The campaign for this game had a great aesthetic that I adore. The mission design was also good for the most part. The story was perfectly fine, however. I didn't hate it and it served its purpose. However it doesn't reach the emotional pains of Halo 2 or the bombastic feeling of Halo 3.

Firefight was a solid, yet difficult, distraction if you could find 3 other people to do a run with you. Sadly there was no matchmaking for this mode, which it desperately needed

A good side package overall, despite the price point at the time frustrating fans

yknow i think i just have a problem with non-linear storytelling, or at least this specific way of doing it where you go find a "piece" of the story, then go find another completely separate piece that's not necessarily directly before or after the previous piece
it just kind of annoys me when i'm like "oh i wonder what happened to that guy" only to find another story piece where someone goes "...blah blah after he DIED blah blah..." and i'm just like "oh okay i guess he's dead now" and then i find another separate piece where it's like "oh no he might DIE?? what will HAPPEN?" and i already know exactly what will happen because the other story piece just fucking told me
anyways i found most of the pieces of this game in order so i actually liked it!
the core concept of looking for little pieces of evidence of your other squad mates and suddenly being like "i know EVERYTHING that happened now" is a little funny but the actual gameplay mechanic of playing through what happened, recontextualizing the areas of the game you just went through is pretty cool and i enjoyed it a lot
also you're NOT master chief which means you can't dual-wield weapons (this is the only gameplay change)
oh my god are these some of the most generic human designs ive ever seen, the squad leader guy straight up looks like some sort of human-proportioned minecraft steve recreation while the boss lady looks like she was designed by someone who doesn't know what women look like (and i dont mean that in a "male gaze" way i mean that in a "the designer was a gay man" way (i don't know who the character designer(s) actually was and i dont care enough to find out))

all in all though i enjoyed the concept, the story, and the gameplay and it wasn't even too long, the city walking sections were pretty alright despite me expecting them to drag on

cortana does NOT exist in this game