Halo 4

Halo 4 Major campaign spoilers, including Cortana and the Didact. Halo 4 comes back to Chief and Cortana after the ending of Halo 3, and it gives them a pretty awful situation to wake up to. They’re still in the broken section of the Forward Unto Dawn. Chief has been asleep. Cortana has been waiting, and she’s been dealing with the passage of time very differently. Then they end up at Requiem, a Forerunner shield world with far more going on inside it than either of them understands. The game released on Xbox 360 in November 2012. It was 343 Industries’ first mainline Halo game, and you can see a different direction in the environments, the armor, the weapons and the way it spends time with the characters. Requiem gives it a lot to work with visually. There are huge structures, landscapes enclosed inside something even bigger, and machinery that makes people look very small standing beside it. The Forerunners have been part of Halo from the beginning, but this game brings a living Forerunner into the middle of the conflict through the Didact. And he has very different ideas about humanity’s future. The Composer makes that threat particularly unpleasant. The danger goes beyond another enemy fleet arriving. You’re dealing with technology that can do something horrifying to people, controlled by somebody who believes he has reasons to use it. Understanding a little more about the ancient world doesn’t make that world safer. The Prometheans change the actual fighting too. You have Crawlers moving around at ground level, Watchers supporting other enemies from above, and Knights demanding considerably more attention. Deciding what to deal with first becomes important. If something is keeping the larger threat in the fight, ignoring it can turn a difficult encounter into a much longer one. Then you get their weapons. The LightRifle, Scattershot and other Forerunner equipment give the game another set of tools alongside the UNSC and Covenant weapons. They have their own look and behavior, so picking something up means learning what kind of situation it’s useful in. There’s also the Mantis. Sometimes the game is going to give you a complicated ancient threat to think about. Sometimes it’s going to let you climb into a walking machine with guns and rockets and deal with the immediate problem that way. There’s room for both. Chief’s return to the rest of humanity is interesting as well. The UNSC has moved forward while he’s been gone. The Infinity is there, new Spartans are there, and the people making decisions don’t all react to him the same way. Captain Del Rio and Lasky give you very different responses to the situation Chief is trying to handle. That matters when Cortana is part of what they’re disagreeing over. To someone else, her deterioration can be treated as a problem to remove. Chief has relied on her through one disaster after another. They’ve survived those things together. He isn’t going to approach that decision as though she’s just something that stopped working properly. I’ve talked a lot about those two already, but this game makes their relationship part of almost everything happening around them. Cortana needs help. Chief wants to find it. The mission keeps getting worse, and none of it stops the thing happening to her. The ending gives her the chance to save him, but it leaves him without the person he was trying to bring home. After all the enormous environments and the fight to stop the Didact, their last conversation is what brings the story back down to the two of them. That’s a lot to leave Chief with. He gets back to humanity, but getting back doesn’t put everything right. There’s more to Halo 4 than that campaign. Spartan Ops follows the Infinity's return to Requiem through episodic missions, with another group of Spartans and a story that continues beyond Chief’s initial visit. It deserves separate coverage, because somebody can finish the campaign and still have a lot of Requiem left to see. The multiplayer also makes some noticeable changes, including customizable loadouts and armor abilities. Whether someone is looking at the campaign, Spartan Ops or multiplayer, it helps to explain what this particular game is asking them to learn rather than treating it as identical to Halo 3. For guides, the Promethean encounters, terminals, Legendary routes and Spartan Ops objectives all give us useful places to start. The MCC version is the one I’ll keep clearly labeled when we’re dealing with its achievements and current features. There’s plenty to discuss with Halo 4. The ancient history gets much closer, humanity looks different, and Chief has to deal with a loss that surviving the fight can’t prevent. And for anybody who cares about him and Cortana the way I do, there’s a great deal in this game to spend time with.