The OBJECTIVELY CORRECT Halo Games Tier List...

yeah it's a webcam video that means things have to go there I'm not sure why this is a tradition so the other day I was grocery shopping and I was listening to a video by rocket sloth where they listed every Halo game it was this tearless thing I've seen them but I've never done one for myself and you know what that rocket sloth video that tier list video I thought it was pretty well done but I have some different opinions and I'd like to share them with you now but first it's time to pay the bills I'm extremely fortunate to have partnered with Apex gaming PCs to create a custom line of late night gaming themed PCS the PCS have been pre-built which means it's easier for you to get your gaming on once yours arrives they come in three tiers Marine ODST and Spartan each tier of PC is designed to run modern games and they're built for different budgets people have best part is is due to the modular nature of PCS if you buy yourself a marine tier PC later on if you want a bit of a boost you can just buy some upgrades for it it may not be Monday but you know what they say it's Monday somewhere in the world that's not actually a saying Apex gaming PC still has their Cyber Monday sale going on which Nets you a whopping 15 off if you use the coupon code late night with your order to support the channel thank you to Apex gaming PC for sponsoring the video and let's get back back to the topic at hand so alright here's the tier list we're going to start off with the first game in the series Halo Combat Evolved so if you look at Halo Combat evolves development history it was kind of a miracle that the game was as coherent as it was not just in terms of the mechanics but even the story it was more or less kind of thrown together and then stitched in place uh in the last year of development multiplayer almost didn't make it with the final release so when understanding those things Halo Combat Evolved is kind of really amazing I don't think it's really Nostalgia goggles to say that Combat Evolved is one of the greatest first person shooter campaigns of all time I think it's definitely up there with Half-Life a lot of the lessons that combat evolve taught the first person shooter industry are still used to this day and no I don't think Halo Combat Evolved ruined the first person shooter genre I think what it did was it set down some ground rules some things that work and then it was up to various other developers to kind of take those rules and design their own games off of them now whether those games were good or not is you know Up For Debate but Halo Combat Evolved was pretty good and I don't think that's Up For Debate if I could summarize why I like the Halo 1 campaign so much it's it's got one of the best most engaging sandbox and exploration experiences in all other Halo games when you stumble upon like a special weapon like a shotgun or a rocket launcher it's like obviously it's empowering it's exciting but in Halo 1 when you find a rocket launcher for some reason it's more powerful than it is in the other campaigns it's more of this incredible experience and the fact that in Halo 1 every single weapon kind of had a place there was the sniper rifle it was the only one the shotgun the rocket launcher it made the act of finding them a lot more exciting because their role could not be filled by other weapons that were very similar within a bubble within a vacuum it helps make Halo 1's campaign just legendary it's so much fun to play even years later the game also supported four player split screen multiplayer you could run around with your friends on all these different Maps or you could system link and run big Team Battle on huge maps and this was before kind of like the modern way that multiplayer maps are created where they have to be curated and balanced and tested and you get the vibe that like all the fun and Edge is sanded off until they're these like dull curated things in Halo Combat Evolved Maps were messy they were sloppy and that's the fun of them all these years later Halo Combat Evolved is legendary it lives on currently via the Master Chief collection and unfortunately the Master Chief Collection Port of Halo Combat Evolved as a couple of wonky things going on with its sandbox balancing in the multiplayer component but I still think that party atmosphere is able to shine especially if you're playing the way it was intended which is two versus two on small maps and let's not even forget the incredible soundtrack because of all of these various things Halo Combat Evolved it goes up in Godly so all right the sequel Halo 2. this game also had a very disorganized very rushed very troubled production I do think Halo 2 Bears a lot of the scars that it obtained during its development process uh notoriously the third Act was completely cut from The Campaign it's easy to look back at the base campaign and be like holy moly this really was unfinished it's very interesting then that in spite of all those things Halo 2 is considered one of the best games in the series and one of the best shooter campaigns of all time and I think the key to Halo 2's success was honestly the early 2000s cool Factor when you look at the atmosphere surrounding the game not just pre-release but also with the launched product itself the visuals of the main menu the fonts used the music and various artists that actually contributed to Halo 2 soundtrack there's just this early 2000s cool factor that just it can't really be scrubbed Away Halo 2 has style and there's no way about that the campaign was ambitious made use of really impressive cinematic techniques and then when you hop on over to the multiplayer part of things Halo 2 took Halo online finally players were able to match make against each other the multiplayer wasn't this last minute thing with very little thought put into it there was a desire to