We start another fight in Halo: The Master Chief Collection (now playing: Nothing! We're done!)

ONI Alpha Site is the best defense setpiece Halo 2 wishes it could have come up with.

We’re past the halfway point now, and ODST’s strengths and weaknesses are starting to all become a little better defined. I’m still enjoying myself, but the fact that each level seems to be a single experiment and not much else is a feeling I can’t really shake. Also, we discuss the nature of audio logs.

ODST continues with a visit to the NMPD HQ in an effort to see how many acronyms we can jam into one sentence. I think we could pump those numbers up, myself.

As for the game, well, it’s a sniper mission and comes with all that that suggests.

Today’s mission brings us to some sort of flooded undercity, which is a weird thing to keep around. This aerial assault plays out a little like a guided tour more than anything else, made all the more apparent by all the technical and scripting issues we ran into with it. It’s also the first time in a while we hear from the story, so that’s nice.

I’ve been generally enjoying myself with ODST so far, but it is kind of awkward that we’re only just now doing something plot-relevant. The game’s just a bit thin, overall, so I can see why people wouldn’t be too pleased with it. Still better than 3’s plot, at least.

And just like that, ODST’s over.

It’s kind of an abrupt story at the end of the day, isn’t it? A whole lot of basically nothing and then the entire plot gets jammed into the last two missions, but it’s been fun I guess. It was definitely more creative than 3, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, Bungie just couldn’t help themselves and end the game with an epilogue cutscene that makes their patented “no goddamn amount” of sense.

Next week, we forge onward to Reach.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: Halo Reach is easily my favorite of the series. If you want to know why, check out the video.

Expanding on that, I’m happy we’re finally here, because Reach is a real breeding ground for all sorts of interesting conversation, mainly because I feel that it’s the first game where Bungie made any sort of real effort since Halo 2. The world, level, and encounter design are all top-notch for the series, and there are a lot of little details everywhere that really sell the theme the whole game is built around. In short, it does a lot that none of the other games ever had.

Our ongoing defense continues as we head to the chilly ice shelf where ONI Sword Base resides. It’s the second “open” sort of mission in the series with a whole two things to do in either order, but at least we get to play with some new toys. It’s also just a good blend of multiple types of environments and encounter types in a single mission held together by pretty good pacing. It’s fun!

Nightfall is kind of a mulligan of the original Truth and Reconciliation mission, at least as far as framework and setup go. As that redo, however, it’s much better and is one of the few times you can tell that Bungie’s learned anything from their decade-plus experience in game development. The encounters in this level flow incredibly well, guiding us naturally and almost effortlessly through a massive network of cliffs, canyons, and settlements, and ending in a lovely tease for the next level.

When the hell did they learn all this, and where is it in their later games?

Tip of the Spear gives us a great look into the actual, in-universe odds of the current situation in a way that other games only really told us about. Tying gameplay with narrative? In a Halo game? What a concept!

Snark aside, this is a pretty fun and open mission with a lot going on. Lots of excitement, cool vehicles, new weapons, and a neat cutscene.

Long Night of Solace is one of those missions where because of what the series has been comfortable with so far, you’d be excused for expecting most of it to be a short little cutscene. But it isn’t, and it shows how much Reach actually cares about telling its story and letting the world it’s created breathe a little.

Again, really a shame they learned this five games in, but at least it’s something.

And the level’s fun, too!

With last week’s mid-game climax out of the way, the story takes a bit of a turn now that certain stakes have been raised. Exodus marks a real turning point in the story where things are very obviously much worse than before, and the player is informed of all this just by simple perspective changes, the types of NPCs and enemies you encounter, and the environments.

From the ground and now into the sky and onto the rooftops, we have a bunch of randomly-selected objectives to complete and the city doesn’t seem to have a lot of time. This is another one of those levels that does a great job properly conveying the scale of what’s happening, versus just saying it’s big and showing us the same things we always see.

Also, I give everyone some reading recommendations.

The decision to include Cortana as a surprise guest character in Reach was, I consider, an incredibly poor one. It’s clearly just fanservice, as her introduction and the end to the narrative her presence ushers in suddenly becomes a rushed botch job that doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the game. What was very recently about trying as best we could to help civilians suddenly becomes about getting a MacGuffin to a place, and as we’ll see in the next level, ends up actually denying the game a satisfying conclusion from a gameplay standpoint.

There was a better way to set up the finale, but by including Cortana (who shouldn’t even be here if we’re taking the words of the previous games into account), it feels like the writers and Bungie didn’t have the confidence to do it.

Oh, and the level’s like, fine, I guess. It ends with a big defense setpiece but they tried a bit.

We’ve reached the end of Reach. Rather than doing something huge and bombastic and cool, we’re pointedly told to ignore a lot of cool things, and then we hang around a static arena fighting waves of enemies until we hop on a stationary turret to end the game.

