85% is acedemically an A! So tis nothing to be sniffed at at all.

Understandably so, MCC's launch was a nightmare. I've only heard good things about H5's online though so maybe they learned their lesson.

The multiplayer servers are amazing for such a huge release.

The thing is, I never hear casual players complain about 5 to 6 hour campaings in COD games or any other FPS game in particular.  Most experienced Halo players play on Heroic which will be the majority of the people who purchase the game.  This is not like the first game of the series so its not like people do not understand how the difficulty works in the series.  For any new Halo player, yes they will be starting on normal but then again they probably will not finish the game in 5 to 6 hours and if they do its not like you do not have a wealth of other things to do in the game to make your money worth the purchase.  

For FPS shooters like Halo, COD, Killzone, Battlefield ect that have extensive either MP, Co-op and other modes of play, your Normal always plays about 5 to 6 hours for experience FPS players and close to 8 to 10 on the more challenging difficulty.  This has been this way for a long time so not sure why people seem to act like its suddenly became this way just for this one game.

Haven't played the single player get, just the mp. And so far I gotta say it might be the best shooter I've ever played. My favorite competitive shooters are halo 2, 3, and gears 1. It's too early to say if it's better than those only time will tell, but it's in the conversation. Easily better than halo 4's mp which was very good, but worst in the series.

I don't know about Halo 5, but Halo 4's labels were fairly standard stuff like 'for players with shooter experience' and 'for halo veterans'. 

As i mentioned though, what i said is on the assumption that 'Normal' is balanced properly (i.e. average). Lacking the ability to know how easy or hard a game is before actually playing it, 'Normal' is usually what i expect a reviewer will settle on (if there's a choice). If they think it's too easy for the average player, that's usually mentioned in the review. Gets brought up about R&C a lot :p

Just like The Order 1886 metacritic month, we will soon have a lot of threads about how great of a game Halo 5 is and the campaign length is not what some reviewers are saying.

86 on metacritic at the moment.

IGN review 9/10

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/10/26/halo-5-guardians-review

Hell yeah, smooth recovery!