make a really good online experience for Halo's multiplayer and I think it definitely shows on one hand you have the submachine gun which was this close range fully automatic weapon and it was designed for social starts that way everyone could run around the map with ease but then if you wanted things to get a bit sweaty a bit uh competitive you give everybody the battle rifle and now you've kind of got a repeat of Halo Combat evolves competitive tournaments where everyone's cross mapping each other with Magnums Bungie was able to have their cake and eat it too with the way that they designed the multiplayer component Halo 2 is Big it's messy it's sloppy it's glitchy but it's scary charismatic and so because of all of those things I'm putting Halo 2 firmly up in amazing anywhere lower just isn't fair to that game now Halo 3. I've got a lot of nostalgia for this thing it was my first ever experience with a console generational leap so when I look at Halo 3 you know I think of how impressive the lighting system Bungie used was I think of how vast and how big the campaign play spaces were and just how impressive a lot of the set pieces were like the Scarab the campaign for Halo 3 is a good time arguments can be made that the story maybe wasn't quite as deep as it could have been compared to Halo 2. this is my list and you know what when I think of Halo 3's campaign I don't think of online Internet arguments people screaming at each other I remember the memories I had playing that campaign split screen as a kid and of course the warthog Run Halo 3's War Hog Run is legendary not just for the music but also just the pure cinematic gameplay experience Halo 3's campaign is awesome but you know what's more awesome and the main reason that I have such nostalgic memories for Halo 3 Forge and theater mode Bungie was pretty ahead of their time they saw with Halo 2 that there were communities forming and they wanted to build their next game with support for those communities so on one hand you had the forge tool which actually let you rearrange the assets that Bungie placed on their multiplayer maps if you think a sniper rifle was too unbalanced here you could move it down here or replace it with something like a shotgun and once the community realized that you could like stack objects on top of each other and get them to like glitch in place or even phase and clip into each other people started getting really creative in the forge mode people were making their own obstacle courses their own maps and with the infection game type people were making a lot of fun infection Maps a lot of fun holdout maps and then with this impressive file share system you could put your new maps your new custom modes that you were making up onto your file share and other people could download them and then when you hopped into matchmaking you could invite people to your party and then you all could go on as this big gang of buddies and just played these awesome custom games you made together and with the theater mode it was God I love theater mode this is around the time when Machinima exploded people were starting to make their own videos using the theater tool and no matter where you were in Halo 3 whether you were fighting the Covenant making a map in Forge or playing online theater was always watching always recording and you could always hop into it and get more cinematic angles and share them on your file share whether they be screenshots or Clips one of the first ever file share Clips I ever saw was somebody getting killed by a traffic cone because it was a viral clip on the file share and that's a legendary experience that I think a lot of people share Halo 3 was a great package on the Xbox 360. and on the MCC nowadays I think it's only aged like a fine wine so because of that Halo 3 I am firmly putting up in Godly we move on to Halo 3 ODST this is a hard game to talk about without understanding um kind of the atmosphere of when it released so Halo was Call of Duty back in the day what do I mean by that well it was the shooter you know everybody bought a console so that they could play Halo but other games were now starting to kind of step out of the Shadows you had Call of Duty 4 which was the Smash Hit That kind of came out of nowhere you had Battlefield finally starting to take confident steps onto the console market and around this time Halo kind of you know needed to do something a little bit more impressive because Halo 3 was sustaining people for years and years and years and what was that way to sustain the Halo brand well it wasn't Halo 3 ODST the game was actually Trashed by people when it came out reviewers gave it a fair Shake but a lot of Gamers they felt like it was kind of like this is like a Halo 3 asset flip what is this this is what and unfortunately I also felt the same way you know like it didn't come with the multiplayer component it came with a pretty short campaign it came with this firefight board mode but Call of Duty was over here doing Nazi zombies which was way cooler and it wasn't until years and years later when I actually gave odstf bear shake and you know what ODST is a pretty good game for sixty dollars I think it's a tall ask but for the more appropriate 25 or even less dollars I think a Halo 3 ODST is a pretty solid package because there isn't a multiplayer component Bungie could actually really focus on the sandbox This Time Around by the time of Halo 3 Halo sandbox had started to get a bit uh he had a lot of guns that were struggling to find a place for themselves you had a lot of mechanics that were starting to get in the way of Designing new guns and you know what Bungie said strip it all down let's start from the basics like Combat Evolved there's no multiplayer to worry about balancing for so all they had to do was focus on the campaign and they made a pretty solid sandbox experience Halo 3 odst's campaign is a really good time it's fun to play through it has a solid sandbox and not just the gameplay experience the actual atmosphere of the campaign can't be understated maybe it was kind of like the creative restrictions of working on Purely back-to-back Master Chief stories but the fact that Halo 3 ODST was the first game where you weren't Master Chief I don't think it's a surprise then that the soundtrack also went crazy Marty O'Donnell and Michael Salvatore were able to get from under the green boots of the chief and Deliver Us a really unique sounding musical experience and what's really impressive is in spite of how unique it is still sounds like Halo music especially the action bits in the firefight mode it's a great distilled way to experience just raw Halo Combat I'm of the opinion that Halo Combat is a lot more fun when you are the aggressor more than you are the defender but in odst's combat Loop defensive gameplay actually works pretty well and the firefight mode is a ton of fun so because of all of these different factors Halo 3 ODST I'm putting in the great tier this doesn't mean that it's lesser than Halo 2 or lesser than all the other games it just means exactly what it says right there Halo 3 ODST is great really good now let's move on to Halo Wars Halo Wars was the first Halo title without Bungie and not just that it wasn't a first person shooter it was an RTS game now here's a bit of background I grew up playing RTS games I grew up playing the original Starcraft as well as The Brood War expansion Age of Empires 2 that was my jam as a kid so these kind of sprite based semi-empire building game rts's I love those those are my type of RTS experience Halo Wars was an RTS game made for console specifically the Xbox 360 and that came with some pretty harsh limitations when I was younger I didn't really give Halo Wars a chance because whenever I try to play it all I could think about was how much cooler it would be if I could place my base anywhere if I could make more units then the game would allow for if the maps were bigger more expansive if there were semi-empire building mechanics built into the game and as an adult I've grown to appreciate Halo Wars a lot more for what it is did you guys know that like Halo Wars retained a cult Community for an extremely long time even past the Xbox One's launch people in the Halo Wars Community were still returning to it and still playing it and not giving up on it and it's partly why 343 was inspired to make Halo Wars 2 just due to the unusual commitment the Halo Wars Community had to that game so Halo Wars is a great game but it's never been an RTS game for me it just I don't know if maybe I'm stubborn or maybe I'm spoiled on PC RTS games but the limitations and the gameplay systems built around those limitations they always frustrated me more than they excited me what I can give Halo Wars though is the presentation is superb it's not done by Bungie but it feels like it dude Stephen Rippy absolutely killed it on the soundtrack and I think the music of Halo Wars goes really unappreciated seriously go listen to the Halo Wars soundtrack and the blur CGI cut scenes still look awesome to this day and I think it's helped by the fact that blur didn't really go for photorealism they went for more of this like bungee stylized look just blur CGI cutscenes they hold up very well for Halo Wars and due to all of these factors Halo Wars I'm putting in good okay I don't like playing it particularly much I won't really revisit it just because man I really want to play some Halo Wars but that doesn't mean it's a bad game it is a good game okay it's just not my cup of tea when it comes to RTS gameplay now Halo Reach remember how I was talking about how ODST was an asset flip of Halo 3 and that there was a lot of criticism about odsd when it came out well Halo Reach was one of the best looking games I had ever seen on the Xbox 360 when it came out I remember I couldn't actually buy it for about a week after the game released and one of my first glimpses of it was in a Game Informer Magazine and they had redesigned the way that the shield effect works and I remember just like looking at these images of a Spartan being impacted in the way that the shield flared up and it was like oh my God that looks so much more detailed than Halo 3 did and then my brother and I we were on a walk and we were visiting one of his friend's house and that friend's older brother was playing Halo Reach firefight and he was using a Needler and I remember just being floored by the graphical Fidelity of the Needler it looked it looked like playable CGI the game looked so impressive I couldn't wait to play it and then I had another friend whose name was Daniel he actually finally got Halo Reach and one of the first things we actually did was hop into the forge mode because Halo Reach listen multiplayer pretty good campaign is pretty good but I spent most of my time playing Forge in Halo 3. and I was so excited to see what they were going to change about Forge in Halo Reach forage world was on a whole nother level Halo Reach I have a lot of nostalgia for I think it's an excellent game and by the time I finally got Xbox Live the game only got even better the social features in that game were expanded upon from Halo 3 and they even managed to make improvements to some of their systems the theater mode will in Halo 3 you couldn't actually rewind in campaign in Halo reach you could so you could rewind all the way back to the start of the campaign or you could fast forward and you could jump around through your play session and then beyond that you had this incredibly addictive online grind Halo Reach had this currency system and it made kind of like for this really just compulsive gameplay experience like I wanted to keep playing I wanted to keep grinding currency and I wanted to reserve that currency and hold on to it because I was looking at the little catalog of different helmets that I wanted to buy and the best part about this currency you couldn't buy it with real world money you only obtained it by playing the game so it felt like it was distributed in a very fair manner Halo Reach was just such an astonishing package at the time you had the campaign you had fire fight both campaign and firefight had matchmaking options as well as scoring and timing options then you had the multiplayer that had a ton of playlists variety Living Dead was one of my favorite playlists on Halo reach you had the theater mode system as well as the comprehensive Forge Mode which had forged World which just exploded in the community and all of these things were wrapped up in this really impressive player ecosystem with the file share system with the way that you could share maps and modes with the way that you could invite people online party up hop from different experience to different experience Halo Reach really fostered a community it felt like it felt like a community game a game made by Bungie for the fans to sustain itself long after they had left the series whenever people say Halo reaches a bad game I'm just like no no it really wasn't back in the day when you walked into a game store and you were spending 60 dollars Halo Reach had the biggest bang for your buck the stuff that was included in that game you couldn't expect from any modern game it was overwhelming the amount of content that was in that game and I think Halo reaches just pure dedication to its Community to the content that it was delivering is part of why Halo Reach lived on years after Bungie had moved on and even after the release of Halo 4. Halo Reach was an incredible package it was this landmark in Xbox 360 game releases and it's something that I have a lot of respect for and purely because of what it delivered I'm gonna be putting it up in amazing we could nitpick things like the armor abilities all we want or the weapons or even the art style or whatever we want to criticize but Halo Reach has my eternal respect for what it gave me for the money it asked the time I spent on Halo Reach forging the time I spent in the campaign with a buddy the time I spent in online matchmaking or running around and exploring my own theater clips and uploading them to the file share that's time well spent now here's the big one Bungie had moved on from Halo and there was a new developer in town 343 Industries and for their first Halo game they released Halo Spartan Assault Halo Spartan Assault is this meme in the Halo community and it drives me honestly crazy a little bit because Spartan Assault it was a mobile game it was designed for tablets for phones and you can definitely tell with the look of the main menu you know you could kind of picture it on a phone screen or on a tablet screen it almost feels like a UNSC data pad of sorts and as a mobile experience it's this top-down twin stick shooter and it's kind of designed to be played in chunks you know each Mission can be beaten in like less than five minutes or whatever and then you're kind of immediately on to the next mission there is a story but it's so shallow that it's probably not even worth discussing you know what is worth discussing about this little mobile spin-off Halo title the soundtrack and presentation Tom salta was the man who composed the Halo Spartan Assault soundtrack and years and years ago I actually got a chance to talk to him and the stories he told me about how just how crazy he went with the soundtrack they asked him for a specific length of Music a specific kind of music and he deliberately went above and beyond what they asked of him and I think it shows in the final game soundtrack despite it being a mobile title Halo Spartan Assault as one of the best soundtracks in the HALO Series and if you haven't listened to it on YouTube go look up Legacy which is the Spartan Assault main theme it was Tom salta's take on the monk chant Halo Spartan Assault gets trashed so much it gets memed on and you know what those missions are fun for about five minutes they're very quick and they're very enjoyable especially if you're playing the game on your phone Spartan Assault is not offensive as a game it's a pretty good halo mobile experience it's a great one in fact it's got a solid visual presentation it's got a great soundtrack and you know what all of you trashing Spartan Assault Halo Spartan assault's pretty good now you know what's also pretty good A little game called Halo 4. well okay that was a great opening but I'll get more into it Halo 4 was 343 Industries first Mainline FPS title and it was pretty divisive it's easy to say now thanks to the Halo cycle being a thing people look upon Halo 4 a lot more fondly and honestly some of that I think is just due to them knowing where the HALO Series was gonna go after Halo 4 knowing that some of the things Halo 4 tried to do were not going to become the norm going forward so I'm going to tell you about the launch experience of Halo 4 for me I remember Halo 4 coming out and I remember vaguely seeing the Halo E3 trailer for it and it was doing some of the Call of Duty things you know where it's like the first person cut scenes that you can't skip the Press X to punch the boss or whatever I wasn't really impressed it kind of felt like oh God yeah you can tell that's not being made by Bungie that kind of looks more like a Call of Duty game than it does a Halo game and I didn't really pay up much mind and the game came out and it was very like kind of like divisive some people liked that some people didn't the multiplayer population was starting to decline because of gameplay choices made and honestly just because by that time Call of Duty had become this Unstoppable Juggernaut that that was the game that was absorbing a lot of people's online time uh embarrassingly myself included Black