- TheUseless0ne
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- Elder Mythic Member
I am a penguin. Every day I boogie on down to the water, and eat fish. Once, while fishing in the deepest depths, I saw great Cthulhu... And he said to me "Shine, to thine own self be true. They can't tell you what to do once you've gone guru." Also, I should tell you, "slide".
Inventor of the Bombstache avatar!
The game was FILLED TO THE BRIM with potential. The mix of campaign and FF for Spartan Ops had my mouth WATERING. The potential for an expanded forge mode was TREMENDOUS. Opening new story frontiers with the Forerunner could have been AMAZING...
And then I played it.
The campaign's STORY was good. I liked it a good bit, but it's clear that they aren't quite all that talented at story TELLING. They try too hard to reenforce some ideas, and fall flat on others they could have expanded for great value.
Expanding on the "John" concept was a mistake. It works out fine if you're the sort of player who's not intelligent or creative enough to fill the armor with your own character, personality, and baggage, but for those of us who are, "John" is an annoying chatty fool who likes stating the obvious, and has some very invented problems (the whole debate on the "am I a man or a machine/ soldier" thing was very loosely wedged in , and not very fitting of the character they had just manufactured to fit in the armor).
Replayablity is not a thing that exists. Not JUST because of the lack of campaign match making, but it's clear that the campaign is designed for one person to got through solo, and the AI is seriously lacking.
The AI no longer works to surround players, it no longer tries to use cover to any real effect, and it doesn't even MOVE as much while shooting as Reach AI enemies. All the enemies are content to stand still and shoot at players like dullards, and Eliets only do their dodgy maneuvers haphazardly in a way that PRETENDS to act like it's being intelligent. The only "difficult" enemies are the Knights, and that's only because they're bullet sponges who recharge their shields quickly and teleport now and again.
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Spartan Ops was a whole lot of nothing. Palmer keeps reminding you that she's an anti-intellectual (when she is actually fairly personable and badass in cutscenes in both SpOps Episode cinematics and the one campaign cinematic she shows up in. which is a rarity for a female character in a action game setting without them being a Mary Sue). Recycling the maps would be fine if they actually did something different with them with each revisit, and SpOps is frankly not a god replacement for FF's setup, which allowed for sustained action and camaraderie with a good team.
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Multiplayer is a flat out step back from what Reach did. Reach reinvented the weapons sandbox in a way that encouraged players to think strategically about their environment beyond "is this a big map or a tiny map"; it came down to a room-by-room planning scenario, where the game punished players who tried desperately to stick to any one weapon. One couldn't really face-spam the DMR like the BR of yore in CQ and expect too much of a chance against a weapon more designed for closer combat like ARs or shotguns, and likewise with longer ranges against snipers. Every weapon had a place, and one was a fool for trying to stick to only one gameplay style.
This compiled with egregiously poor map design, some funky-ass inconsistent "hit boxes" for vehicle jacking (one can jack a ghost coming at them at full speed. Cool, right? But being in contact with the tread of a tank might prove fruitless, unless one consideres a tank shell to the face to be a delicious fruit).
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Forge and custom games. They exist, and for the first time in the series outside of ODST, one has fewer options for creating scenarios/ maps/ everything in a UI that somehow is less functional than the series of lists UI used in previous games.
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Basically, this game is a glorified Halo 2 with more of H2's faults than accomplishments,of which it had few.