Halo 5: Guardians Playthrough
02015, XONE. Rating: 2 out of 4 stars
Like Halo 2, the fifth installment in this saga decides to go with a split narrative structure. This time, we have Blue Team as one story, led by Master Chief and his fellow Spartans who are trying to find a suddenly resurfaced Cortana. The other story is led by Spartan Locke and Osiris Team, who are trying to stop the AWOL Master Chief and bring closure to a potentially devastating crisis.
It’s odd, given this description, that Osiris Team is the emphasis for 75% of the campaign. That’s not necessarily a bad choice, but the narrative energy and focus is in the wrong direction. Master Chief’s quest to find Cortana should be the driving point. To an extent, it is, but the game is emphasizing it from a distance rather than front and center. That’s not to say Locke and the rest of Osiris are bland. They aren’t. They’re more interesting than the rest of Blue Team. The problem is everything is being held at a distance.
Sadly, that’s a problem for Guardians as a whole. The game’s highlight might be the opening cinematic with the tracking shot of Osiris taking the fight to the Covenant. It’s a great bit of camerawork that the rest of the game fails to live up to. There are some good scenes here and there, but everything is so disjointed and off-key that it becomes a shambles. Halo 2 had similar struggles at times, but the Arbiter as a character and a narrative had a through-line. Guardians has nothing of the kind. What we’re left with is a lot of cut-and-paste material.
The general production values are uniformly excellent and the ability to climb and pull yourself up onto ledges is a welcome addition. Otherwise, Guardians brings very little to the table we haven’t already seen and what it does have is being emphasized in all the wrong places. A real disappointment.
0:00 Osiris
14:45 Blue Team
44:06 Glassed
59:00 Meridian Station
1:02:58 Unconfirmed
1:22:57 Evacuation
1:37:50 Reunion
1:57:16 Swords of Sanghelios
2:14:08 Alliance
2:17:25 Enemy Lines
2:33:12 Before the Storm
2:34:33 Battle of Sunaion
2:58:50 Genesis
3:10:49 The Breaking
3:29:38 Guardians
Watch live streams and speedruns on https://www.twitch.tv/proa007.
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