This is the latest in a series of retrospective write-ups where I relate my experience playing through the campaigns of the Halo series all over again, this time in the remastered form of the Master Chief Collection. You can find previous posts in The Great Journey here:
At last The Great Journey has arrived at the modern era of Halo. With Bungie’s final installment in the books, I now turn to the first entry of 343 Industries’s so called “Reclaimer Trilogy”. Halo 4, being the first game post-Halo 3 to follow the Master Chief’s story, certainly had a lot to prove. While the general response around its release ranged from apathy to disappointment, perhaps the intervening years have been kind to it. Time to wake up from cryo and save humanity. Again.
As it’s been a few games since we’ve last seen John-117, let’s consider where we were at the end of Halo 3. The Chief, with the help of Cortana and the Arbiter, managed to activate a half built Halo far away from the Milky Way and in doing so wiped out the majority of the Covenant hierarchy along with the Flood. While attempting to escape on the good ship Forward Unto Dawn, the Chief and Cortana got stuck on the stern of the ship which did not make it through a slipspace portal headed back to Earth. Adrift and millions of miles away from home, the Chief enters cryosleep while he and Cortana await a rescue that could be years away.
This setup opens up some interesting possibilities for where the story goes next, but 343 chose to start Halo 4 in an unexpected way. The opening scene involves the interrogation of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the founder of the SPARTAN-II program who made her first in-game appearance in Halo: Reach. While this is the first of many welcome references to Bungie’s beloved prequel, there really isn’t a whole lot in this scene that adds to the story being told. All it really amounts to is making sure that the players who hadn’t played Reach are clued in on who Halsey is and why the Chief and Cortana seek to get back to her at the start of the game. But what the cutscene lacks in substance it more than makes up in style.
The opening scene, like the rest of the game, is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Whatever voodoo that 343 had to do to make the Xbox 360 sing like this is simply extraordinary. For the first time in the series, human faces emote somewhat realistically and the level of detail is far and above what Bungie was ever able to accomplish. Indeed, with the addition of 1080p resolution and 60 fps framerate the game looks like it was developed specifically for the Xbox One. I really can’t overstate how good Halo 4 looks, even as I have already been exposed to the beauty that is Halo 5. But graphics are only the surface of this package. What of the story and mission design?
After Halsey’s speechifying, the game gets on with the plot proper. Four years have passed and the Chief is awakened by a panicked Cortana as their ship is boarded by a hostile Covenant force. Disoriented and not given much context, the Chief must repel these boarders in a fashion not dissimilar to the first missions of Halo 1 and 2. This mission is mainly a playground to showcase the upgrades Cortana has made to the Chief’s suit. The most apparent of these upgrades is a dedicated sprint button. While sprinting first made an appearance in Halo: Reach as an armor ability, here it is more closely integrated with as a player tool that you will come to depend on. It serves to make the game feel faster and decidedly more modern than previous entries, although it doesn’t quite have the smoothness of movement expected of shooters post-Titanfall. Other subtle changes include a bouncing reticle that encourages more controlled bursts of fire for increased accuracy with automatic weapons. Halo 3’s equipment has been ditched in favor of Reach’s armor abilities, and certain abilities such as the autoturret and boost come in quite handy in combat. The available weapons in this mission mostly play it safe, reintroducing the tweaked assault rifle, battle rifle, and pistol. The Covenant weapons are also pretty standard, with plasma pistols, needlers, and carbines feeling like they usually do, and the storm rifle from Reach taking over for the series staple plasma rifle. I’ll give credit to 343 as they really understand what gives Halo its distinctive “feel” and were able to replicate it quite well while also including some smart additions. But while Halo 4 does a great job of replicating the series’ gameplay, the narrative is a bit of a mixed bag.
Right off the bat the story of Halo 4 feels smaller and more intimate than the grand battles of the original trilogy. This was a smart decision, as simply escalating scale of the plot would have likely painted 343 into a narrative corner. There’s increased emphasis on the relationship between Cortana and the Chief and for the most part their interactions work to emotionally anchor the story. As hinted in Halo 3, Cortana is now in the process of succumbing to rampancy, which is essentially Alzheimer’s disease for AIs. While there’s no known cure for rampancy, the Chief believes that by getting Cortana back to her creator, Dr. Halsey, there’s a chance that she can be saved. For a character who in the past was so stoic and rational minded, it’s a welcome development to see our protagonist’s motivation come from an emotional place rather than a logical one. Indeed, John is a lot more chatty this time around, and while his conversations with Cortana can border on melodramatic at times, they at least provide a compelling core to latch onto when the other parts of the story falter.
As the Chief clears the Forward Unto Dawn of enemies, it becomes apparent that there’s a lot more going on than Covenant simply stumbling upon the ship. First, there’s the mysterious planet of Requiem in the distance and second, there’s the appearance of the UNSC starship Infinity. Unfortunately for the Infinity, by responding to Cortana’s garbled distress beacon, it gets pulled into the gravity well of Requiem, necessitating the Chief to rescue the flagship and her crew. Upon touching down on Requiem, which turns out to be a hollow Dyson sphere, the Chief attempts to warn away the Infinity by deactivating certain devices which appear to be jamming communications. Instead, by turning off these devices, the Chief unwittingly releases a being known as the Didact and his army of Prometheans.
