I was actually just playing the campaign last night and was really enjoying it.
I wondered why everyone on GAF was down on the game- I guess everyone loved the campaign and hated the MP?
How did the Spartan Ops turn out?
Here are my problems with Halo 4's campaign. It was basically the only thing about Halo 4 that I was still hyped about and because of that it was probably even more disappointing than the multiplayer.
-The scale of encounters is toned down.
Halo Reach already had smaller encounters than Halo 3, but Halo 4 doesn't do anything to fix that either. Battles like the ones towards the end of the The Ark or the double Scarab fight during The Covenant are nowhere to be seen in Halo 4. While playing the level with the Mammoth I was waiting for a battle against a big army, but all we got was a couple of Wraiths and a Ghost here and there at most. In total the level had quite a few vehicles, but that's only because you fought wave after wave of one Wraith and two Ghosts. I'm not sure why Scarabs didn't make it into Reach and Halo 4. Sure, after a couple of times they became easy to take down, but I feel like if they were expanded upon some great things could've come out of it.
-It's more linear than any other Halo.
This related to my previous point. Similarly, ever since Reach there's been a worrisome trend. The levels are getting more and more linear and there are less options to mix things up. Halo 1 was probably the most open of any of the Halo games. Levels like The Silent Cartographer and Halo were great examples of to gives people the option to take different approaches to certain encounters. Halo 3 also did a great job at this. While there aren't any levels quite as open as the ones I just mentioned, the levels were still designed with flexibility in mind. Halo 4 hardly had any of this. The most open level was the one with the Pelican, but in the end you didn't really do anything while flying it. So essentially the level was just three (?) linear encounters in one. Being able to mix things up was what made Halo so excellent for replayability which is something Halo 4 sorely misses, partly because of this.
-Promethean enemies are badly designed.
343 had the opportunity to do something Bungie never did: create completely new enemy types that would freshen up the campaign after 10 years of Elites, Grunts and Jackals. The result, to me, was quite disappointing. Initially I was pretty excited about the idea of the Promethean working closely together, but after playing the game it felt really lacking. The only unit that actually interact with his allies was the Watcher. It shielded Knights and even revived them after they died. Knights and Robodogs didn't really acknowledge their allies at all. This resulted in the Watcher being a priority target every single time there was a fight against Prometheans. Why bother killing knights first if the Watcher can revive them anyway? It made the fights less flexible as a result, especially compared to fights against the Covenant.
A bigger issue I had with the Promethean was how they felt like bullet sponges much more than the Covenant ever did. (Halo 2 Brutes were pretty bad, but even those died with a couple of headshots) Where with the Covenant you can quickly drains shields with Plasma weaponry there was no such thing with the Prometheans. Yes, you could drain their shields with Plasma weapons, but during most encounters with them there weren't any Covenant around to drop Plasma weapons. So you ended up mostly using either Human or Promethean weapons, both of which weren't effective at range. The Suppressor was decent, but on higher difficulty levels getting up close with Knights is not recommended. Combine the lack of Plasma weaponry with the fact that the shields of the Knights are barely visible and recharge incredibly quickly and you've got a frustrating enemy. That's without even taking into account the teleporting and their screwed up head hitboxes.
-The story is a mess
The stories in Halo games were never that great to being with, but until Halo 4 there were at least fairly contained. Reach already made it a bit muddy by adding Halsey without even explaining who she is, but Halo 4 truly is a mess. If you hadn't read the books you'd have no idea who you're fighting or why have even hates humanity to begin with. The terminals do a decent job at explaining some of this stuff, but they're not even viewable in the game itself. You have to go to Youtube or the Waypoint app to watch them. Something which I can safely assume rarely anybody does midgame. Even if you could watch them as soon as you unlocked a terminal it wouldn't have be great, because a lot of people miss out of them this way. They should've been woven into the gameplay and cutscenes in the game itself to work.
-It's too 'game-y'
Keep in mind, this is a relatively small complaint. It's about how 343's Halo feels less natural than those of Bungie. Quick Time Events, the same button press animation a million times, a predator strike section, calling in 'airstrikes' with the target designator, those short ingame cutscenes, that kinda stuff. Stuff like that never made it into Bungie Halo games for good reason. Halo was about dropping you into and environment and letting you do whatever you want. Those things I mentioned just now take you out of it and make it less... sandbox-y if that makes sense. They're unnecessary small things that when added up annoy me quite a bit. Another example of the difference between 343 and Bungie is the comparison between the The Maw Hog run and the Halo 4 Ghost run. You can see enemy troops run away during both these sequences, but there's a difference between how they're handled in both. In Halo 1 you can see Covenant fighting Flood, you can see squads made out of Elites and Grunts running toward safety. It all feels very natural and doesn't feel out of place. During the Halo 4 Ghost run you see nearly a hundred Grunts all running in a straight line doing the exact same animation. They look like they're placed there to give the player some cheap free kills. It feels fake. Again, these aren't major issues, but it does make me appreciate Bungie.
