Halo 5: Guardians

Halo 5: Guardians Major campaign spoilers, including Cortana and the ending. Halo 5 gives you two Spartan teams to follow, and that changes the game quite a bit before you get anywhere near the larger story. Chief is with Blue Team: Fred, Kelly and Linda. Locke leads Fireteam Osiris, with Buck, Vale and Tanaka. You’ve got people who have a long history with Chief on one side, and another team being sent to bring him back on the other. The game released on Xbox One in October 2015. It follows Chief’s decision to pursue Cortana after receiving a sign that she may still be alive. Given where Halo 4 left him, you can understand why he wants answers. The UNSC has its own concerns about what he’s doing, and Osiris gets sent after Blue Team. That creates two different conversations within the same campaign. Chief is working alongside people who know him extremely well. Locke has a job to do, a team to look after, and a situation that keeps becoming bigger than the assignment he started with. The squad setup affects how you play too. You can direct teammates toward targets and positions, and reviving a downed teammate becomes part of keeping a fight from falling apart. The campaign has four-player online co-op, with the other team members controlled by AI when you’re playing alone. It gives the game a reason to have several Spartans in an encounter instead of making every cutscene pretend the people playing alongside you don’t exist. Then there’s the movement. Halo 5 gives you a lot of ways to get around or get yourself into trouble. Thrusters, clambering, sliding, Spartan Charge and Ground Pound all change what you can attempt. A ledge can become a route into a fight. A change in elevation can become an attack. There are more ways to close a gap, and more chances to commit to something you probably should have thought about first. The level design has room for that. You can look for another approach, get above an enemy, or find a weapon tucked somewhere you wouldn’t reach by simply walking down the most obvious route. That gives exploration an actual purpose in the middle of a combat-heavy game. Sanghelios is a particularly interesting part of the campaign. After spending so much of the series dealing with the Covenant, getting to see the Elites’ homeworld and the Arbiter’s own conflict gives us something different. Those characters have a world and a struggle outside the moments when they cross paths with Chief. And Buck being part of Osiris gives ODST a connection to this game without making the whole squad another version of Alpha-Nine. The people he’s fighting beside now have their own roles and backgrounds. The larger story, though, comes back to what Cortana is doing. Her return doesn’t give Chief a simple reunion. She is taking control through the Guardians, and her idea of bringing order has consequences for everybody who doesn’t agree to it. By the time she confines Blue Team in a Cryptum, the trust that made their earlier relationship work has been badly damaged. Osiris ends up having to rescue the people it was originally pursuing. The two teams are caught in something much more serious than a disagreement over orders. That leaves a very different situation at the end of the campaign. The Created have power across the galaxy, the Infinity is trying to stay ahead of them, and Chief is back without the reunion he was hoping for. There’s a lot to discuss there, especially alongside the Cortana posts, without pretending every decision she makes is something to celebrate. The multiplayer gives Halo 5 another major part of its identity. Arena puts the movement and weapons into more focused competitive matches. Warzone uses larger teams and mixes fighting other players with fighting AI enemies and bosses. There are objectives competing for your attention, so knowing where to spend your time can matter as much as winning the fight directly in front of you. Forge also became a huge part of the game. The separate Halo 5: Forge release on Windows is worth covering for people interested in building and playing custom creations, but it should never be mistaken for the full Guardians campaign on PC. For guides, this one has intel, skulls, squad tactics, movement, different approaches to encounters and its own achievement list. Co-op instructions need to say online, too. Halo 5 doesn’t have the local split-screen campaign option some players will expect from earlier games. There’s a lot here to look at separately. The two teams, the movement, Sanghelios, Warzone, Forge, and a story that leaves the galaxy in a very different place. A proper breakdown needs to give each part some attention instead of letting one argument about the campaign swallow the entire game.