![]() And it’s all weighed down with a decade’s worth of incomprehensible franchise lore - good luck understanding what’s going on if you don’t know what the Mantle of Responsibility is, or who the Forerunners are, or what the Domain is - plus some confusing new additions, like the game’s angry recurring level boss, the Warden Eternal.īy far the most interesting character in the game is Governor Sloan, a grouchy AI who has been made political leader of a mining colony and sometimes seems a little crazy. Kurtz used to be a friendly intelligent hologram whom Martin Sheen was (maybe) secretly in love with.īut it doesn’t really play out like a story, with building tension and dramatic reveals, so much as a series of expository mission introductions. It's a plan that, somewhat awkwardly, will probably result in the death of millions.īasically, Halo Guardians is a sci-fi version of Apocalypse Now, except you’re chasing the Martin Sheen character, and Col. ![]() Cortana, meanwhile, appears to have gone nuts, and now seeks to use an ancient galactic weapons system in a quixotic plan to enforce peace across the galaxy. Master Chief, in turn, is leading his own team of Spartans - none of whom has a memorable personality, either - on a quest to find Cortana, the beloved AI companion who supposedly died at the end of the last game. ![]() Osiris has been sent to track down Master Chief, a legendary warrior and the protagonist of the previous Halo games. Locke is the leader of Fireteam Osiris, a small band of Spartans who also lack recognizable personalities outside of the fact that one of them looks and sounds like Nathan Fillion. For most of the game, you play as Locke, a heavily armored space Marine, or Spartan, whose bland gruffness renders him virtually blank as a character. ![]() Part of the problem is that the characters are so dull. I’ve played every single Halo game since the first one was released in 2001, so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the series’ complicated mythology - and yet Halo Guardians still left me scratching my head. Halo Guardians' plot and characters are both underdeveloped And that’s the biggest problem with the game: The story makes almost no sense. Meanwhile, the game's better-than-average voice acting (the cast includes well-known character actors like Keith David and Nathan Fillion) goes a long way toward keeping the scenes grounded, even when the lines themselves are hokey and ridiculous. Indeed, the game’s opening cinematic, which ends with the introduction of the main characters in an extended, single-take battle sequence, reminded me more than a little of the similar opening to Avengers: Age of Ultron. The computer-animated characters in these scenes still don’t look quite photorealistic, but at times they come scarily close, and the scenes are directed with the commercially stylish intensity of a major summer blockbuster. The game’s flawless look and high-tech production values also extend to the cinematic cutscenes that break up the game’s missions and deliver its story. Many of the game’s most memorable moments, however, come in the brief periods of calm between firefights as you navigate along virtual mountain ridges or through windowed space-station hallways that let you look out on the larger planets and space scenes you’re playing through.Īs I worked through the game’s single-player storyline last week, I often found myself pausing to gaze out at the spectacular sci-fi vistas these transitional moments provided: The sheer scale of the game’s visuals is bigger than that of just about any movie, and the fact that I could choose to slow down and peer at them for as long as I wanted allowed me to appreciate the incredible scope and the massive galactic conflicts they often seemed to suggest. Like all the Halo games, Guardians is a first-person shooter, so you’ll spend most of your time with gun in hand, blasting your way through these spaces in frenetic, fun combat situations. The fifth major entry in Microsoft’s signature video game franchise, and the first of the series made for the company’s next-generation gaming system, the Xbox One, the game takes advantage of the system’s improved computing power to offer players a feast of gorgeously designed, battle-ready environments to explore and destroy, from lush green planetscapes pocked with giant neon flowers to eerie metallic interiors lining alien megastructures. Halo Guardians is a slick, stunning, impeccably designed, interactive space opera - the video game equivalent of a blockbuster movie.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |