Monolithic, billion-dollar franchises don’t change hands every day. And they change hands from veteran triple-A studios like Bungie to startups like 343 Industries…well, never. So to say that Halo 4 represents lot of risk for everyone involved – Microsoft, 343i, and Xbox gamers alike – is a Spartan-sized understatement. This year’s E3 showed that 343i seems to have multiplayer well in hand, and IGN editor-in-chief Casey Lynch’s new all-day hands-on with new War Games modes offers more details than ever and has my excitement level peaking .
But what about the campaign? Though you can argue that people stay for Halo’s rich and robust multiplayer suite, the reason they’ve always shown up in the first place is for Master Chief and his Ringworld adventures. Long lauded for its engrossing sci-fi storyline, the Halo campaigns have always been the beating heart of the series, and thus it’s been the most concerning element of the franchise’s transition to 343i’s care. I finally played two of the early missions – the post-prologue stage “Dawn” and mission 3’s introduction to the Prometheans, titled “Forerunner” – and came to the half-satisfying, half-relieving conclusion that, yes, Halo is in good hands.
[WARNING: Spoilers ahead!]
“Wake up, Chief. I need you.”
Cortana’s aging codebase may be slowly making her crazy and unstable, but she’s not wrong to rouse her BFF/Spartan Popsicle from cryo-sleep after a mysterious yellow energy wave passes through their ship, the half-busted Forward Unto Dawn.
Perhaps Master Chief was enjoying his four-year hibernation, as he seems a bit angry when he asks, “Where are we? Why did you wake me?”
Halo 4’s sharp new heads-up display, a.k.a. Chief’s visor, is immediately given narrative justification, with Cortana telling John that she rewrote his MJOLNIR suit’s firmware while he was on ice. It’s slick and full of details; on a big TV you’ll actually be able to read the tiny text along its upper edges.
For once, these screenshots aren't an exaggeration. The game actually looks this good.
Without missing a beat, our hero hops to. “Ready to get back to work?” Cortana asks with a wry smile. “I thought you’d never ask,” he retorts. We’re being boarded, his purple AI pal explains. But by who? On a side note: Jen Taylor and Steve Downes are iconic in these voice-acting roles, so this is one area I’m happy hasn’t changed.
When the cutscene ends and the proper game begins, it’s immediately evident that 343i has assembled a world-class technology team. Oh, you’ll know this is the Halo engine by feel – the weight and movement is decidedly, blissfully “Halo” – but to the eye you’d be forgiven for believing this is a fresh piece of next-generation tech. That’s not hyperbole; Halo 4 is a clear leap over any and all of its predecessors, with an obvious fidelity boost that has the game runing in actual 1280x720 resolution, which should please those sticklers who noted that previous Xbox 360 Halos technically ran a few pixels below the native HD specification. It’s sharp, it’s crisp, and it’s gorgeous.
It’s sharp, it’s crisp, and it’s gorgeous.
Lighting is among the areas of the engine most noticeably rewritten. Sharp self-shadowing (look down to get a good look at your Spartan-y silhouette at any time), bright halo-y (no pun intended) light sources, and the metallic, rounded hallways of the Forward Unto Dawn give Halo 4’s first mission an almost Doom 3-like vibe (albeit with a more high-tech modern look) from a technical and stylistic perspective. To that point, it’s probably not a coincidence that Halo 4’s art director is former id Software artist Kenneth Scott.
Years of skull-searching skills immediately kick in and I begin combing every corner for secrets. I quickly sniff one out, wandering down a staircase in the first room to a terminal. Interacting with it by pressing X reveals Master Chief’s service record; it’s essentially a 20-30-second recap of Halo 3’s story, intercut with still images you’ll recognize from old Halo marketing campaigns. I even get a 20-point Achievement for my sleuthing efforts.
Anyone else getting a Doom 3 vibe from the art style? There's a reason for that...
Moving on, I guide Chief into to the weapons systems room and interact with another console. A gentle female voice reports back: “Weapons systems: online. Gravity controls: online. Ship propulsion: offline. Hull integrity: compromised. Life support: online.” I come to a pair of double doors, pry them open, and get knocked down an elevator shaft by a flying box thrown out into my face by the pressure loss. I climb back up, dodging falling debris during the ascent by leaping from pipe to pipe and ladder to ladder. As I climb out, a Covenant Elite gets right in my grill, mandibles-to-MJOLNIR visor. Spartan-117 grabs him by the face and throws him down the elevator shaft to what will no doubt be a sudden, artificial-gravity-induced death.
