microsoft gaming is BDS and the remake sucks.

Why would I buy this when I have MCC’s facelift with everything left as is? Combat Evolved was fucking Evolved because the AI was so life-like at the time. If thats broken, then you aren’t even playing Halo.

They made the sexy booba AI hologram look like a regular person instead of my anime waifu!

Even ignoring for a moment how it destroyed FPS games as a genre, why are you as a leftist even giving mental processing time to imperialist propaganda.

Genuine waste of time made by people who really didnt understand the source material.

The good

• visuals are great although typically unreal engine 5 issues abound its largely a modernised recreation
• guns feel and sound good but are mechanically broken

The bad is everything else

• the music in 343 guilty spark is muted so theres just no music at all for the whole level
• the bonus missions give you no guns and some of the worst arenas ever put into a game, no cover, no ammo, no counter to the aimbot enemy spam
• one hit kill sometimes phantom bullet jackals. The number of instant deaths ive had on only heroic is wild
• cant shoot jackals hands cos aim assist and bullet magnetism is broken
• hunters just cant be dealt with they rapid fire and always face you i ended up having to shoot their feet
• one hit kill melee most times also theres no sound or animation so you just die. Also enemies just really like rushing you now for the one hit kill invisible slap
• difficulty balancing doesnt make any sense
• every cutscene is redone to be worse for reasons unknown
• all the voice acting is worse and lines cut for no reason
• no multiplayer
• spawns enemies behind you for reasons unknown
• enemy spam enemy spam enemy spam holy shit what do you mean i walk into a room with 10 elites half of them invisible with nothing but retreating back where i came from as an option?
• the library for all its ills in the original is just devoid of life in this one
• 10 minute tutorial for the final mission to blow up the engine like ok cortana we all somehow managed when we were kids
• “the ship is going to blow up in 5 minutes, when the 5 minutes is up the ship will explode, we need to leave before the 5 minutes is over”…. Ok
• not a single fucking wort wort wort
• visual readability is atrocious the number of times i just didnt see an elite walk past me was unreal
• cant hear low shield noise
• cant see low shields
• ai is either bugged out staring at a wall or headshotting
• warthog physics are bugged
• vehicles have like 2hp and can survive 3 shots from a single grunt before exploding and have no telegraph so you just die
• hunter spam around every other corner
• flood hunters come in packs of three for some fucking reason and can eat all your grenades and ammo
• plasma rifle is useless now
• human weapons generally feel much stronger and covenant weapons much weaker
• waypoints EVERYWHERE
• you cant see any weapons on the floor, half of them despawn i imagine cos ue5 cant handle it. They tried to add little markers so you can see them but you basically have to be on top of the weapon for them to maybe appear
• enemies disappearing the instant they die just popping out of existence
• the bonus missions are also terribly written and the needle rifle is basically mandatory cos nothing else does any damage. Its also walk 2 feet, circle arena with no cover, walk 2 feet, circle arena over and over
• youve heard of sniper jackals? What about sniper elites!
• phantom homing grenades that one hit
• sticking someone with a plasma grenade may as well be tickling them. They also rush you when stuck so you die and they dont
• checkpoints are busted i once got stuck in a death loop of getting exploded by a rocket grunt 1 frame into reloading until rng deemed i could live after the 8th death
• overshield gives you 1 extra bar for reasons unknown to anybody
• invis doesnt work you can still be seen and enemies will still run towards you even if they wont be shooting at you
• oh yeah and they added sniper jackals into the game cos why not

Theres probably more but i didnt take notes. Its like that meme where “if Ubisoft made elden ring” idk how it has any positive reception at all other than halo fans being desperate (which is me which is why i wasted my time playing it)

propaganda for the us army that has a background story saying the coded americans are by right and capacity destined to rule the world because their very identity places them above everyone else and reality bends around them to confirm it?

I don’t understand it, I already have MCC and I don’t see the difference

Unless you can win solely by pistol sniping everything and hiding it’s not a real remake.

Big post lol, I literally just finished my legendary playthrough

[1/8] Campaign Remastered is Triple AAA Halo. After 5 years we end up with a game where only 2-3 of the 6 main weapons feel right and 2 of the 4 main enemies are broken. The game only feels correct when fighting low-level elites and grunts with the AR and Magnum, and even then the magnum switch is so slow it really disrupts the flow of combat.

[2/8] Hitboxes are broken - the Hunters are so aggressive you have to push into melee range to stay safe from their cannons but their melee hitbox is broken and you’ll be killed despite being a full meter away from their bludgeons and fists. You’re forced to keep distance and shoot at their knees which does not feel good. Especially because they’ve introduced literally 10+ new hunter fights into the game that weren’t in the original.

