Halo: Spartan Assault

Halo: Spartan Assault Premise and gameplay discussion; no major ending spoilers. Halo: Spartan Assault is one of those games that needs a little explanation before somebody goes into it expecting another Master Chief campaign. You’re looking down at the fighting, moving your Spartan around the battlefield and aiming separately. It’s a twin-stick shooter, and that changes quite a bit about how you approach it. I like that Halo has these smaller games alongside the main series. There’s a whole universe here. It would be a shame if the only way we ever got to see it was through one character and one kind of game. Spartan Assault first arrived in 2013, with 343 Industries and Vanguard Games taking Halo into this different format. It started on Windows and Windows Phone, then came to Xbox consoles and other platforms. The Steam release followed in April 2014. That history matters because the different versions aren’t all the same package. The story sits between Halo 3 and Halo 4 and follows Sarah Palmer and Spartan Davis. If Palmer is somebody you mainly associate with the Infinity and Spartan Ops, this gives you another part of her history. Chief isn’t the only Spartan doing important things, and a smaller campaign can spend time with people who otherwise get pushed into the background. The fighting still uses familiar Halo weapons, vehicles and armor abilities. You haven’t suddenly traded your rifle for a menu of orders like Halo Wars. You’re directly controlling the Spartan, dodging around enemies and deciding where to aim. The camera gives you a different view of the same kind of trouble: Covenant soldiers, incoming fire, and a battlefield that can become crowded very quickly. That wider view is useful, but it also asks you to watch more than whatever is directly in front of your weapon. You can be shooting in one direction while moving away from something coming in from another. Keeping yourself out of a bad position is a constant part of the fighting. Standing still because you’re concentrating on one enemy is an easy habit to bring over from another game, and it isn’t always a good one. The campaign is divided into short missions rather than the long continuous stretches you get in the main games. That makes sense for something that started with portable play in mind. There’s an objective to deal with, a fight to work through and a result at the end. You can spend a little time with it without committing to an entire evening. The complete single-player campaign has 30 missions, including Operation Hydra. Finishing them is one part of it. Scores, medals and the challenge objectives give you reasons to come back and clean up a run. There’s a difference between barely getting through and understanding a mission well enough to do it the way you intended. That’s where I think the smaller format has something going for it. Repeating a short mission to improve a specific thing is a much easier commitment than restarting a long campaign level. You can work on your positioning, try different equipment, or focus on an objective you ignored while you were simply trying to survive. The console co-op deserves its own mention because it can cause confusion. The Xbox versions added a separate online mode where two players fight the Flood. That does not mean the Steam single-player campaign suddenly becomes a two-player campaign. If you’re buying it to play with somebody, check the actual version first. And don’t mistake Spartan Assault for the Spartan Ops episodes inside Halo 4. The names sound related because they are connected to the same part of Halo’s world, but they are different games and different experiences. Buying one doesn’t give you the other. For guides, I’d keep this one very practical. Which mission are you working on? Are you trying to finish it, improve the medal, or get a particular achievement? What equipment is available, and what mistake keeps ending the attempt? Those are useful questions to answer without pretending it needs the same sort of collectible tour as a mainline Halo campaign. The old mobile releases also need a little care. A launch announcement from 2013 is not proof that a particular phone can download it today. The Steam edition still has a live store listing, but old Windows Phone instructions belong in the history of the game, not in a current installation guide. Spartan Assault isn’t where I’d send somebody looking for the full Chief and Cortana story. It’s another piece of Halo, built for a different kind of play. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you want the huge campaign, and sometimes you want to jump into a smaller fight and see how well you can handle it.