Category Archives: Game Logs

Halo Fest 2020: The TV Series

It’s time to tie-up my numerous bonus blurbs related to live action teasers and commercials with the culmination of those efforts: 2022’s Halo TV series. While not the Hollywood blockbuster Peter Jackson tried to bring to reality in the mid 2000s, this reasonably big budget Steven Spielberg executive produced television series is the real deal. It’s sad then that when the series launched, there was an awkward mix of excitement around the show’s more impressive qualities, and total rejection of its many deviations from the source material, with the former giving away to the latter as the season went on. While I’ve read things about the show and had the odd conversation about it with friends, I purposely held off watching until after the fervor around it had dissipated.

“Ouch. Yeah, Halo is surprisingly violent at times.”

Not too far into the first episode, a fireteam of Spartans is shown dropping into battle and brutally, efficiently, and honestly, kind of scarily, fighting off a much larger force of Covenant. All of the practical stuff, costumes, props, sets, etc. look quite good. Visually, the Spartans themselves are a nice blend of various styles used in the games and other media over the years, and Master Chief is instantly recognizable. Hell, there’s even a first person scene, which I hadn’t anticipated at all. The vast majority of visual effects look great too, and even the ones that don’t (some of the character animation during this particular battle look freakishly unnatural) can be perhaps explained away by the superhuman physical abilities of the Spartans. This first big fight scene isn’t perfect, but it was enough to get a lot of us on the hook.

Then, as the episode moves on, Halo becomes something… different. Let’s go ahead and jump into spoiler territory, because so many of my thoughts from here on out are related to this show’s writing. I’m going to try to be as vague as I can with my plot summary here but I will mention a lot more specifics as I dive into my criticism, so skip to the last two paragraphs if you want to avoid spoilers.

The story: The Covenant attack an Insurrectionist outpost on the planet Madrigal, slaughtering everyone except teenager Kwan Ha, who is saved by the intervention of the UNSC Spartan unit Silver Team. Spartan Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 pursues the remaining Covenant forces to a nearby cave, where he discovers a Forerunner relic. Touching the relic unlocks long-suppressed childhood memories for John, deeply affecting him. As they return to the UNSC base on Reach, Kwan refuses to cooperate with the UNSC, and John is ordered to execute her. Defying his orders, they escape to a pirate base where John reunites with ex-Spartan Soren. Leaving Kwan with Soren, John surrenders to Silver Team and is taken back to Reach. To ensure his stability, Dr. Halsey implants a new advanced AI called Cortana into John’s neural link. Meanwhile, on the Covenant capital station High Charity, the Prophets learn of John’s activation of the relic on Madrigal and send their human ward Makee to retrieve it. As the investigation of the Forerunner relic continues, John touches it again, triggering memories of his childhood home on Eridanus II. These memories prompt him and Halsey to travel there in search of a possible second relic. On Eridanus II, John recalls memories of the second relic’s location, as well as troubling details of Dr. Halsey’s involvement in his abduction into the Spartan program. While the UNSC excavates the second relic, Makee and the Covenant are alerted to its location, launching a successful surprise attack and retrieving the second relic. As the Covenant flee the planet, Makee is purposely left behind. Back on Reach, Miranda Keyes studies the original relic and discovers that it is part of a keystone leading to a Covenant “Sacred Ring” known as “Halo.” During her interrogation, Makee reveals that both she and John possess the ability to activate Forerunner technology. She also suggests that the second piece of the keystone may have been taken to a Covenant holy planet in the Aspero star system. When John tests the Madrigal relic once more, he and Makee share a vision of being on the Halo ringworld together. As John grows closer to Makee, he learns that the Covenant seeks the Halo rings to initiate their “Great Journey.” Desperate to remain at the center of the efforts to reunite the two pieces of the keystone, Dr. Halsey sabotages communications at the UNSC base and takes control of Silver Team, ordering them to capture John, Makee, and the Madrigal relic. In a last-second decision, Cortana chooses to warn John instead of helping to incapacitate him. In the ensuing chaos, Makee is able to take the relic and escape. Upon learning of Halsey’s betrayal and Makee’s escape, Cortana and John deduce the location of the Covenant holy planet and lead Silver Team on a mission to recover both Forerunner relics. They arrive just in time to witness Makee activate the combined keystone, generating a star map. Alerted to their presence, the members of Silver Team are soon overwhelmed by the much larger Covenant force. During the battle, Makee is shot, shutting down the star map before revealing the final location of Halo. Sustaining a fatal hit himself, Cortana assumes complete control of John, rescuing the members of Silver Team and escaping with both pieces of the keystone. Meanwhile, Kwan convinces Soren to take her back to Madrigal to reunite with the Insurrectionists. There, she learns that her family had been entrusted with protecting a Forerunner portal on the planet. Determined to continue her family’s mission, she begins to search for the portal.

