The Master Chief's Great At Making Enemies, It's Friends He Finds Difficult

Halo 4 is my second jaunt into the Halo series. I owned the original on the XBox, but a lack of opportunity for multiplayer with my friends led me to trade it in. Once I'd beaten the game, I didn't really feel like playing it again.

And that's where I'm at with Halo 4, good thing it was a Christmas gift. I was interested in trying the game because of what I'd read about Cortana's story arc, her problems with rampancy. Essentially, she's been in service too long, and her systems are falling apart, being overwhelmed by her accumulated experiences, something like that. Sounds a bit like she's butting up against planned obsolescence. Given that her rampancy seems to present itself as disorientation, distraction, and fits of temper, a part of me wondered if it was a crack on menopause. That would be pretty mean, but the video game industry doesn't have much better of a track record with female characters than the comic book industry.

In reality, it's probably meant to mirror Alzheimer's, or senile dementia. At any rate, the Master Chief is determined to get Cortana back to Earth, on the theory her designers can counteract the problem somehow, and Cortana is determined to get the Chief home. She might be in love with him, or it might simply be that each one is all the other has. Near as I can tell, everyone else they've known over the course of these games has died, or else been separated from them by years and light years. But Cortana's always been there for the Chief, pointing him in the right direction, and he's always been there for her, trusting that she'll help him do whatever needs be done. It was touching, made me care a little more about the Chief. In Halo, Cortana had plenty of personality (sass and exasperation, mostly, but lots of both). The Chief was just sort of there, the guy who follows orders and saves the day because it's his job. Kurt Russell in Soldier, basically. The difference was that movie surrounded Russell with people who regarded his ingrained habits as odd, whereas the Chief is surrounded by soldiers and officers who think nothing of it (there is some sense that most soldiers regard him with at least a little awe). Maybe that's the point, the military is a different world, what seems strange from the outside looks perfectly natural, maybe even necessary from the inside. Still, it didn't leave much opportunity to bounce different personalities off the Chief to play up what he's like.

There still isn't much of that here, but the story presents the Chief as struggling against the limits of what he can do and how he's been trained. He probably isn't supposed to care about Cortana as much as he does, but he probably also wasn't meant to survive as long as he has, either. He's seen who knows how many people die, killed an immense number of foes, to the point not much of it fazes him. But Cortana's been the constant, and he wants to save her. He can't do that himself, so he trusts that if he keeps doing what he can do - kill things - he'll get her to someone who can. Kill the right guy and everything will work out, and you can feel him recognizing the foolishness of that when Cortana presses him or loses hope. He doesn't know what to say, because he knows, "We'll stop the Didact", does not sound like much of a plan. So he turns to action. We all have things we fall back on in the hard moments.

OK, that's story considerations, what about gameplay? Well, it's a first-person shooter, so you spend a lot of time running around shooting things. Shocking, I know. There tends to be some sort of highlighted objective you need to reach and either blow up or switch off. Actually, there's usually more than one before you can move on to the next objective. At times it feels a little too obvious that I'm being led by the nose through hoops. This isn't helped by the fact that it seems to take a lot of bullets to kill anyone in this game, especially for the first few chapters. I'd stand there firing, reload, fire some more, oh good, his shield is down, empty another clip into and. . . dead. Oh great, the little floaty bastard reconstituted him, so now I gotta start all over. You factor in the enemies taking cover, teleporting away, distracting you with flanking attacks, and so on, and some of these fights stretch for awhile. I died several times by simply getting fed up and trying to rush through them to the exit. What was a few more Convenant, dead or living? That didn't work very well.

I like the various add-ons the Chief can carry. I didn't find all of them useful, but the auto-sentry and the hardlight shield were helpful. If nothing else, it adds some variety, gives the player some choice as to how they want to play. Not too much, though. The game is going to have you enter an area, throw enemies at you for awhile, then you advance and kill more enemies. I guess you could argue the Didact regards his forces as expendable, so he doesn't see any need for tactics beyond throwing numbers at you, but there's no sense while playing that you could attacked at any moment.

Perhaps the designers figure Cortana would prevent that, although they could have played up the rampancy for an uncertainty. There was one point near the end where she couldn't get herself together enough to place an objective marker, and I felt legitimately lost. I didn't want to wander in a useless direction, getting worn down by enemies I shouldn't even bother fighting, so there was confusion. Work with that. Maybe nothing happens during stretches where she's discombobulated, and other times, you get attacked by some elite cloaked guy. Make those moments of real dread where the player understands just how critical Cortana's been to the Chief's survival all these years.

I really hated the steering controls for all the craft you can drive. They set it up so one thumbstick moves you forward and back, but the other is for turning. Which I could buy for a tracked vehicle, like the Scorpion tank, but why would the fighter craft Banshee, or the hoverbike Ghost handle like that? It was very frustrating and I did not much enjoy the parts of the game where steering was required.

I can't speak to the multiplayer part of the game. Haven't tried it, not sure when I'd get around to it. As for the single player campaign, if I had to buy Halo 4 myself, I probably never would have. Obviously I was interested in some of the story (not the Didact, who was tedious with his arrogant blather from the start), and it does the shooting part of the gameplay well. But I never felt invested in the mess with the Forerunners, and after awhile, I'd just get bored, feel like I was playing out of some obligation to finish the chapter. I didn't feel compelled to find out "what happens next", which is not a great feeling.