Baaaaaaadddddd. Really bad. Like, just really bad. None of what makes Halo good or interesing is present here in Spartan Assault. There's no pacing, no momentum, no pulse pounding sequences, just lifeless, flat objectives repeated over and over across samey levels fighting the same boring handful of enemies. What's worst about all this is I think this game could have been great. A top down Halo makes sense, it's not a shooter that prioritises verticality much, so this really could have worked. But instead, everything about this game feels cheap and low effort, from most levels featuring no music at all and the story being delivered entirely by text boxes and barely animated images.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but Halo is a series that Microsoft has generally been quite careful with. There have only been twelve Halo games (including spinoffs) over 23 years, so even a mobile spinoff like this feels significant. They clearly believed that Halo should be kept prestige and not diluted by endless spinoffs and tie-ins, so why this game is so shit is beyond me. Some tiny changes would have made all the difference here, like having some actual dialogue in the levels themselves or adjusting the mechanics of Halo to better fit the perspective shift. As it stands, this feels more like a bad mod for Halo: Reach turned into something approximating a full game and shoved full of microtransactions (that are now thankfully absent) and sent out to die. For all my hating of 343's Halo offerings, this really is the black mark of the series and is best left forgotten.