Ops 2 was a good time but a friend of mine finally got me to try Halo 4 and I really enjoyed my time with it even though I didn't want to admit it you know because like I had to stick to my guns like Bungie forever only Bungie can make good halo titles well the Halo 4 was a pretty good halo it wasn't Perfect by any means I thought that there were a lot of places where Halo had kind of taken a step back I thought the music wasn't quite as memorable or iconic as some of the Bungie titles I thought the art style was it veered just a little bit too much into this like we want to be generic sci-fi Universe number 147 kind of look and I really didn't appreciate some of the things that were removed from the game like playable Elites being just removed from the game theater mode your access in the campaign was completely cut off for some ungodly reason and the multiplayer was kind of like this weird Halos take on Call of Duty he had kill streaks you had perks you even had sleight of hand from Call of Duty and then on top of that you also had kill streaks that you could call in if you got enough kills it was just kind of like this very confusing online experience and this very kind of like um anxious feeling package you know the campaign was very confident in what it was there were some Call of duty-ish tropes you know like the Press X to beat the final boss ending but the campaign was very uh confident in what it was trying to be on the multiplayer side of things you know firefight was gone you had this new Spartan Ops mode that was ambitious but clearly maybe a little bit too ambitious for the resources they had and then you had a lot of regressions like what you could do with the infection game types which basically kind of killed the custom game community at least in Halo 4 and a whole host of other problems and you had what felt like for the first time a regression in terms of quality for the HALO Series when you compare to Halo 4 to Halo Reach Halo Reach offered more for what you're paying than Halo 4 did that doesn't stop Halo 4 from being a pretty good game though I think in isolation Halo 4 story is actually a very fascinating kind of one-off character study of the master chief especially if you're a fan of the books you know Halo 4 it was setting the stage for the future of the series under 343 and it was it had a lot to juggle when you escape a lot of the hyperbole in the community Halo 4 was an honest try and I think it got more right than it did wrong sure it wasn't as good as Halo Reach or Halo 3 or 2 or any of the Bungie titles but when you've stacked it up against other Shooters in the industry Halo 4 was still really up there it was an incredible well-made package and because of that Halo 4 I'm going to be putting up in great now this is where things start to get dicey the Master Chief Collection which version of the Master Chief Collection are we talking about because there are two versions in fact there's been like more than just two there's been like so many as they've patched the game into a working state it was kind of a disaster uh well a disaster is understating it was an absolute catastrophe um the online matchmaking was incredibly broken you could get into games if you tried really hard enough but the fact that you had to try and use workarounds and look at YouTube guides on how to actually get a match going it wasn't it Chief and all of the ports of the various Halo titles that were contained within they all had a lot of problems they were not very good ports you had a matchmaking that just didn't work the way it was supposed to work and on top of that it crashed broke glitched and froze up a lot and what kind of sucks is 343 they acknowledged that there were problems and they were going to make it right by the community they released the Spartan Ops mode from Halo 4 as free content months after the launch of the game they also released Halo 3 ODST for free until a certain cutoff date then they want to charge you money for it but then suddenly a update stopped coming to the game they just stopped patching the game there wasn't an announcement that they were winding down updates that they thought the game was solid just suddenly they stopped updating the game and by this point the MCC was left in a pretty buggy state in fact the ending Quick Time Event of Halo 4 was bugged it told you to press the wrong button if you looked at the Halo subreddit every couple of weeks you'd see somebody saying Hey how do I beat the final mission I've got the MCC and I'm doing what it says to do but I can't win and people have to say no the game's lying to you they haven't fixed that bug you have to press this button instead 343 just didn't address it they dropped the game but that's not what the MCC is nowadays is it around 2017 there were Rumblings that the MCC was going to be coming back you know internally on Microsoft's own servers there were like subtle updates that were happening and finally uh 343 actually came out and talked about the Master Chief Collection they talked about how it's not in a good place and that that's not right for the community and then in 2018 I believe The Road to Redemption started with the big 4K patch for the MCC and since then 343 has brought the MCC to not just uh you know Xbox One X as well as the Xbox series X they brought it to PC as well and Steam Workshop support is going to be coming soon because hey on PC Halo MCC has mod tools and remember all those buggy ports that I talked about well 343 actually went through the ports and began cleaning up the problems none of those ports are perfect one to one but if you were to go play them you'd get an experience that is a lot more faithful to their original releases than you would have if you played MCC back in 2014. Halo MCC received its own customization systems it received new name plates as well as new systems a server browser it