Recent reviews by ★rhides☆

After all these years, Bungie still knows how to produce incredibly tight gunplay. The bread-and-butter combat from the HALO series is enhanced by the addition of class perks and supers, adding mobility and power.

SINGLE PLAYER: 5/10 (Average)
Setting: Incredible. Rich and diverse lore, great style and designs for world and aliens. Some of the best looking armor you'll find in a sci-fi setting, period.
Characters: Awful. The Vanguard are unbearable, and each DLC has made them even more unlikable.
Story: Starts off well, but slowly becomes unhinged. Feels inconsistent in tone and stoicism, especially when attempting to deal with comic relief (Ghost, Sagira/Osiris, etc). It's weird how the game tries to hype up the player as the super special savior of all mankind. It leads to the rest of the cast sitting around doing nothing.
Pacing: Super grindy, subsequent DLC are laughably short and full of open-world filler.

MULTIPLAYER: 8.5/10 (Very good)
Combat flows fast and fiercely. Both PVP and raid content is great. Connectivity is occasionally an issue, and Bungie is very capricious when it comes to deciding fireteam sizes for certain activities, but this is generally not a big issue unless you have a ton of friends playing (you won't). Regarding PVP, I can't help feel that there will never be a serious competitive scene as long as the game is hopelessly grindwalled behind misguided MMO systems of hunting randomly rolled guns or lengthy quest-locked pinnacles. Comp PVP should have been loadout based, with players having full access to the same PVP gear (eg: archetypal 110, 140, 150, and 180 rpm hand cannons with pre-locked but customizable perks) that can be balanced easily and consistently instead of having to make massive weapon nerfs that cripple the game every season.

Overall: 7/10 (Good)
For deathmatch fans, this is an above-average game with amazing style held back by many bad decisions. Gameplay loop has serious issues, especially if you don't enjoy PVP or raid content, but still want to get the best guns in the game. It doesn't help that Bungie keeps introducing convoluted systems each season that come and go, leaving no sense of stability to a game that is already pushing three years old.

STILL PLAYING