Halo 5: Guardians

A strong final piece of DLC that delivers meaningful UI improvements alongside the addition of Ogre mercenaries. It addresses long-standing Forge complaints that had frustrated players. The result is a satisfying, polished send-off for the content drops.

Revisiting the campaign confirms it as arguably the worst and most disjointed in the franchise, with a story that juggles too many half-baked concepts, characters and plot points introduced then abandoned, riddle-heavy dialogue, and stakes that feel hollow because key conflicts resolve off-screen. Combat is tedious with boring, endlessly spawning Promethean enemies and stingy ammo. The redeeming qualities are genuinely impressive visuals, strong cutscenes and motion capture, a wide variety of locations, and solid polish for its era, but it is not really worth playing again.

A buy and a good, if not the best, Halo game, carried by slick 60fps gameplay, excellent enemy designs and one of the series' top soundtracks, with the new War Zone mode being a standout multiplayer addition. It stumbles on a story that forces you to play mostly as Locke chasing the Chief, an overused repeated boss battle, and graphical caveats like dynamic resolution and poor texture filtering.

A bland, formulaic continuation that coasts on its franchise rather than innovating, with the same shooting, no new weapons or enemies, and a campaign that ends abruptly on a cliffhanger. The story is thin and the characters underdeveloped, with most exposition crammed into two-sentence exchanges between combat arenas. The microtransaction-laden multiplayer is the harshest sticking point.

A capable but ultimately disappointing shooter held back to slightly above average. The campaign is one of the shortest in the series with a mediocre, cliffhanger story that sidelines Master Chief for Spartan Locke, never delivers its marketed showdown, and recycles the Warden Eternal boss endlessly. Removing split-screen co-op and adding a grindy requisition-point microtransaction system are major missteps, though the polished 60fps multiplayer fares better.

A real disappointment on the single-player side: the story and cutscenes are great and set up something exciting, but the roughly six-hour campaign cuts off abruptly with no payoff, reusing the same enemies throughout. The multiplayer redeems it, with excellent Arena and Warzone modes, fluid movement, and additions like the ground pound that make it a genuinely fun, satisfying shooter.