First off, Halo the TV series is not canon, taking place in its own “Silver Timeline.” Smart move, as there are various departures from the games that would otherwise have fans eating their own faces. Things like Master Chief acting very, very differently and major changes to other characters, like Captain Keyes being more involved with UNSC command rather than the captain of a cruiser, and Miranda Keyes being a scientist like her mother instead of a ship’s captain herself. There are numerous, mostly small changes like these peppered throughout the entire series, but adding them up, they drastically change core parts of the backstory and timeline of the extended Halo fiction. I mean, some of you probably noticed by the summary above that the plot itself totally rewrites the events leading up to first reaching Alpha Halo in Halo: Combat Evolved.

“A rare shot of Master Chief wearing his helmet.”

As mentioned, John doesn’t really behave like the Master Chief we know. He switches between the cold professional you’d expect, and being emotionally disturbed by memories of his childhood and other truths he comes to learn throughout the season. As mentioned in my brief review of Homecoming from Halo: Legends, I actually really like the concept of exploring this facet of the SPARTAN-II program. Not with John-117 though! We know him, and we already know this isn’t something he struggles with, making this feel bizarrely out of character. Now, this can all be forgiven by the Forerunner relic affecting him when he first touches it. It’s easy to gloss over, but the show explicitly tells us this is the case, with others around him mentioning that he seems to be acting quite differently. That doesn’t make it much easier to sell to Halo fans, especially when he’s taking his helmet off all of then time. Yes, that’s a silly nitpick! Still, when he first contemplates taking it off he explains to Kwan why he should always keep it on, and I accepted the idea of him later taking it off to gain her trust, but for the rest of the season it seemed like he was always looking for any excuse to pull it off.

Speaking of, I don’t actually take any major issue with Pablo Schreiber as John-117. He has a reasonably similar voice, mannerisms, and is built like a brick shithouse, just as a SPARTAN-II should be. If the script had him acting more like Master Chief from the games, I doubt too many people would have a problem with it. I… do hate his beard though. I mean, it would make sense that if he was in his Mjolnir for days or weeks he might need a shave, but I’d have preferred to see him clean shaven, looking more like a member of the military, when back on Reach. Now that is a silly nitpick! 😀

“Cortana gets gradually less creepy as the series goes on.”

Now Makee, AKA the Blessed One, is definitely a controversial character. Personally, I found her portrayal as someone essentially raised in Covenant captivity to be unconvincing on multiple fronts, from petty stuff like her hair style and clothing, to her apparent levels of education and socialization. Beyond that, the idea that the Covenant might want to capture their own “Reclaimer” and treat them as religiously significant actually works for me. I’m also not all that bothered by her and John having sex. Again, blame John being emotionally disturbed by the relic. If anything, the show sets up this bond between the two characters, both in emotionally compromised positions, and both with this apparently rare connection to the Forerunners, acceptably well. It was unnecessary, sure, but at least it wasn’t a full fledged romance subplot.