received new customization options it even gave you toggles so that you could opt out of those non-native customization options if you wanted a pure classic the way it was intended to be played Halo experience and then Halo Reach was even added to the MCC but then with Halo Reach also came firefight and then they also went back and added firefight to ODST and just currently MCC is in a very good place right now MCC is one of the strongest best packages for a Halo fan it has all the Halo titles on it they're all running in 60 frames per second or higher if you're on PC you've got mod support and you've got a pretty healthy Suite of PC options a lot of hard work went into the MCC and getting it to where it is now and that hard work is really appreciated the MCC is a fantastic package I would have honestly put it up in meh when it launched because it wasn't irredeemable it was still Halo but it was a very buggy kind of poor representation of Halo but now MCC is up in Godly dude they gave it new life and now a Halo MCC sits up there with the greats MCC is a good time the only problem with it is the main menu and the removal of those old loading screens God what I wouldn't give for them to patch back in those original loading screens let's move on to Halo 5. in 2015 a year after the launch of the original MCC the Halo Community was already kind of like you know grumbling because it was like hey do you guys pretending the MCC doesn't exist what's going on and then on top of that you've got Halo 5 very controversial prior to release a lot of the marketing was focusing on this like the master Chiefs being hunted the Master Chief's a Trader uh Master Chief is dead like screw you screw Halo screw everything like Master Chief's helmet is being blown out it was a lot of like just we hate Master Chief marketing and then on top of that they announced that uh yeah split screen uh we're just We're Not Gonna ship the game with split screen and everyone was like what and then they were also like yeah playable Elites nope we're still not bringing them back and I was at least like what and then they were like oh yeah we're gonna be adding loot boxes to the game as well and they released that news in this very like condescending trailer that was really rude to its audience and it was like what firefight nope it's not coming back we've instead designed a mode around the microtransactions called Warzone uh no you can't play in customs it's only online theater mode nope it's not coming to the campaign also Forge isn't gonna be making the launch also we cut 90 of the modes from the game but Halo 5 will be a live service this was one of the first ever times I had ever heard the term games as a service Halo 5 is a game as a service so over the course of the next year the rest of the content that Halo games used to launch with will be patched into the game I remember waiting one month for big Team Battle it didn't even get its own Maps they were made on Forge Maps two months for the forge mode four months for Griff ball and a gravity hammer um and then beyond that seven months for infection I had to wait over half a year I can't remember when the file share was added but that also didn't arrive with Forge either so it was like you're making all these impressive uh things in Forge Mode uh too bad you can't share them with anybody in the Halo Community unless they specifically search up your gamer tag and okay okay all right like the game launched very incomplete was the story at least good not really like Whiplash you know it was kind of like this huge drop in uh production value and presentation from Halo 4 cutscene presentation was different there was just this this odd pacing to the story it was really hard to follow what was going on things were being quickly dropped and then reintroduced to players there was a lot of plot threads from the previous game that were just completely cut off and there was just this like like no room to breathe feeling and then suddenly the campaign was over and you were just lost with like you were just stuck with like what was the point of that and then on top of that no split screen so you couldn't play with your buddies unless you were playing specifically online and then on top of that Halo 5 it made a lot of very core changes to the way Halo's gameplay is done so traditionally Halo has always been very simplistic core movement but then a very expansive very complex external sandbox this time it was all about a very complex very uh sophisticated movement system it was kind of like level design what's level design I'm gonna fly over everything and when you give the player the ability to just kind of like fly over everything uh level design kind of matters a lot less and I definitely got that Vibe and I think other people got that Vibe too level design in the campaign felt a lot less interesting a lot less engaging because you were using your enhanced Mobility techniques to bypass a lot of it and as far as the multiplayer was concerned because of all these enhanced Mobility tools as well as this really cracked out skill based match making system it was like this just like like you had to be constantly sweating your thumbs were cramping up because you had to press like a a b y y x slide boost thrust Dodge like just to move about the map and keep up with players and as players started to leave the game because you know Halo 5 it was very content incomplete 343 took a very long time to get content out the door the good players were the only ones sticking around so Halo 5 matchmaking only got sweatier and sweatier and soon 343 had to start like removing certain enhanced Mobility techniques from the matchmaking just to kind of cool it down a little bit like the Spartan charge but that just kind of wasn't enough thankfully by the time a server browser was added to the game I think that's when Halo 5 really turned it around