Halo 4

I've been playing Halo 4 for over a month now, but only just recently bothered to check out the single player campaign. It wasn't bad. Previous Halo titles have struggled at times to offer a diverse enough set of levels to prevent me from yawning with boredom. I'll give Halo 4 this much - it was rarely repetitive or annoyingly dull. There were only eight different missions and for the most part each one took place in its own environment and had its own objective. While much of the game certainly did involve that bland old "get from A to B while mowing down whoever stands in your way" mentality, there was just enough going on to keep things fresh, I thought. The story picks up after the events of Halo 3, which left Master Chief floating aimlessly through space, literally. His ship approaches some Forerunner planet, then crashes, and then all of a sudden it's off to the races once more. There's an emotional story shoehorned into the mix this time, with sentient artificial intelligence unit Cortana coming down with some sort of software Alzheimer's and Master Chief promising to "fix" her. I won't lie; watching a barely human killing machine vowing to help out a piece of code gussied up as a naked blue chick was more surreal than emotionally stirring, but early on in the game I at least bought into it. By game's end though, when Cortana was downloading her software failure into an entire spaceship, and Master Chief was detonating nuclear weapons held against his chest but still surviving unscathed, I was scowling with every muscle in my face at all the bullshit that somehow passed for "writing" back at 343 Industries at one point. Blech. If this was really the "best Halo story ever" - and it actually might be - then there's been no bar set at all.

But I don't play Halo for its single-player mode. I'm all about the multiplayer aspect. Therefore, even though the campaign itself was a messy pile of dogshit that was often fun enough to slog through, I can still comfortably and confidently call Halo 4 an extremely enjoyable game thanks to its multiplayer mode. Hooray!