The introduction of the Prometheans to the Halo universe is definitely Halo 4’s largest contribution to the franchise canon. Essentially, Prometheans are digitized beings that were formerly Forerunners and humans and were transformed in the aftermath of their ancient war. The backstory gets quite complicated, but it essentially asserts that humans ran an ancient galactic empire that stumbled upon the Flood. Having no effective way of holding back the infection, they retreated into Forerunner controlled space, sparking off a war between the two civilizations. After a millennium of fighting, humanity was forcibly reverted to a primitive state on Earth to rebuild their civilization. The Forerunners, victorious but also unable to fight back against the Flood, built and activated the Halos to cleanse the galaxy of the infection at the cost of their continued survival. The resulting Prometheans were then kept locked up on Requiem. It’s all a very complicated and unnecessary backstory that remains the weakest point of the narrative, especially when later on in the plot the Chief is singled out as the desired end result of humanity’s evolution. It all feels tonally inconsistent with the rest of the Halo universe. Certainly, in the previous games there were implications that the Forerunners and humans had some connection, but to imply that humanity had this sprawling civilization that was never heard about until now feels like an awkward retcon. Worse still is making the Master Chief a predestined savior, where in the past he was merely a super soldier who succeeded despite the odds.
The problems with Halo 4’s story are best exemplified with the Didact, and by extension the other named Promethean, the Librarian. These two are your typical haughty British accented “higher beings” that speak almost entirely in prophecy and could not be any less interesting. The Didact has a telekinetic power such that the Chief gets helplessly thrown around like a ragdoll whenever they meet. As such, there’s really no way that the DIdact could be fought using Halo’s combat system and so any interactions between the hero and villain are done via cutscenes. This further distanced me from caring at all about the bad guy, as I knew that would just be fighting his minions until a cutscene triggers. Even the Didact’s motivations are beyond cliche. He seeks a macguffin artifact known as the Composer that can kill all of humanity, which just marks off the “universe/world/humanity is in danger” box on the mediocre story checklist. But despite their leader being a complete wet blanket, the Promethean foot soldiers and their armaments ended up being quite fun.
With the Flood being wiped out at the end of Halo 3, a void was created for a third faction that were neither human nor Covenant. The Prometheans fill this gap nicely, and for the most part are a welcome addition. The enemy types are structured similarly to the Covenant with Crawlers being equivalent to Jackals and Grunts, Knights being ersatz Elites, and Watchers being more modular versions of Engineers. Their Tron-like designs are quite cool looking and take full advantage of Halo 4’s gorgeous lighting system. Even the Promethean weapons end up being fun to use, although they simply follow the standard paradigm of pistol, auto-rifle, marksman-rifle, sniper, shotgun, and rocket launcher. Like the enemies themselves, the design of the armaments are top notch with all their modular parts assembling in cool ways each time you pick them up. The one downside to this is the Chief feels a little less survivable than in previous games. Covenant weapons are exceptionally effective against shields but do little damage against the Chief himself, which allowed for some forgiveness when you’re ambushed by Grunts as their plasma pistols will almost never kill you outright. Not so with crawlers, whose pistols are quite effective at dealing unshielded damage and will take you down before you can get your bearings.. Combined with some of the weakest checkpointing since Halo 1, the game has some extremely frustrating sequences in its back half.
Halo 4 keeps a tight focus on the major players of its story, but it ends up feeling incomplete as a result. Being as it is a sequel to Halo 3, there is frustratingly little attention paid to what happened after the dust of the human-Covenant war settled. There’s no mention of the Arbiter, for instance, and no explanation of what happened to the Covenant outside of a small splinter group that worships the Prometheans. Humanity is also given short-shrift, as they are almost entirely represented by Infinity. It would have been nice to see more of the civilian side of humanity, but that isn’t to say that the ship and her crew aren’t compelling. Infinity, a marvel of post-war engineering, is a symbol of humanity’s ascendance to master of the stars. Now that the UNSC is no longer struggling to survive against overwhelming odds, Infinity’s crew comes across as optimistic and hopeful with a budding curiosity to explore the universe. The executive officer and later captain of Infinity, Thomas Lasky, best exemplifies these values and is a delightful addition to the cast. His instant rapport with the Chief and Cortana gave spark to what otherwise would have merely been expository dialog, and it was always great to see him pop up at various points in the story to lend a helping hand. The coolest part of Infinity, though, is Commander Sarah Palmer (voiced by FemShep herself, Jennifer Hale) and her compliment of SPARTAN-IVs. 343 Industries, possibly noting how cool it was to have a squad of SPARTANs in Halo: Reach, wisely included a new generation of enhanced soldiers into the story. Unlike previous generations of the ethically dubious program, these new SPARTANs are veterans from the various UNSC military branches who volunteer to get augmented. While much is made about the fact that the SPARTAN-IIs are superior to these new soldiers, functionally they seem to have the same capabilities as Master Chief. In any case, it’s pretty cool to be accompanied on missions by SPARTANs in powered armor rather than the typical redshirt marines of previous games.