Last but not least, Cortana. Her visual presentation is strangely off-putting, perhaps in an “uncanny valley” sort of way. Having her be voiced by Jen Taylor really helped though. Still, she’s not exactly the Cortana we know. You know, I’m still not entirely sure how taking over John’s body once he’s physically dead is supposed to work. Hmm! Regardless, the one thing I did like about this version of Cortana is how she gradually came to side with John over Halsey, with John first regarding her as little more than a nuisance, and slowly starting to see her value as well. It’s honestly probably more compelling than how Cortana and Master Chief’s relationship started in the games.

“What does it do? It’s a plot device, obviously!”

Season 1 mostly revolved around the Forerunner keystone itself. While I enjoyed the mystery surrounding it early on, the fact that it was a total MacGuffin, capable of doing whatever the writers needed it to at any point in time, felt incredibly lazy. Really, the way all of this Forerunner stuff presented is a bit over the top. The crazy guy on the Rubble who ranted at John felt totally out of place to me, and Kwan’s weird desert warrior maiden mystics had me absolutely rolling my eyes. Most egregious though, is the concept that John is more or less unique in his ability as a “Reclaimer”. In the games this was never implied to be a rare trait in humans, but in the TV series it is heavily implied that his connection to Forerunner technology is perhaps the reason he is such an exceptional Spartan in the first place. Come on, isn’t being just an exceptional human being good enough without having to tie his existence into some kind of ridiculous destiny?

At this point I feel like I’m really just picking out silly shit to complain about here. There’s a lot to like as well. The fight scenes, though few and far between, continued to be excellent throughout the season, with the one in episode 5 when the Covenant show up to Eridanus II being the highlight of the entire season. I was especially impressed with some of the hand to hand combat choreography, with the Silver Team fight being a thousand times more enjoyable than Locke and Chief’s showdown in Halo 5. I also found myself to be reasonably intrigued by the core plot at the beginning, and as the season got into its later episodes and the pieces started to align more cleanly, I totally got what the writers were going for with the vast majority of their decisions.

“The lengthy battle in episode 5 might justify the show’s existence on its own.”

It’s sad then that this show is so much closer to being good than I would have suspected. I don’t mean “close to being good” as in “eh, it’s pretty good!” I mean, as a Halo fan, it kind of sucks. Change and tweak a few things and it could have been great, though. Why not have the lead be some other Spartan we’d never heard of before instead of John-117? I mean, realistically, they had to know that Halo fans would never be satisfied with any depiction of Master Chief that wasn’t wearing a helmet 24/7 and voiced by Steve Downs. This could have also alleviated almost all of the above complaints about the show, and perhaps even kept it canon to boot. The pacing was also totally off, both at the season and the per episode level, and that’s an issue regardless of if you’re coming into the show as a Halo fan or not.

Some harsh words, but I definitely plan on watching season 2 when it’s released in 2024. At this point, I’m just fascinated to see where they take the show. With a new showrunner, will they try to correct some of the first season’s missteps? Can they, even? That said, season 1 apparently did quite well, with good ratings and decent critical reviews, so maybe, in a way, the series has achieved the crossover success they were hoping for. I just wish they didn’t leave us Halo fans behind in the process…

Halo Fest 2020 – Infinite

By the time I began following Halo Infinite’s development, there were already indications of significant issues at 343 Industries that all but extinguished hopes that many of its more intriguing rumored features would ever materialize. That big, ugly delay didn’t exactly instill confidence either. However, three weeks before the game’s official launch date, its multiplayer was unexpectedly released early, and at its core was a game that somehow felt like Halo again. While the community’s frustrations have come to overshadow this, when the full game launched few weeks later, reviews of its campaign were overwhelmingly positive too. Although I dove right into its multiplayer, it’s been a real test of my willpower to wait this long to finally play the campaign.

