Halo 4 – Review

It’s the end of Halo 3 and the world has ended with a bang, not a whimper. More specifically, it’s ended with our protagonist Master Chief riding a jeep off a flaming planet into the bay of a derelict escape ship: a catastrophic boom, not a whimper, perhaps. The aliens retreat, the flames turn to ember, the hoarse choir sets down its sheet music and space is, finally, still. Microsoft’s flagship trilogy ostensibly drifts into history while developer Bungie, after working out its contractual obligations, wanders off to work on something new – something to prove to itself that Halo, the console shooter that changed everything, isn’t the end of its story.

But while this one-man army has renewed purpose and a new crisis to tackle, that lack of humanity is hidden in plain sight. For a game so focused on saving the universe, the Halo series is curiously devoid of people to save. It’s filled with others to destroy, of course, this time in the form of the Prometheans, an alien race of bipedal insect knights and exploding robot dogs that fight against (and alongside) Halo’s more familiar enemies, the Covenant.

They provide the ingredients for the sprawling three-way battles the series is known for and – while their ability to warp and fly is an irritating combination – in their assured design new developer 343 Industries shows that it’s up to the task of expanding the boundaries of the Halo universe. And it’s a universe filled with weapons, more weapons than ever before, the Prometheans adding their armoury of esoteric rifles and machine guns to the already enormous array of killing tools. But people to save? You won’t find many of those here.

You can save yourself – but with instant restarts and checkpoints, death is a setback that can be measured in short seconds and the stakes are necessarily low. You can save your comrades, the nameless cannon-fodder marines that accompany you into the fray from time to time. But when their passing goes unnoticed, either by the game’s story or its systems, there’s precious little motivation to take a bullet for these ciphers.

Which begs the question: why? When the only people you meet in your relentless dash from Pillar to Outpost are high-ranking military officials or untrustworthy scientists, where’s the motivation? Why not let the aliens rule this space junk, these empty planets, these clinically clean ships? There doesn’t appear to be anyone else around to protest anyway.
Master Chief, though, has nowhere to go. He has no home for Christmas, no lonely wife to reacquaint with, no overgrown garden to tend to, no son to teach how to throw a plasma ball. Beneath the rank and uniform he may be named John, but that ever-present helmet snuffed out the pilot light of his humanity long ago. He is a voiceless weapon, drawn in times of intergalactic crisis, sheathed when calamity has passed. So he’s left in stasis, a dreamless sleep in a forgotten ship watched over by his only friend and companion, an AI girl called Cortana.

Five years pass – an age in video games – and in this time Activision’s Modern Warfare series rises to prominence, knocking Halo down the most-played charts. A time of crisis; a time for an old hero to take back old ground. It’s the start of Halo 4, and Cortana unsheathes Master Chief.

But while this one-man army has renewed purpose and a new crisis to tackle, that lack of humanity is hidden in plain sight. For a game so focused on saving the universe, the Halo series is curiously devoid of people to save. It’s filled with others to destroy, of course, this time in the form of the Prometheans, an alien race of bipedal insect knights and exploding robot dogs that fight against (and alongside) Halo’s more familiar enemies, the Covenant.

They provide the ingredients for the sprawling three-way battles the series is known for and – while their ability to warp and fly is an irritating combination – in their assured design new developer 343 Industries shows that it’s up to the task of expanding the boundaries of the Halo universe. And it’s a universe filled with weapons, more weapons than ever before, the Prometheans adding their armoury of esoteric rifles and machine guns to the already enormous array of killing tools. But people to save? You won’t find many of those here.

You can save yourself – but with instant restarts and checkpoints, death is a setback that can be measured in short seconds and the stakes are necessarily low. You can save your comrades, the nameless cannon-fodder marines that accompany you into the fray from time to time. But when their passing goes unnoticed, either by the game’s story or its systems, there’s precious little motivation to take a bullet for these ciphers.

Which begs the question: why? When the only people you meet in your relentless dash from Pillar to Outpost are high-ranking military officials or untrustworthy scientists, where’s the motivation? Why not let the aliens rule this space junk, these empty planets, these clinically clean ships? There doesn’t appear to be anyone else around to protest anyway.

You can read the rest of this review here.