He’s kind enough to leave behind a new weapon: the Storm Rifle, a Covenant firearm that’s a bit like a scaled-up plasma rifle. It’s finally time to add to Master Chief’s Covie body count for the first time in five years. A pack of grunts and a Magnum pistol picked up off of a weapon rack nearby make for a bad combination on the alien side. But the good news turns sour as Cortana informs me that the Forward Unto Dawn has drifted into an entire Covenant fleet.
The Prometheans are Forerunners. The Forerunners are Prometheans. Finkel and Einhorn...
Chief moves to a new, bigger room that’s clearly fit for a firefight, and my old nemeses happily oblige. They dock their Cruiser with the Dawn and begin boarding the broken UNSC vessel. Between the boarding of the ship and the umbilical cord-like tubes the Covenant use to do it, this first full mission of Halo 4 is giving off a decidedly Halo 2 vibe – one that will only be reinforced in a later section of this stage.
Cortana advises that I have to override the blast shields in order to deploy the Dawn’s weapons systems – my only hope of fighting back against the massive Covenant fleet just outside the window as we orbit the Forerunner planet teased during Halo 3’s Legendary ending. “I’m sorry,” the Chief jokes. “Did I miss orbiting a Forerunner planet at some point?”
This first full mission of Halo 4 is giving off a decidedly Halo 2 vibe.
To fire the guns, of course, I’m going to have to venture outside. Here’s where I’m most vividly reminded of Halo 2. I step outside the ship’s interior and onto the hull. The glorious Battle Rifle makes its campaign return cleverly: it’s just floating a few feet high in the outer-space void in front of me, begging me to pick it up. I do, and then survey the zero-g battlefield. Sniper-wielding Jackals in the distance on the opposite end of the ship’s exterior, Grunts below me, with Elites mixed in too. It feels damn good – Halo 2 good – to pick off the Jackal scumbags across the way with a single burst round to their un-helmeted heads. Another Halo 2-originated reinforcement follows the Battle Rifle in the form of the Covenant Carbine. Is this Halo heaven?
After the blast door jams (of course), I’ll have to clear the mechanical jam in order to initiate a manual launch. One more half-gravity Covenant battle later, the Dawn’s massive missile is launched and that plump purple Cruiser is reduced to space-dust. The same mysterious orange energy wave from before washes over Chief again – I’m being scanned. And then taken. The Forerunner shield world opens up its gargantuan doors and a blue gravity well sucks me in. Around 45 minutes after I started this level, I’m heading onto this planet whether I want to or not.
[WARNING: Still more spoilers ahead!]
The choice of missions 343i allowed me to play during my visit was no doubt highly calculated. “Dawn” proves that the studio can handle Halo as we already know it. “Forerunner,” however, would be the biggest indicator yet as to whether they’d be able to bring something new to the Halo table – and make it work.
And make no mistake – this third mission, set on the Forerunner planet Requiem, is full of new things. First is the Autosentry, one of Halo 4’s new Armor Abilities. Deploy it and a small sentry bot will hover above your position, peppering any targets it sees with light weapon fire. It helps when the first pack of Crawlers – Halo 4’s feral dog-esque creatures whose rough analogs are the Flood spores (tricky to hit, but easy to kill) – begin attacking. The Sentrybot softens them up and even takes one out for me in the process.
Cortana explains that another UNSC ship – the same UNSC Infinity vessel on which all of multiplayer’s War Games take place – has tracked our signal and is attempting to rescue us, but communications are blocked. I’ll have to take down three signal-interfering pylons in order to tell them to, in fact, not rescue us and instead stay the hell away from this clearly bad-news planet, lest they get caught in the same gravity well we did. That and getting Cortana back to Earth to address her rampancy. Those are the priorities.
Promethean Knights are bad mofos.
“Hope you don’t mind hoofing it a little,” Cortana says wryly, indicating that I’m going to have a long mission ahead of me.
Next, another new toy: the Boltshot pistol. It’s a Forerunner sidearm, so like all Forerunner guns, it assembles itself in your hand upon pickup and during reloads. It seems Magnum-y with the default Right Trigger pull, but hold it down and the weapon will overcharge like a Plasma Pistol, resulting in a high-damage, short-range blast when it goes off (which happens automatically after several seconds).