“There will be consequences…”

Aesthetically, Halo Infinite feels like a bit of a throwback. While the game can look amazing at times, on a technical level, it’s not as ambitious as I think many fans expected. Coupled with 343’s return to the Bungie days of Halo stylistically, which, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love, the whole thing looks just a little… stale? While there are countless articles and videos you can dig into to understand its technical issues, one of the game’s biggest visual shortcomings is simply its lack of diverse environments. While Halo campaigns have always featured a rich variety of distinct maps, apart from Banished and Forerunner areas, Infinite mostly takes place in a single biome. Hell, a dynamic weather system or even just a more aggressive day/night cycle could have helped. It’s a shame, as overall, I like the game’s look and I really like the vast majority of its new designs, but it falls short of the home run Halo deserved.

With no technical issues to wrestle with, Infinite’s similarly Bungie inspired soundtrack fares far better. Incorporating elements of and otherwise influenced by the series defining work of Marty O’donnell and Michael Salvatori, including some full remakes of classic tracks, I have zero complaints. Again, 343 played it fairly safe here, but after the more experimental soundtracks of Halo 4 and Halo 5, I think returning to its roots was a good move. Specific nitpicks aside, the rest of the audio work, from the way weapons sound to the voice acting, is similarly top-notch.

“Hey, I can see my house from here!”

Not surprisingly, the majority of my notes are on gameplay, as that’s where 343 took the most risks. Borrowing heavily from the open-world genre, while Infinite’s campaign still consists of a series of linearly progressed levels, there’s now a huge map that you can explore between missions. Oftentimes these more classic-style missions are triggered by reaching specific locations on the map, while others actually take place in the open world itself. Combat-wise, these open world segments don’t feel dissimilar from the larger areas in previous Halo levels, but having such a vast map, so untethered from the campaign’s mission structure is a new concept for the series. Personally, I think it works, though it’s a bit rough around the edges.

First it has to be said, combat in Infinite really feels like Halo in a way that, while hard to describe, is damn satisfying. The weapon balance is just about perfect, and many favorites return in one form or another. There are some new additions, like the Commando, something of a peculiar blend of a DMR and a SAW, though I was particularly attached to Infinite’s take on the good old, versatile Battle Rifle. On the Banished side, the new shock weapons like the Disruptor pistol and the Dynamo grenades are surprisingly effective, as are the long-range Stalker Rifle and Skewer. The two new Forerunner weapons, the Heatwave and the Cindershot, seem practically designed to promote battlefield chaos with their multiple ricocheting projectiles and bouncing explosions, respectively. As for difficulty, playing on Heroic, I felt fairly challenged by fights, especially when I was overmatched yet too careless with my approach, though I admit, most of my deaths early on were probably from falling off of the edge of the map. Well, that, and bosses. There are a number of missions that include scripted boss battles. These don’t play out too differently from similar fights in previous Halo games, but some of these fights were really fun. Overall, big thumbs up!

“Not a great time to run out of charges.”

This means that moving through the open world, encountering Banished patrols and camps, and tactically taking them out in any way you want, is fantastic too. Naturally, 343 also made some half-hearted attempts to pepper the map with other diversions. You can rescue captured marines, destroy Banished propaganda towers, and take down “high value target” mini-bosses, all of which are just minor spins on the typical fights you’ll have in the world. You can re-take overrun UNSC bases which function similarly to the “tower” mechanic popularized by Ubisoft open world games, revealing notable locations on your map, as well as serving as fast travel and resupply points. You can, of course, also hunt down various collectibles from skulls and audio logs to multiplayer cosmetics. Then there are the Banished outposts, which are open world missions involving taking over much larger Banished bases. Again, at their core, they’re just more opportunities for combat, but they verge on feeling like actual scripted campaign missions. Probably the biggest issue with all of these side activities is how much of a pace-destroying, repetitive slog the campaign can turn into if you’re prioritizing completing/collecting everything, as I did, but that’s not exactly a new problem for the genre.

