Which Halo game is the greatest, and why?

[Shadow1980]

Halo CE. It's still my favorite campaign in the series, and is one of the closest things to a video game equivalent of comfort food for me. I probably play at least a level of two every couple of weeks. The multiplayer was a blast back in the LAN days, which were probably my favorite memories when it came to playing multiplayer games. It's one of those things that makes me most nostalgic for my early to mid 20s, that and the early years of me really getting into anime.

Most of the rest of the games have solid campaigns, but none of them ever feel quite as fun as CE. Halo 2 has a great story but awful difficulty balancing, esp. on Legendary. Halo 3's story is kinda meh thanks to the first half of the campaign being "Chief missed the party and is now dicking around in the woods," but the levels are mostly fun to play (except Cortana). ODST is short but sweet. Reach is decent enough, but I didn't care for how it effectively retconned the entire back half of the Fall of Reach novel. Halo 4 is probably the weakest campaign gameplay-wise thanks to overly linear levels and the Prometheans not being fun to fight, while the story was serviceable, with the highlight being everything to do with Cortana. Halo 5's story was likewise lackluster, and it had some pretty cheap difficulty on Legendary (not quite as bad as Halo 2, though), but the level design was an improvement. Infinite's core gameplay was solid, and the linear levels are pretty good, but the open world felt trite and derivative, and was lacking in the varied biomes common in Halo games.

As for the multiplayer modes, CE doesn't play as good on the MCC, at least in matchmaking, probably because it's the PC version, and the weapon setup for auto starts is screwy and totally unlike the OXbox version. It's just a different experience than the old LAN days. Halo 2 still has the best maps of any MP mode, combined with the absolute worst weapon balance in the series, not to mention it was glitchy as hell (mostly fixed on MCC) and the OXbox experience was plagued by cheaters. Halo 3 actually plays very well in retrospect, esp. on the MCC once they fixed the hit detection issues that made it feel kinda mushy, and is now my go-to MP game on MCC. Reach was fun at first, but as the years have passed I've grown to despise being able to spawn with armor abilities. Halo 4 has good weapon balance for the most part (the Boltshot can go to hell), but I hate how 343i decided to go full Call of Duty with custom loadouts, rank-based unlocks, and even weapon drops similar to kill streaks, plus it continued Reach's practice of letting people spawn with things like jet packs and X-ray vision. Halo 2 Anniversary's multiplayer was great, and is how Halo 2 should have played, but they only remade like seven of the 23 maps from Halo 2. Halo 5 is probably the weakest MP mode to me. While they went back to equal starting gear, the new enhanced mobility made the game way to fast and hectic for me, and I had a hard time keeping up. Infinite is probably the best Halo has played since Halo 3 in terms of core gameplay, but it suffers from excessively strict SBMM that ensures that almost every match is as sweaty as possible, even if it's an unranked match.