate limit right off the bat because it dramatically reduces the framerate beyond the limit it imposes), although the FOV slider is a godsend, it looks like an old game and there isn't much to be done about it.

And as old games tend to be, it plays like an experience better left to nostalgia and imagination. The campaign isn't bad, more because you have all the options and not a bunch of factors foisted upon you arbitrarily, but the multiplayer feels terrible. Its easy to see that it was never designed with a mouse in mind, since flying vehicles can now make instant 180 degree turns and literally juke around missiles, but people who were savage at Halo have always been savage at Halo, so any of those experiences are going to be frustrating if you aren't also savage at halo. The more frustrating part is the weird morass that the whole game seems to be stuck in. They have added some 'modern' features, like a new cursor location (in the center of the screen rather than 1/3 from the bottom) or Modern Aiming ('a more consistent experience across all weapons', your guess at what that means is as good as mine) but they really just seem to highlight how bad it all feels. I've recently gotten back into Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2, and I never stopped playing Destiny 2, and even at their worst, bad pingiest they feel better. Its so slow, and the built in inaccuracy in most of the weapons feels so bad, the more I played of it the less I liked it. Which will be a fun topic I bring up again later!

Multiplayer is its own fun set of problems, mostly having to do with Old Games Didn't Get To Learn From Their Own Mistakes. Remember team killing? I didn't and it frustrates me every time I see an ally run over a grenade I just threw in a desperate attempt to melee kill the dude I was fighting, only to take all the damage and see the dude kill us both. Remember long respawns? BOY ARE THEY LONG. It defaults to spawning on a teammate, which never works because no one is ever safe so you spend 10-15 seconds watching someone slowly run around, die and then you both spawn at the start. And it waits 5 seconds after you choose a spawn to actually spawn you, leading me to usually end up yelling JUST SPAWN, JUST PUT ME BACK IN THE GAME at the screen looking at a spawn timer of 0. And, for all the complaints Battlefield gets about getting back into combat, has never been as slow as the run back in Invasion. If you didn't already know where all the weapon and vehicle spawns are, bummer because everyone else does. Kills feel like they take an eternity, and death comes frustratingly instantaneously as people already know all the tricks to bring opponents down faster than just killing them (the inherent lag is also frustrating, but probably unavoidable, but it never feels good to shotgun someone in the face, only to have them sword you and never take damage). People that loved it will continue to love it, but man if you didn't, its a sticky grenade thrown from a ledge you didn't know was there with no grenade indicator straight to the nostalgia.

All of which leads to the deep dark sin at the core of all of it, the Battle Pass. Lots of games have battle passes. Its an easy excuse to keep you playing by holding cosmetics or whatever hostage until you can dump enough of your life into it to have 'earned' it. But most are consistent. Destiny 2 is 100k experience per level, flat. Halo both requires more experience per level, and also seems to be reducing the XP you get from multiplayer as you play. My first Firefight Arcade match gave me 2 levels, at level 12 it barely gives me 1/8 of a level. You get more from Competitive matches, but its directly tied to performance (read: k/d and medals earned, NOT PARTICIPATION IN THE GAME MODE) so if you aren't great at it, you get very little. So, if you're like me and like the ODSTs and want that helmet, you need to grind out 19 levels before you can use it. The first 10 will feel dull and frustrating, but doable. The last 9 will feel excruciating, and every time you struggle through a match where someone went 70/5 and your team never left spawn, you get to watch the bar gently tick a little and wonder why you're bothering at all. I gave up at 12 1/2 because I just felt frustrated and angry the entire time. Add to that, they haven't been very clear about the permanence of the rewards either. Can you use them when Halo 1 launches? Will it have its own separate battle pass and all your work is thrown to the wind like so many dead leaves? Will any of the game even support custom Spartans, leaving you to keep playing Reach to be able to even see any of the cosmetics you unlocked? Will slowly growing to hate Halo defer you from grinding out the 50 levels it takes to get the ODST pauldrons? Having to play a bunch of the game to unlock cool cosmetics isn't an inherently poor idea, but god, forcing you to compete with people who haven't been playing anything but Halo for 20 years and then punishing you for not being as good feels so incredibly disheartening on top of slowly liking the moment to moment gameplay less and less. It combines, Voltron style, into a bitter morass that is a perfect killing machine for any love you had for Halo. And the head of that blooded Voltron is that the campaign gives ABSOLUTELY NO PROGRESS AT ALL. Not in single player, not in multiplayer, not in any of the weird playlists they built. None. So the core experience that the game was designed around, the only thing that the game hasn't shapened into a competitive stake to drive straight into your eye, has effectively been rendered useless, a way to see your boring, un cosmetic'd character interact with people who don't like them and don't want to be there.

I'll be the first to admit I only really liked ODST, and mostly because you were an ODST. But I spent my time in multiplayer, I played through all the campaigns through Reach, I had fun with them. This experience has made me wish I had spent my time then more productively. Like failing to learn to play the piano or burning myself with matches. Anything to take this worm out of my head that looks at Halo and says, 'But Halo was fun? Why isn't this fun? Why do I dread every second of this more and more?'. I started this game with the expectation that I would have a fun time with the campaign and actually buy ODST when it launches, but now I struggle to feel any urge to go back to it ever. The few minutes it should have taken to hop into the campaign, play through it and see my fun ODST helmet and move on are dragged out, as the intestines from a medieval execution, and left to slowly die as any remaining goodwill for Halo rots away.