Adding more types of enemies, weapons, and vehicles could have gone a long way in keeping the open world exciting. Again, 343 were a bit conservative here. The lack of vehicles is particularly egregious with such an expansive open world available for the first time. There are vehicles, certainly, but they show up in the world surprisingly infrequently. Worse yet, when they do show up, the enemy AI’s use of them is bizarrely restrained, while friendly AI doesn’t even bother using vehicles at all. I can imagine patrols of marine Warthogs flying over the hills out of nowhere, massive tank battles in the distance, and air to air skirmishes unfolding overhead as Banshees chase down Pelicans. Come to think of it, we got far more of that kind of stuff in the older games. A real missed opportunity.

“Taking the boys out on a Sunday drive.”

That doesn’t stop you from using vehicles, of course. Along with the staples of the series and some returning favorites from Halo 5, we have access to the new UNSC Razorback troop transport. That might sound boring, but loading a Razorback up with marines armed to the teeth is far more effective than the developers probably intended, even if the wonky physics of the Warthog-like vehicles sometimes conspire to ruin the fun. Seriously, who doesn’t love spending several minutes equipping and loading up your marines only to flip over 10 seconds after leaving your FOB?! The Banished’s selection of vehicles is a bit worse, especially since we know they have a lot more in their arsenal from their appearance in Halo Wars 2. More vehicles are added to the sandbox as you upgrade your FOBs from completing activities and unlock more of the map by progressing the campaign, and by the time you’ve made it to the last major section of the map, you’ll probably be spending much of your time exploiting the Wasp to simply fly everywhere. It’s a game changer for sure, and despite the sudden appearance of Banshees and Banished troops armed with Shock Rifles in hopes of countering you, almost the funnest way to travel.

Yes, by far the most unique new addition to the Chief’s tool belt is the Grappleshot, a launchable and retractable grappling hook. We’ve never seen anything like this in Halo before, and oh man, is it satisfying. I’d go as far as to say that the addition of the Grappleshot single-handedly saves Infinite’s new open world from mediocrity. How fun would exploring be without being able to easily scale huge structures and even mountains, and save yourself from the inevitable deadly falls that follow? Oh, and zipping directly onto an enemy, perfectly timing meeting their face with the butt of your rifle (or better yet, an Energy Sword or a Gravity Hammer) is just… *chef’s kiss*

“The upgraded Grappleshot also electrocutes your enemies! *grin*”

Finally, we have the story. As this is the last game of this series, and I’ll want to talk about it a bit, let’s go ahead and summarize the plot right here. As usual I’ll keep it reasonably vague, but this, as well as the two paragraphs after it, contain spoilers. Skip the next three paragraphs if you’ve not played Infinite yet and care about the sort of thing!

The Story: Having spent a year evading the Created, the UNSC flagship Infinity is dispatched to Installation 07 to execute a plan to defeat Cortana. Mere moments after their arrival, the Infinity and her escorts are ambushed by a massive Banished force. The Infinity is abandoned, with its surviving crew scattering to the ring’s surface. During the chaos, the Master Chief comes face to face with Atriox, the leader of the Banished. In the ensuing melee, the Chief is thrown from the Infinity and left for dead. Six months later, he is discovered amongst the debris and revived by a lone UNSC Pelican pilot. Together they discover an encoded message being sent from the Halo and head to its surface to investigate. The Chief finds the Weapon, a copy of the Cortana AI that was the linchpin in UNSC’s now evidently successful plan. The Chief and the Weapon unite and attempt to rally the scant surviving UNSC forces against the ring’s Banished occupiers, now led by Atriox’s lieutenant Escharum after Atriox’s apparent death. During their mission, they encounter the installation’s monitor, 117649 Despondent Pyre, who hysterically warns them of the Harbinger, a dangerous entity that the Banished have released. Later the pair encounter the Harbinger herself, who divulges her plan to repair the ring and free the rest of the Endless, an ancient race imprisoned there by the Forerunners. After being taunted by a hologram of Escharum, who imparts that the Banished and the Harbinger share the same goal, Master Chief and the Weapon hatch a plan to disrupt the Harbinger’s attempts to accelerate the ring’s repair systems. In the process, they discover that these repair efforts are being focused on a specific mysterious part of the ring known as the Silent Auditorium. Escharum again taunts the Chief, baiting him with the coordinates to where he is holding the Pilot captive. Soundly defeating the Banished warlord, the Chief and the Weapon continue on to the Silent Auditorium. While searching the facility, they encounter numerous corrupted fragments of Cortana’s memories. Ultimately, these visions reveal that Cortana sacrificed herself to stop Atriox from releasing the Endless and ensure that the Weapon remained active to guide the Chief. The Chief locates and defeats the Harbinger, but too late as Atriox, in an unknown location, is already freeing the Endless himself.

Before playing it, I was under the impression that Halo Infinite more or less ignored the plot of Halo 5. It doesn’t. In fact, despite leaving out a lot of those details above, it’s actually quite important to Infinite’s plot. Regardless, this was still an incredibly unsatisfying way of following up the semi-cliffhanger ending of Halo 5, skipping ahead and barely even referencing much of the preceding drama outside of audio logs. Playing these games back to back, one moment the fate of the entire galaxy hangs in peril thanks to Cortana’s Created and their Guardian enforcers, the next you’re just facing off against the newest batch of wanna-be Covenant goons, and you completely miss most of that action to boot! Like a good Noir story, there can be something compelling about putting the pieces together after the fact, but I’d argue that Infinite doesn’t lean far enough into it to make it interesting. Instead, it just feels like a flimsy excuse to go a different direction with the story without having to worry too much about the details.

“Sign up now for Escharum’s officer morale improvement seminar!”

That wanna-be Covenant comment aside, I do really like the way the Banished are portrayed here, being my favorite depiction of the Brutes by far, and they’re about as fun of an enemy as I could imagine facing while rehashing the Covenant yet again. I also enjoyed the dynamic between Master Chief and his naive new AI companion “the Weapon”, and running around solo with just her at your side (err, in your head) feels like a welcome return to form after Halo 5. I also kind of appreciate Infinite’s attempt to deliver a more grounded, less epic “hero saves the entire universe” kind of story this time around, even though, if we ever get it, I expect the DLC (or standalone sequel) that has us dealing with the Endless to be more along those lines.

That uncertainty is the saddest thing about Infinite. I’d imagine that most of my complaints were due to that aforementioned rocky development, resulting from compromises to get the game shipped, but Infinite was supposedly going to live up to its name by being something of a “live service” game. Yet, it’s obvious that 343 has utterly failed to make that happen, even struggling to put out fixes and new maps for multiplayer with any sort of expediency. With recent news of more departures and layoffs, this could even end up being the last 343 Industries developed Halo game. It’s a shame because the core gameplay and a lot of the ideas here are great, and if fully realized, I think Infinite could have finally been the game to prove that 343 was worthy of carrying the torch. In the end, it is definitely worth playing, but it’s definitely not that.

Well, after that gut punch, I’ll cover the live-action stuff quickly. A pair of teasers, Forever We Fight and Carry On are kind of neat, with the latter showing the Chief squaring off against a Banished Brute. Less neat, the UNSC Archive trailers Unspoken, Project Magnes, and Lightbringers may also be of some interest too. Much more on this subject next!