because you could escape the matchmaking you could Escape The Campaign and you could dive purely into the forge experience and the custom games experience because that's where Halo 5 really shined Halo fights Forge and custom games were they were tippy top I didn't think it was possible for anything to rival or even surpass Halo reaches custom games and Forge experience but by jove Halo 5 did it and then some 343 even released a dedicated Forge tool for the PC and you know what that's where I spent most of my time playing Halo 5. it was on PC forging maps and then putting them up on the file share for anybody to play so Halo 5. I don't really like the gameplay I don't really like the story uh multiplayer not a big fan of that either nor am I the competitive aspect of it the forging costume games they were so good when they were finally added that it's enough for me to put Halo 5 up in good Halo 5 is a good game okay it's not my cup of tea for Halo it's not my preferred way to design a Halo game as a package right now if you were to buy Halo 5 you'd be greeted with a lot of good value especially for the cheaper asking price and you heard that from me so after Halo 5 we got Spartan strike Barton strike is an interesting one remember how I praised Halo Spartan Assault Spartan strike is one that I'm not the biggest fan of Tom Salter returns and of course his soundtrack is very good but the soundtrack reprises A lot of the songs from Halo Spartan Assault and I think kind of like Halo 2 Anniversary where it's a recomposition of the original Halo 2 soundtrack but it's a bit too loud for its own good the Halo Spartan strike soundtrack I feel the same I think it's it's just a little bit too over composed like the original was perfect you didn't need to add extra instruments to it they just kind of sound out of place to me and on top of that the design became a lot less like start and stop it became a lot more linear a lot more story driven levels were longer there were extended tutorial sequences even like semi-weird stealth sequences and because of that the act of playing it took longer than normal and it started to kind of drift away from that that mobile game experience that I expected from it I didn't actually end up enjoying Spartan's strike I thought it just kind of like this isn't why I enjoyed the original Spartan Assault it was also around this time when I noticed this very annoying trend for the HALO Series where it seemed like Halo's Universe was shrinking in scope if you were gonna play a new Halo game you were only gonna play it as a Spartan you were gonna earn Spartan points for your Spartan and online Spartan war zone simulation multiplayer what's that you want to play Halo on the go well load up your game up Halo Spartan Assault and Spartans strike in fact in one of the first cutscenes of Halo Spartan strike in ODST lands in new Mombasa during the events of Halo 2 but then they're like because this is a simulation you're gonna be a Spartan now and I'm like no I would have liked to play Halo ODST strike but no everything's a Spartan now and that's just a minor nitpick so Halo Spartans strike it's meh you know it's not bad it's not a dysfunctional piece of software it's just kind of meh to me so by this point the Halo Community was pretty sour on a lot of things MCC was broken 343 wasn't talking about it Halo 5 was kind of shocking to a lot of Halo fans that launched incomplete it was pretty buggy uh campaign was super lackluster Halo was just kind of going in this weird direction that nobody was happy and then Halo Wars 2 had this incredible trailer and then on top of that the game released and it was uh it was it was pretty good the story was a little bit shallow well a lot shallow but it was a solid follow-up with the only criticism being that the soundtrack was not very good minus a couple songs the soundtrack sounded more like it was trying to be Star Wars than it was Halo but what really stood out for Halo Wars 2 was it kind of felt like the first Halo title in a very long time time that had like that like like [Music] that original Halo magic I hear it it's still here like the game aesthetically looked more like it took place in the Halo Universe atmospherically it felt more like a proper Halo title and it had less of like that look guys where the Avengers vibe that Halo 5 had now Halo Wars 2 the actual Act of playing it a lot of my criticisms of Halo Wars 1 actually repeat here as an RTS fan I think that Halo Wars 2 is unfortunately too limited by console limitations or even at this point just design limitations you know people wanted to follow up to Halo Wars so they got that complete with you know things like you can't select where you want your base to be as well as probably Market demands for something Uber fast paced they really pushed that during the marketing of Halo Wars 2. this is gonna be the fastest paced RTS game you've ever played and for me I like to sit back and enjoy my RTS games so that was kind of unfortunately a very alienating thing to hear and then on top of that the multiplayer was segmented into two things you have the traditional multiplayer experience then you had this kind of like fake micro transactions mode that was clearly just made so that they could add loot boxes to the game and that multiplayer mode was dead it was called like Blitz or something nobody played it because everyone could be like I know why this exists this wasn't made for me it was made for money so Blitz was a waste of development resources the multiplayer was there but it also focused a lot on like hero abilities which the core Halo Wars Community was a little bit iffy about a campaign was pretty solid but unfortunately the story was a bit shallow but the DLC for this game was awesome dude The Awakening the nightmare DLC not just brought back the flood it also kind of reminded me of Starcraft a little bit because