What's your favourite halo campaign in order of least to most, and why?

What's your favourite halo campaign game in order, least favourite to most favourite, and what are the reasons why?

Here's mine:

5-ODST- Fun game in it's own right, but just doesn't sit well in terms of the halo universe for me. Half the game is a snooze-fest with not enough action, the parts at night are just trudging around waiting for something to happen. The game lighting is way too dark at night, so there's no reason not to use your visor-vision permanently, which completely changes the look of the game. Also it's too short overall, and has an anti climactic ending, and the campaign suffers from having too much of the firefight, "hold this area while swarms of enemies attack you" mechanic in it.

4-Halo CE- Great game, and still fun, but looks more limited every time i play it. Was groundbreaking at the time but doesn't hold up well to the rest of the series now, both graphically and gameplay wise. Backtracking and copy/paste level design is a nightmare throughout.

3-Halo 2-Very good game in terms of play mechanics and action and set pieces, but the campaign overall was a real disappointment. Jumps around way too much between Chief & Arbiter storylines, backtracking is still an issue, and the ending is by far the worst in the series.

2-Reach. very good game overall, great graphics, fantastic sound, linear story, loadouts and abilities add a great new twist to gameplay. The "part of a team" dynamic is nice but the friendly AI is too thick for it to be pulled off properly, so you're more or less a lone wolf. Enemy AI is strong, almost to the point of cheapness sometimes. The story, while linear is not particularly engaging, and many sections of it lack pacing and just aren't interesting. Also i thought the space combat level completely split the action in two, and was an unnecessary departure from the feel of the game. One major gripe i had was with the weapon placement. There never seemed to be the right weapon available for the job at hand, and the game forced you to use certain weapons and approach many sections a particular way. This took away from the enjoyability of the game somewhat for me.

1-Halo 3. This game had it all for me, great story, lots of fantastic vistas and epic sense of scale, excellent choice of approaches to many scenarios which makes the game feel very open and flexible, good climax to the story, fantastic music, equipment like the bubble shield, regenerator, etc added depth to the action. Some backtracking still present and one or two annoyingly difficult flood levels, but on the whole the best campaign of the bunch.

Gi joe!

Agree with a lot of what you said, except for CE being dated. I'm still impressed how much I enjoy the first half of the game, and even some backtracking levels like Two betrayels.

Although you're right about how much they have refined the combat from the 1st to Reach.

Reach and 3 are definately the most consistently entertaining of the series, and I'd be hard pressed to pick between the two, but Reach is probably the more polished.(needed more scorpion rampages though):(

2 was a monumental disappointment, thought the idea to focus on the Covenant was probably the stupidest design decision ever in a game. Remember all the hype about saving Earth? If they kept with that it could have been the best game of the series as I loved the 1st few missions.

Odst was garbage tbh. Full price for a mission pack!:mad:

Gi joe!

Gi joe! wrote: »

2 was a monumental disappointment, thought the idea to focus on the Covenant was probably the stupidest design decision ever in a game. Remember all the hype about saving Earth? If they kept with that it could have been the best game of the series as I loved the 1st few missions.

Yeah i agree. All of my fave missions in the halo games are the ones set on earth or on earth-like outdoor locations with sweeping vistas, natural scenery, lakes, trees, valleys, mountains etc like on the surface of the rings. The whole "battle for earth" thing was totally wasted. They could have made so much more out of it, and the splitting of the storyline between MC and arbiter just broke up the pacing of the game. It felt like every time you accomplished a section with the chief you were ripped out of the action and dropped somewhere miles away as the arbiter. I personally couldn't wait to get back to playing as a spartan every time. Shame because the actual action of the game was great in parts, some of the set pieces like grabbing a rocket launcher and boarding a scarab full of enemies for the first time were really cool.

Oh and on H1 being dated, i don't want to hate on H1 at all, it's still a fantastic game in it's own right, it's just that when a game has such a huge effect on it's genre as H1 did, it's inevitable that every other game will copy it a bit, and that some of those games will do it really well and improve on it, like H2 and H3, COD, and others did. Over time, the genre standard then "becomes" that new, updated, and improved/refined set of mechanics, and when you look back at the original game nearly 10 years later and compare it to the genre as it stands now, or even to some of the later games in the series you can really see how far things have come. Not to take away from CE though, it is a stellar game, and a landmark in FPS history.

On reach vs Halo 3, i agree, they are VERY close, i think what shaded it for me was something you touched on, stuff like scorpion rampages, sniper sprees, rocket launcher carnage etc. There was far less of that fun stuff in reach and it just felt like you were following a much more defined path in terms of how you went about things, whereas H3 let you do things so many different ways you could literally play throught the entire game twice and never approach a single scenario the same way as before. If you wanted to take out an entire valley full of enemies with the sniper you could, or you could grab rockets or a tank and go in all guns blazing. It was that openness and flexibility fun factor above all that put H3 at the number 1 spot for me.