Halo Fest 2020 – Halo Wars 2

I was both surprised and more than a little pessimistic when I heard that Halo Wars 2 was in development for the Xbox One. It seems that neither my observations about the first game’s questionable intended audience or its odd, semi-forgotten place in the Halo series necessarily correlated with low sales numbers. Still, I’m curious about what inspired them to make Halo Wars 2 beyond 343 Industries’ continued efforts to grow and diversify the franchise, particularly with Ensemble out of the picture. Speaking of, Halo Wars 2 would be developed by another studio with some serious strategy game credentials, Creative Assembly, best known for their Total War series. Likely pretty exciting for fans of the first game, though, like I mentioned in my Halo 5 post, I was out of the loop on all things Xbox for much of that generation.

“Capt. Cutter and Jerome-092 are back, along with a new friend.”

Immediately upon loading the game up I was struck by its presentation, as extremely close-up shots of units in combat cycle in the background showcasing a change in both art direction and graphical fidelity; the further you zoom in the more the individual units start to look cartoonishly stylized, almost appearing like figurines from a tabletop wargame. Then we have the pre-rendered cutscenes. Oh my! Blur is back and their work here is top-tier, even more impressive than in the original Halo Wars.

Hopping into my first mission I was struck by how much better the effects, animations, and particularly the environments looked than in the first game. As for the units, Halo Wars 2 sticks with designs much closer to those of the original Halo trilogy than 343’s later revisions. Whether this was an attempt to appease older fans or simply justified for the in-universe reason that the Spirit of Fire and her crew had been drifting since before Halo: CE (and without any fancy nanomachine upgrades) I don’t know, but I appreciate it in any case. About my only complaint is that, unlike in the original Halo Wars, your units are all colored with the multiplayer forest green color rather than the typical olive green we associate with the Master Chief. A total nitpick, I admit.

“The Flood aren’t the only ones who can field ridiculous numbers of the same unit.”

The UI has been totally overhauled, and while many of the controller bindings and interface concepts are the same as in the first game, they’ve definitely been improved and expanded upon, particularly when it comes to unit selection. In the end, I still relied mostly on the basic controls of selecting every unit, all units on the screen, or units of a particular type rather than grouping them more strategically as I might in a PC RTS. As such, there were points at which I returned to the cheesy strategy of massing a single type of unit, most notably fully upgraded Banshees when playing the last few missions of the Awakening the Nightmare expansion.

As with the first game, I opted to lower my difficulty level down to “Normal” in the interest of keeping my playthrough from being too laborious, but while there were definitely still a few difficult spots where I found myself caught in a bit of a grind against unit attrition and/or base defense versus exploration or aggressively seeking out objectives, overall it felt a little less challenging, at least until I got to the DLC content. I still find the unit constraints and other limitations many campaign missions force on you to be pretty annoying, but this is typical of single player campaigns in RTS games, and I at least found some of these scenarios, particularly the mission “Hold the Line” (a straight-up tower defense ripoff) to be pretty fun.

“A huge UNSC combined force claiming a Forerunner structure.”

Now let’s talk about the story. As this is a side story without too much relation to the main series, I’ll go ahead and recap the plot of Halo War 2’s campaign and its two DLC expansions. I try to be somewhat vague in these plot summaries but they absolutely do still contain spoilers, so skip the three paragraphs if you don’t want the plot to be spoiled!

The Story: After drifting for 28 years the Spirit of Fire’s crew awakens to find themselves orbiting an enormous Forerunner installation in uncharted space. Spartan Red Team and a small recon squad are soon dispatched to the surface to investigate the source of an encrypted UNSC transmission. There they find the battle-scarred ruins of a small UNSC science outpost and its still-active AI, Isabel. Isabel tells Captain Cutter and his officers about the installation they’re on, the Ark, and the Banished, a powerful mercenary army made up of Covenant remnants and led by the Brute warlord Atriox, who have occupied it. Determined to stay and fight, Cutter begins deploying forces planetside, successfully executing a series of strikes against Banished bases. Enraged by these losses, the Banished send their flagship, Enduring Conviction, to engage the Spirit of Fire directly. With the Spirit of Fire only temporarily able to fend off the Enduring Conviction, Isabel enacts a cunning plan to gain access to the flagship’s systems and attack the Ark, causing the installation’s Sentinel drones to attack the ship en masse, quickly crippling it. Meanwhile, Professor Anders comes up with her own cunning plan to regain contact with the UNSC. Launching a reserve Halo ring from the Ark’s Foundry, Anders plans to plant a beacon in its control room before it jumps to the site of the destroyed Installation 04, hopefully close enough to UNSC space to be detected. After repelling a Banished assault on the newly launched ring, Anders, while successful, is unable to escape the ring’s control room before it jumps. Sometime later while Cutter and Atriox plan their next moves in the war for control of the Ark, the ring drops out of slipspace. Investigating, Anders comes face to face with a Guardian.