I decide to drop the Boltshot in favor of two more new Forerunner death-dealers: the Lightrifle and the Suppressor. The former fires a Battle Rifle-esque three-round burst, while the latter acts like a machinegun. I even snag a new grenade type: the Pulse variant, which creates a damage-inflicting area of effect around it before exploding. After taking down a Knight – Halo 4’s hulking Promethean bad guys who can teleport away from danger – I snag his shotgun-style Scattershot.
The problem is that the Knights are almost always flanked by small, hovering companions called Watchers. They not only run interference for the Knights, but they also whip your own grenades back at you. You’ll almost always want to take down the Knights first, as in one amazing (yet also horrible) moment, I ran up to a Knight, gave him a point-blank Scattershot blast, and he began to dissolve, only to be reconstituted a second later by a Watcher who swooped in to bail out his master.
If you don't take out the floating Watcher first, you'll regret it later. Promise.
Things get more interesting in the next section of this craggy canyon world. The Covenant – remember them from orbit a few minutes ago? Chief only brought down one craft from their fleet of ships – are landing on this planet, and they’re not friends with anyone. That means – reminiscent of Halo 1 – you can sit back and watch the Covenant and the Prometheans fight each other, and then swoop in and clean up whatever’s left. Better, I discover my first Halo 4 terminal, only to be greeted by the disappointing message, “Domain video unlocked on terminal.” It would seem that you might have to go to Halo Waypoint in order to watch these…
Yet another new foe: a fixed Sentinel-type object that doesn’t seem to have a name. It fires a destructive laser at you if you’re in its line of sight, and it’s only vulnerable when it’s charging up to unleash its fury. Unlike the mobile, flying Sentinels, however, these Eye of Sauron-inspired Forerunner defense systems are fixed to rocks and walls. Taking one out was aided greatly by another of Halo 4’s new boomsticks: the Binary Rifle, a long-range, two-stage-zoom weapon that’s clearly the Forerunner equivalent of the UNSC Sniper Rifle.
It would seem that you might have to go to Halo Waypoint in order to watch Terminal content…
Over the course of this one-hour mission, I walk a few miles in Master Chief’s boots and kill a lot of aggressive Prometheans. The level culminates with a huge battle with and against Ghosts, Banshees, and plenty of on-foot bad guys. I’m able to get my hands on both classic vehicles during the course of the fight. The good ol’ Ghost feels the same as ever, while the Banshee seems to have been tweaked to make it less nimble; it’s no longer quite so easy to pull off crazy aerial maneuvers. You can still hold LB and press in any direction to do flips and barrel rolls, but they’ll happen slower than before and they have a bit of a cool-down period. And yes, you can also still press Y to switch from plasma bolts to the big green fuel rod bomb.
To close out the mission, we’re introduced to…well, a spoiler-y thing 343i kindly asked us not to ruin for you. Sorry.
The biggest, most important takeaways from my first – and last – hands-on with Halo 4’s campaign before it’s time to review it? First, 343i definitely gets Halo. No need to worry about that. For a new developer, their game plays like something out of a veteran studio. The visuals are amazing, the audio – which I haven’t mentioned until now – is downright potent thanks to a punchier arsenal of weapon sounds, and the new weapons feel fantastic.
More crucially, all of the weapons – human, Covenant, and Forerunner alike – feel natural in the context of battling the new Promethean enemies. The Lightrifle is great for taking out Crawlers, Scattershots are visceral Knight-killers, and the Boltshot can help you eliminate the pesky Watchers…or overcharge for an improvised Elite kill at close range. Meanwhile, Halo’s long-renowned AI lives up to its reputation, even with these new additions to the bad guy roster. Crawlers will group up and flank around behind you, Watchers devilishly protect Knights, and Knights are just plain difficult to deal with.
"What if you miss?" "I won't...not with a gun this big!"
Halo 4 is almost a lock to become the best-selling first-party Xbox game of the year (surprisingly, Minecraft is likely to come in second place). It’s also the most important. Sure, Call of Duty: Black Ops II will probably sell more copies, but Halo 4 will set the tone for the new Master Chief trilogy and give the franchise significant momentum heading into Halo 5 on the next-generation Xbox…Unless it doesn’t, that is. But if the two-mission taste of Halo 4’s campaign I got is any indication, both the series – and our collective Halo fandom – are in good hands at 343i.
Ryan McCaffrey is the Executive Editor at IGN Xbox. He used to own a DeLorean, which is weird. Follow him on Twitter, on IGN, catch him on Podcast Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
Source : ign[dot]com
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