[3/8] But the most egregious problem with the gameplay is the jackals, the 2nd most common enemy in the game. You fight hundreds of them but the bullet magnetism is broken and will pull your bullets away from their weakspot (their pistol hand, opposite to their hand which holds their riot shield) and towards their head which is behind their riot shield. Jackals also kill you in one hit with a charged plasma pistol even when you’re at full health - they are worse than Halo 2’s jackal snipers and have no counter. They literally don’t have a weakspot. Their weakspot is their pistol hand. They’re so badly made they will 1-hit kill you by shooting a surprise charged shot through their own hands and riot shields without warning. I’ve died to this literally hundreds of times, more than anything else in the game. In a tense fight you always need to save your grenades for jackals.

[4/8] Their level changes are bad, new 343 is in love with the hallway of death. You will encounter them in every level change they’ve made. You have no ammo and you have to walk across a 20m long hallway with no cover to open an automatic sliding door door and die instantly because 20 enemies shoot you at once - you can’t play the door by walking back and closing it because they will push closer and keep the door open, there is literally not enough time to react and survive. The fights in every other Halo game were fundamentally fair, even if they’re a slog. This includes Halo 4 and 5. If you learn the mechanics you’re awarded by surviving, this does not apply to campaign evolved. You survive a bullshit fight because of pure luck, which will make an Iron Skull playthrough absolutely miserable.

[5/8] The Prometheans in Halo 4-5 have weakspots and are vulnerable to their own hardlight weapons. The complaints about them are overblown in my opinion and imo they’re fun to overcome by matching their own aggression and attriting their support. Hunters and flood enemies in the remake have no weakspots, I have a clip of me shooting flood enemy literally 200 times with an assault rifle in its head before it dies. It has no weakspots and one-hits you. The usual utility counters that take advantage of their hidden weakenesses from the other games don’t apply here.

[6/8] Finally the most unforgiveable changes are that the tone of the game has shifted from 80s-90s scifi like Alien/Aliens and Ghost in the Shell to Marvel. Some day someone will write a feminist academic paper on the infantilization of Cortana. Yes her character in the previous games was flawed - and in my opinion 343 made her genuinely compelling among all fictional characters in Halo 4 - but this is just embarrassing. This is Microsoft coming down hard enforcing their brand guidelines, the character in this game is not Halo’s Cortana, this is literally Microsoft Windows Cortana. Her voicelines have been re-recorded and she has been regressed from a challenging but highly competent professional coworker managing a cascading crisis to what GamerGate wants every woman to be. I thought her character would develop throughout the game, becoming more confident, and more like her original self. But no, when she takes over Halo’s control room and is given godlike power and knowledge she still talks to you like she’s your intern and she’s afraid of offending you because you’re going to fire her. You can guess why the executives at Microsoft have pushed her character in this direction. She is no longer an equal partner to you - playing the game with this characterization of her makes me genuinely uncomfortable and solidifies the total chudification of the series.

[7/8] It’s been almost 20 years now since 343 took over and they’ve been consistently getting worse because at a fundamental level HALO studios is basically a sweatshop that churns through 18 month contractors instead of a real development studio. In the same timeframe Bungie went from making Halo 3 ODST to Destiny 2: The Final Shape while 343 went from making Halo 4 (a game I genuinely love and think is compelling a decade later!) to whatever this is. UE5 slop tonally designed to groom children into joining the military, with the exact same child-targeted tone changes made between Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2009) to Call of Duty Modern Warfare II (2022).

[8/8] The game is not good. Gameplay wise it can be fixed but everything that made the series compelling outside of that is dead. Not even going to get into how little the game respects you - the fact that between Truth and Reconciliation and Silent Cartographer Cortana explained what invisible elites are and what hunters are and exactly how to kill them no less than 5 times is what made me realize the game is Triple AAA Mario and Microsoft finally hired that man. Halo 4 got flak for revealing what forerunners looked like in order to have them play an active role in the story, this game stops and explains literally everything you could possibly be wondering about, as if developers showed a full playthrough to a clueless bourgeois executive, and every time he said “what is that? Why’d they do that?” they were forced to insert a line from Cortana explaining what it is. You will come across unexplained mysterious structures or oddities from the original and you’ll get a really disappointing answer the second you get the slightest feeling of wonder.

I don’t have many opinions on it. I think it’s another cash grab and it will be “ok” but won’t scratch the itch completely.

Maybe I’m getting older but nothing is going to hit as hard as loading up OG halo for a coop campaign run

I didnt really follow it at all. Im not a Halo Gal. What did I miss ?

I haven’t played but I watched nervy play some of it.

The ai looks like the Reach ai, saw a marine take ~3 seconds to get into a warthog after slowly turning around to face it. Elites also have high-damaging instant melees like in Reach. The graphics look fine but he claimed some of the geometry was messed up like in H1a.

Might get it with a friend since it seems like it might be playable on linux. I doubt it’ll beat Halo 1 but it might be enjoyable enough I guess. It at least seems like it’d be more fun than Halo 2+3 and it looks like it plays a bit like Infinite which I thought was fun enough.