The time Halo fans (I'm one of them... I think) have been looking forward to is finally here. I sat down and played through Halo 5's campaign yesterday from about 6pm to 12:30am. The last game that I played through in one sitting was Halo 4. Because, I'm old and.. you know.. work and stuff. :)
I guess I'm totally going to go into grumpy-old-dad mode here, Spoilers ahead.
The disappointment began when my son and daughter sat there with me, hopeful to play co-op campaign in split screen. Evidently in the next-gen gaming market fun should be sacrificed for fps count. The developers intentionally left out split-screen play altogether so as to keep the 60fps frame rate.
What the hell, guys. What a horrible idea that is. I guess folks developing games didn't realize the most fun playing games is having your friends over to work through the campaign or to destroy them in multiplayer. Many fights amongst siblings will now occur and many parents, fed-up are just going to say "screw it" and remove the game so as to remove the family conflict.
Fortunately, my kids handled it well. "Oh, it doesn't support co-op? *shrug* - and they went upstairs and played Halo 4 on the xBox 360.
Cortana's back.. I mean, when MSFT doubled down on Cortana as their Siri alternative this shouldn't have really surprised anyone. How is she back? Well it's basically a matter of: *sprinkle* nonsensical sub-space star trek pseudoscience here.
How is it that she didn't die? I honestly couldn't tell you, aside that she's back and on a power trip. You see, she merged with this Forerunner thing and it's given her other powers and she's doing her iRobot Vicki, bring-peace through the imprisonment of humanity-move. I think that's what happened, anyway.
If you are a fan of Master Chief and looking forward to playing as him, I have good news: there will be other Halo games where you get to do that. In Halo 5 you play as the big guy for about 1/3 of the game. I don't have the exact count handy but yeah, that's the deal. You play as Locke through 2/3 of the game, you play as Master Chief through only a small handful of missions.
There are 15 total missions and three are pointless non-combat RPG-ish nods to ODST-styled "talk to the locals" objectives that are supposed to advance the story in some way. The whole non-combat mission thing is very sloppy at best. You can direct your squad to shoot things and they kinda-of-do. Don't let them drive a warthog, though - they are asian woman drivers at best.
The story was good-ish, I guess - it kept me playing but ended on a weak note.
So, basically Spartan Locke in his buddies go kick a bunch of ass and end up back at the Infinity where the one-armed doctor chick is talking about Cortana doing bad stuff.
Master Chief and his fire team are in the midst of kicking a bunch of ass when he has a Vision from Cortana and takes his team to go find her. She's somehow merged with this thing called the Forerunner Domain and it magically gives her powers. She's collecting these awesome gigantic Forerunner robots that were built to police entire Solar systems.
Locke does a bunch of stuff, Master Chief and his crew do a bunch of stuff and Master Chief and his crew end up getting put in some sort of stasis-thingy-ma-bob, basically as Cortana's pets while she enforces galactic martial law with bad-assed space robots.
Locke and his crew break and kill and fight a bunch of stuff and save The Master Chief and his crew. Later, they all chill at the Arbiter's pad for what I'm guessing was Shawarma, based on the decor of the place.
So, in conclusion.. Cortana is back and she's VICKI from iRobot. Locke is Mario and Master Chief is the Princess. Oh and a Forereunner bad guy named Warden Eternal is Bowser.
Well, at least there's multiplayer.
