Finished Guardians. It had some cool moments but for the most part I found it to be the weakest in the mainline Halo games.
Halo CE - 8.5
Halo 2 - 9
Halo 3 - 8
Halo 4 - 9
Halo Guardians - 7.5
My main problems were the terrible narrative and the level design. Like, Halo 4 had some pretty linear levels, which I guess explains how they got the game to look so damn good. But Guardians seemed even worse. I don't remember a single level with any open design to it at all. Everything was very linear, very follow this one obvious path. Makes me all the more excited for Infinite and its open world and upgrades and stuff. Just the event demo we saw seemed to have more open design than all of Guardians combined. Not a fan of the story either, it was like the next to last level or maybe even the very last one before you found out what Guardians even are, and the ending made no sense. You get one boss battle the entire game basically, they just recycled it like four times. I don't get how Cortana can easily control so many things and the Elder Warden or whatever but she can't stop one small builder AI or whatever from taking away the only thing she seemed to care about?
However, even with those faults, I still thought it was a good shooter because the gunplay and combat design were so great. Prometheans are amazing enemies, I really hope they are back in some form in Infinite and we aren't just fighting Banished. Great weapons and sound again. If there are three areas where 343i seem to poop all over Bungie it's the sound, HUD, and graphics.
I am about four missions or so into Halo Wars 2. I am digging the break from usual Halo gameplay but not really digging the story yet.
