This review contains spoilers
Beat campaign on Legendary.
Plot sucked: Master Chief wakes up a year or somethign after the big cliffhanger ending from Halo 5 was already decided, and drops onto a Halo ring where the humans already lost a war. The entire game is played on this premise of post-lost-war cleanup and Master Chief conveniently waking up just as the enemy are trying to activate the Halo again or something.
Gameplay is what you expect, but being older and understanding game design a bit better, not good. In particular, they don't make the game difficult in the "right" ways in my opinion. For example, having "jump scares" where you are suddenly rushed by sword elites or melee brutes just encourages you to die, know when they show up, and play differently upon reloading the checkpoint. There was no realistic way to "know" ahead of time that would happen. You are trained by memorization/cheesing, not actually developing a general skill for the game. Another example of bullshit-I-guess-this-is-difficult-but-not--in-a-fun-way is near the end of the game when they have a penchant for spawning sprinting brutes with gravity hammers + jackal snipers at the same time, in areas with minimal cover. You have no counterplay: you run you get sniped in the back. You stand and fight, you cannot kill a literal sprinting 1HKO brute before he does (another bullshit move) leap strike. The "counterplay" involved lots of dying and reloading RNG until the brutes, by chance, would NOT do their leap strike, or the jackals, by chance, would miss. Of course, I expect Legendary to be difficult, but there are better ways of making a game difficult in my opinion. For example, removing auto-aim would be a fair way of making the campaign harder (people would complain that builds bad muscle memory for multiplayer which is fair).
Music is a very good mix of nostalgia and new sounds. But it's hard to give this much weight.
Plot sucked: Master Chief wakes up a year or somethign after the big cliffhanger ending from Halo 5 was already decided, and drops onto a Halo ring where the humans already lost a war. The entire game is played on this premise of post-lost-war cleanup and Master Chief conveniently waking up just as the enemy are trying to activate the Halo again or something.
Gameplay is what you expect, but being older and understanding game design a bit better, not good. In particular, they don't make the game difficult in the "right" ways in my opinion. For example, having "jump scares" where you are suddenly rushed by sword elites or melee brutes just encourages you to die, know when they show up, and play differently upon reloading the checkpoint. There was no realistic way to "know" ahead of time that would happen. You are trained by memorization/cheesing, not actually developing a general skill for the game. Another example of bullshit-I-guess-this-is-difficult-but-not--in-a-fun-way is near the end of the game when they have a penchant for spawning sprinting brutes with gravity hammers + jackal snipers at the same time, in areas with minimal cover. You have no counterplay: you run you get sniped in the back. You stand and fight, you cannot kill a literal sprinting 1HKO brute before he does (another bullshit move) leap strike. The "counterplay" involved lots of dying and reloading RNG until the brutes, by chance, would NOT do their leap strike, or the jackals, by chance, would miss. Of course, I expect Legendary to be difficult, but there are better ways of making a game difficult in my opinion. For example, removing auto-aim would be a fair way of making the campaign harder (people would complain that builds bad muscle memory for multiplayer which is fair).
Music is a very good mix of nostalgia and new sounds. But it's hard to give this much weight.