0.5/5 ★ – JimboHarman's review of Halo 5: Guardians.

I don’t believe 343 made this. It was Bungie, you can’t convince me it wasn’t. The game feels so much like a campaign Bungie would make with boring military objectives, cutscenes that have better action than the gameplay and dull one note characters. Visually the game is really nice and it throws a lot of unique locations at the player, the cutscenes somehow feel worse than Halo 4 though, don’t get me wrong the graphics are really great and the intro cinematic is really awesome, following the new squad of Spartans down a snow tipped mountain as they tear their way through covenant and forerunners in an action packed one-take but I can’t get over how stiff the facial animations are, it’s quite hard to empathise with something that has less emotion than my fridge. The gameplay is also a step down from Halo 4. The base shooting mechanics have been improved though, making the controls much more conventional and intuitive and it’s really smooth (when the frame rate isn’t shitting itself) but I’d sacrifice all of that smoothness for more varied action sequences, in Halo 4 almost every mission had a unique action set piece that you could actually play through, in this game there’s barely anything like that. It’s just basic shooting all the way through and when the action gets good it’s in the cutscenes. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if there was an interesting narrative stringing you along and keeping you invested, unfortunately that’s another aspect of the game that falls short. There’s a faint whiff of a decent story here, mainly with Master Chief and Cortana’s dynamic but it’s too little too late. By the time any of that is even brought into the narrative the game is basically over and you’ve just had to sit through one of the worst paced, most boring video game campaigns I’ve ever experienced. I think on paper a lot of the ideas brought into Halo 5 are pretty cool, like the idea of Master Chief going rogue to find Cortana which would’ve carried on his arc of breaking his Spartan programming really well or the premise of playing as a Spartan hunting down a rogue Master Chief. On paper I like these ideas but the execution is so dull. For starters the narrative is structured really badly, the way the two sides of the story are balanced is really annoying with one side setting something up that gets instantly sidelined to go play as the other characters. This, as well as the overly long levels really broke the momentum of the campaign. Also every character is very one note, I don’t mind a lot of side characters as long as they serve a purpose and the main characters get some good stuff but unfortunately they don’t and every character just gets nothing, no one has an arc. Master Chief is pursuing a personal objective but it’s so shallow because they’re trying to balance two stories and that’s resulted in nothing being fleshed out. Don’t get me wrong, I know for a fact a multi-strand narrative like this can be done brilliantly but this game has handled it all wrong. This game has deeply disappointed me. Halo 4 was such a strong start for 343 but with Halo 5 they’ve dropped everything that made Halo 4 special, the character development, the focused narrative, the awesome action, it’s all gone. I can only hope that they go back to their roots with Halo Infinite.