The middle third of Halo 4 mainly focuses on the Chief and the SPARTAN-IVs running operations around Requiem in an effort to free Infinity to contact Earth regarding the threat that the Didact poses. It’s in this stretch that the game feels most like Halos past, with Requiem’s geology and architecture evoking the titular ringworlds. There’s plenty of vehicle battles, although the appropriately named Mammoth personnel transport is the only new vehicle of note. It’s more or less the same open ended combat sandbox that was perfected in Halo 3 but it remains fun nonetheless. 343 cleverly has this portion of the story focus on the increasing friction between Infinity’s captain, Andrew Del Rio, and the Master Chief. Del Rio comes across as stubborn and incompetent in all his scenes but serves his job as a minor antagonist who is more concerned with following protocol than actually completing his mission. Tensions come to a head when Cortana reveals her rampancy to Infinity’s crew and Del Rio orders her termination and the Chief’s arrest. Thanks to the timely intervention of Lasky, however, the Chief and Cortana are able to abscond with a Pelican and track down the Didact.
The final third of the game brings the super weapon known as the Composer to the fore. The Chief and Cortana, stowing aboard a Covenant ship, follows the Didact’s fleet to a remote UNSC science station floating near a Halo. The Chief sneaks into the station as it comes under attack and makes contact with the crew. Talking with civilians proved to be a refreshing change of pace and helped to expand the story’s tight scope, if only by a little bit. It also injected new life into the gameplay with tighter corridors leading to a more frenetic pace of combat. Also, after spending most of my time on Requiem scavenging Covenant and Promethean weapons, it was invigorating to use the abundant UNSC armaments on board the station. But alas, my ass-kicking was for naught as the Didact was able to find and activate the Composer, frying everyone on board save for the Chief who was protected by some ill-defined magic that the Librarian had given him earlier. Knowing that the Didact is heading to Earth to activate the super weapon yet again, the Chief commandeers a Broadsword fighter plane equipped with a nuclear warhead and mounts an attack.
The final mission begins in memorable fashion with the Chief flying the Broadsword on the surface of the Didact’s ship trying to find a way in. This sequence is equal parts Star Wars’ trench run, Halo: Reach’s space fighter sequence, and Halo: Combat Evolved’s Warthog escape. I especially loved the changing skybox as the Didact’s ship exits slipspace to reveal the pale blue orb that is Earth. The Chief and Cortana eventually find an opening into the ship but at the expense of trashing their fighter. With few other options, the Chief grabs the nuclear warhead from the Broadsword with the intent of blowing up the Composer and Didact before they can destroy the Earth. The final stretch of the game is on foot and involves countless Prometheans that needed to be mowed down. There’s a significant difficulty spike at this point in the game that really killed the story’s momentum for me. Still, after trying and retrying checkpoints I was able to progress to the final chamber containing the antagonist. Cortana begins using her rampant code to infect the ship’s systems and create a path for the Chief to get to the Didact. The final bits of the game are an incoherent mess, unfortunately, as the Chief is predictably stopped by the Didact’s telekinesis. Bizarrely, Cortana is able to physically manifest herself and distracts the Didact long enough for the Chief to attack him from behind. This sequence proved frustrating as its only instruction was to fire a machine gun that I did not have. After a few more deaths and retries I managed to luck into the right combination of buttons and finally kill the Didact. What follows afterwards is even more strange, as the Chief activates the nuclear warhead but is not completely vaporized. Instead, he seems to be transported to a dream-like world where he says his goodbyes to Cortana as she sacrifices herself. It’s a nice, heartfelt moment that feels emotionally resonant even if it makes no logical sense. The Chief is next seen floating in space to be picked up by a UNSC scout ship with no explanation as to why he got there. The game then ends with a short epilogue followed by credits.
I admittedly did not like Halo 4 all that much when it first came out and I was hoping that with the passage of time I would be able to appreciate it more. To a certain extent that’s true, as the gameplay and presentation were both good enough to keep me engaged for the duration. But the story is such a mixed bag that I can’t really recommend the campaign. 343 commendably tried to expand Halo’s universe by fleshing out the Forerunner backstory but in doing so attempted to make the series into something it’s not. The Master Chief never was the “chosen one” and while Halo has always had a flair for dramatic names (see the Gravemind) and charismatic villains (see also the Gravemind), the Didact and Librarian never felt natural in the game’s setting. There are places where the story succeeds, though, such as the SPARTAN-IVs and Cortana’s rampancy. It seems that the developers recognized this and retooled the story of Halo 5 to focus more on the elements that worked rather than doubling down on the pseudo-mystical nonsense that hobbled Halo 4. Coming off the outstanding campaign of Halo: Reach makes 343’s stumble all the more pronounced. Being a big Halo fan it’s hard for me to not recommend any of the games, but if there’s one to skip, Halo 4 is definitely it.
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