the flood as an antagonist they're very aggressive they're always swarming you and stuff so it was a campaign that felt very defensive in style you know setting up defenses waiting for the flood horde to approach you and I may not have really vibed with the main campaign but Awakening the nightmare was a great time and really just a solid package if you want like a fun RTS experience and Awakening the nightmare came with a really awesome firefight mode it was kind of like inspired by Balloon Tower Defense and it's just great you have to defend this thing from waves and waves of enemies and the enemies will come through these lanes and so you're just setting up Auto sentries and units to defend the lanes and it's it is just Mindless fun sahila Wars 2 it's still you know around the Halo Wars where it's like I just I I want something else from RTS games but it's a pretty good game and it was the game that kind of got Halo back to where it needed to be at least from a personality sense let's look at some of these games Halo 2600 I am not familiar with uh and it's about time that I look it up so Halo 2600 is a 2010 action adventure game developed by Ed Fry's and published by Atari age for the Atari 2600 interesting um inspired by the Halo video game series The Game sees the player control the master chief and fight through 64 screens with varied enemies completing the game once unlocks a tougher legendary mode okay I've never played Halo 2600 but I'm gonna review it based on what I think it might be we'll put it in meh it's not bad it's not garbage it's not dysfunctional it is just so weird I haven't played it by the way Halo fire team Raven That's Another uh interesting game that's kind of like weird so Halo fire team Raven is this arcade cabinet a light gun shooter that I wished existed when I was a kid um it takes you through the events of Halo 1 but retcon some things adds ODSTs to the experience it also adds a whole bunch of set pieces enemy types and stuff and it lets you kind of like fight through the Halo campaign as a set of ODSTs hey you're not Spartans and what's cool is you're always in the footprints of the master chief he's always ahead of you somewhere you may not see him but sometimes you'll see his handiwork as you fight through kind of big action set pieces and you know what when you're in an arcade and you're kind of surrounded in that atmosphere all the buzz all the lights and stuff and you see that giant Halo arcade cabinet you put your little card in and you actually play some Halo light gun shooting Halo fire team Raven is a good time I enjoy it it's a lot of fun I see a lot of people trashing it and I think that unfortunately it's just kind of like that guys aren't playing it in the right context you gotta go with friends you gotta get a couple of drinks you gotta enjoy yourself man this is a fun Halo arcade game bask in the atmosphere take it all in Halo fire team Raven it is good it is perfectly good perfectly enjoyable I really like playing it whenever I see it out in public now the final one Halo infinite man this is a hard one to talk about because Halo 5 released content incomplete but by the time that we did this list Halo 5 was able to get itself up off its feet dust off the breadcrumbs that were all over it and kind of clean itself up a little bit Halo infinite um it's been over a year since the release of the game and Halo infinite is still in an astonishingly unfinished State as well as a buggy state so reviewing it is kind of hard um Halo infinite as a shooter package you get a very Far Cry light open world campaign it's got a pretty good story but I think that the story is really weighed down by some of the just very strange design choices in the open world music was outstanding it was the first uh 343 Halo title where I thought the music sounded kind of like it was pulled from a legacy title it was so good but as far as the multiplayer experience is concerned it's just it's incomplete you know it's missing a ton of modes even a year later Forge just made it to release over a year after the game's release but forges in a very buggy State um it does have a file share but there's no server browser or anything like that custom games are very hard to get going just because custom games are very bugged So currently where Halo infinite is I don't want to put the game on this pedestal based on you know the potential of it once it's complete it'll be up here purely where it is right now the customization system is very unsatisfying the game is very content incomplete there's no split screen for the campaign the game is very buggy it crashes a lot um it's just if it wasn't for Forge I would have put it in the Mac category but Halo infinite is going in a very very soft good it is on the verge of falling down into the meh category but Forge is outstanding these are how I feel about all the different Halo titles in the series this is my definitive list so you two at Rocket sloth if you guys want to comment on my list especially where I put Spartan Assault I'd be Keen to see what you think down below now this is my totally uncontroversial Halo list I'm sure no fights will result from it and I'm curious to hear what you guys think about my list do you think that I placed things fairly uh and in fact where would you guys Place items so okay that's that's it that's that's my list how long have I been recording for oh no an hour okay um I'll see you guys later [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Late Night Gaming

Views: 32,978

Keywords: Halo, Gaming, LateNightGaming, Examining Games, Commentary, LNG, Late Night Gaming, Halo 5, Game discussion, Halo PC, MCC PC, MCC mods, Halo mods, Halo Infinite, Infinite, MCC, Master Chief Collection, Halo Infinite Banished, Halo Banished, Halo evolution

Id: oLDA2Xoi1a0

Length: 47min 36sec (2856 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022