Set one month later, Operation SPEARBREAKER follows a squad of ODST as they lead an operation to stop the now stranded Banished from activating a Forerunner fighter and using it to destroy the Spirit of Fire. Caught between UNSC forces and the Ark’s own considerable Sentinel defenses, the Banished plan is ultimately foiled.

Set several months later still, Awakening the Nightmare shows the war from the perspective of the Banished. With the loss of the Enduring Conviction, Banished forces must scour the Ark for supplies and other resources to keep up their war against the Spirit of Fire. During such a mission, two of Atriox’s lieutenants, brothers Voridus and Pavium, violate direct orders and penetrate the crashed High Charity’s defenses, unwittingly unleashing the previously quarantined Flood. The Flood rapidly spread across the Ark, infecting Banished and UNSC troops alike, with every plan the brothers concoct to halt their advance being decisively defeated. Soon the existence of a Proto-Gravemind is discovered and, running out of options, the brothers make a concentrated effort to destroy it. Thanks to this massive coordinated strike, Voridus and Pavium succeed, and at Atriox’s order, turn to cleaning up the remaining Flood.

“Atriox, Warmaster of the Banished, throwing off the Covenant’s yoke.”

First, I have to say that I liked Halo Wars 2’s story a hell of a lot more than some other recent entries in the franchise. It feels more original than that of the first Halo Wars while also being grounded enough to not require you to be a scholar of expanded lore to appreciate (looking at you, Halo 4.) To that end, you’re never left scratching your head about who the antagonists are either. In fact, Atriox and his Banished are introduced with a detailed backstory right up front, and the awesome cutscene in question should be required viewing for anyone playing Halo Infinite. I also love that the Spartans of Red Team now have a lot more personality so we can like them for more than just being ridiculously effective, and despite me just saying that, they don’t feel like invincible superheroes either, with one of them getting messed up bad during the very first encounter with the Banished. Between that and Isabel’s almost palpable fear of Atriox when you first meet her, I felt like I was set on my back foot from the start. My only real disappointment is the end of the campaign, which never fully resolves the conflict at the core of the story, even with the addition of two DLC campaigns that extend the timeline. To be continued, I suppose, and likely in a book or a comic rather than another game. *sigh*

“Hellbringers roasting some garrisoned Brutes.”

To wrap up, Halo Wars 2 feels like a good sequel, retaining the feel of the first game with expected iterative refinements to gameplay, technology, and practically everything, really, along with the level of polished presentation you’d expect from a Halo game. It honestly blows my mind that the first Halo Wars managed to be good, but for Halo Wars 2 to come out 8 years later with a completely different dev team at the helm and also be good? Kind of amazing. So, it goes without saying that if you were a fan of Halo Wars, you shouldn’t hesitate to give Halo Wars 2 a spin. If you tried Halo Wars and didn’t like it, on the other hand, there’s probably nothing compelling for you here outside of a quick watch of the cutscenes.

Oh hey, it’s bonus live-action media time again! While Halo Wars 2 did have the usual barrage of promotional and marketing content from 343, the only real live-action content were these two ads which, while having very little to do with efforts to make a Halo movie or television series, did at least get a chuckle out of me. More of this, please!