Hoo boy, it’s a little bit of a letdown.

Reach runs out of steam real fast between these last two missions. Pulling in elements from the other games just adds to the disappointment, honestly. It goes from an excellent standalone game with a lot of exciting, creative levels, all the way down to exactly what we’ve seen before with the rest of the series. Nonsense plot, lame setpieces, and an ending that just raises more questions than will ever be answered.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Well, the day is finally here. Halo 4. The much-maligned sequel by a brand new company, panned by fans for changing too much and not being enough like the old games.

But we gotta ask, after seeing how those older games hold up, is that such a bad thing? Halo 4 introduces brave new concepts into the decade-old series, such as ‘establishing concrete stakes,’ ‘having characters,’ and ‘giving the protagonist a voice and actual agency.’ I can’t help but be a little soft on it when the big changes it makes are generally in support of telling a story that’s understandable without a shelf’s worth of tie-in novels. At least at first.

Halo 4 breaks down, and quickly. Narratively, oh boy, just you wait. But as far as gameplay, too. This game was pushing the poor old 360 well beyond its limits, and the design of the world suffers as a result. While Reach had a crisp artstyle that still generally holds up a decade-plus later that still allowed for some of the largest and most detailed areas we’ve seen in the series up to this point, Halo 4 is forced (4ced?) to take a step backwards in the same way Halo 2 did: smaller, narrower areas focused on individual combat arenas without much in the way of sprawling encounters. The bigger areas that do exist have their own share of problems, as we’ll see throughout this series. The PC port fixes one of the most major issues brought on by the increased demands on the original hardware, namely that dropped weapons no longer despawn mere seconds after they fall, but that’s only one part of a much larger collection of design issues. But we’re not quite there yet.

For now, strap in, grab your favorite AI buddy, and come on a brand new ride as Cooperative Conversations bothers some aliens

Well, our ship crashed, and us along with it. But let’s stagger up, dust ourselves off, and get familiar with a fancy new planet. But first, the game takes some time to actually set up a plot framework and some understandable stakes. It’s refreshing.

And also a little aggravating, because it just highlights how downright bad Bungie was at telling us the same things. Halo 4 is just pulling from ideas that were apparently always there, it’s just that 343 Industries are the ones who decide to take a couple minutes to sit down and explain some of it. All this time, and it was that easy.

This mission gives us our first real look at the larger story of Halo 4, and at least at first, it’s nothing too eyebrow-raising. What is, however, is the fact that we’ve already exhausted our enemy roster. Yep, a new faction is introduced so quickly that we see everything they have to offer within 10 minutes of them showing up.

I bring it up in the video, but in a lot of ways, Halo 4’s problems feel identical to Halo 1’s - the low enemy variety, and also how all the weapons are essentially just reskins of our existing arsenal. It’s a little disappointing to come face to face with this ancient alien threat and find out that no, pistol>assault rifle>shotgun>sniper rifle>rocket launcher transcends, time, space, and species.

A trip through some truly wild woodland ends in the meeting of some new friends. The things this mission introduces are divisive, I understand, but I’ll at least say that it’s a neat look at how the world of the Halo games has progressed since the last one. We’re seeing change, and although it doesn’t exactly sit us down and explain everything I personally would like to know, it shows a legitimate interest by the writers to expand not just the setting, but our own knowledge of it as players. Yet again, where Bungie was more than happy to strap a pair of blinders on us so they didn’t have to think too hard about their setting, 343 comes out swinging with a bit more than the bare minimum of effort.

Enjoy it while the things we’re learning are still relatively tame.

And there’s the nosedive.

When Halo 4 decides it’s done having a story about understandable things, it switches gears real fast. After slogging through some glitches and broken level triggers, we’re suddenly shoved face-first into a story about prophecy, ancient aliens, destiny (not the Bungie one), and weird frog people that hate us. It’s…a lot.

In short, I don’t think this story does the series any favors.

And in fact, neither of us thought that, so here’s another almost 50 minutes of trying to parse what sort of utter nonsense we were just force-fed.

Well, with that out of the way, I guess it’s time we keep trying to hunt down the frog man.

But not before Cortana drops another absolute gem of a monologue for us to ramble about. I think in general, I can mostly appreciate what this game is trying to do with her, but it’s very eager to get in its own way pretty much all the time. The two main plot points the game has introduced are treated with more or less equal importance, but the ways to solve either of them directly clash, and instead of making that the point of the narrative (want to go back to Earth to save Blue Lady versus stay on Unicron to fight Frog Man) we just kind of get bounced between them at random and the former stops being important until it suddenly is again.

Oh and I also have some more to share from The Asteroid Queen because dang, they really did just copy it pretty much wholesale.