Master Chief’s back — and everything he’s known has been upended. The shape of the new trilogy emerges as we go hands-on with a never-before-seen level Halo 4’s epic campaign.
WARNING: HALO 4 CAMPAIGN SPOILERS!
Cortana is clearly losing it. In the midst of a Promethean onslaught, our always dependable A.I. diligently works on activating a particularly stubborn gate that’ll lead us to safer ground — but as the battle-frenzied pace begins to wind down, she angrily barks at us in a startling, unexpected moment of aggression. With clear disdain, she bites out that she’s sick of Master Chief’s overreliance on her. Is the Halo series’ stalwart companion turning on us right when we need her most? If our hands-on session with Halo 4’s intriguing story campaign taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.
As Halo 4’s fourth stage, “Infinity,” opens, frantic chatter floods Chief’s in-helmet comm link. Something big just went down, literally — the hulking UNSC Infinity has landed on Requiem’s surface. Our job is to seek out any of the crewmembers that have been tossed into the surrounding wilds to account for their IFF tags: Are they alive or are they dead? How many can we find before we duck into the relative safety of the Infinity?
The captain of the Infinity, Andrew Del Rio, has tagged their rough locations on your map; now all you have to do is fight through increasingly hostile swarms of Forerunner security A.I. (called Prometheans) to find them. This first introduction to the three different types of Prometheans that inhabit Requiem — the grenade-catching Watchers, the Elite-level Knights, and the canine-like Crawlers — is scary stuff. While the Crawlers are quasi-manageable at a distance if you’ve got a scoped weapon (a nice headshot takes them out in one hit), it’s on when the Knights and Watchers show up.
Your first target will always be the Watchers: given that they’re able to shield their allies, spawn more Crawlers, regenerate foes’ health, and sling back any grenades you might mistakenly toss their way, you’ll want them off your six as fast as possible. But while your main objective is to take these guys out first, skirmishes will also be lessons in multitasking as you juggle multiple hostiles (including the airborne Watchers!), and keep an eye on Knights. Ensuring the latter stay at a safe distance is a challenge in itself; these bipedal terrors have multiple variants. We mostly faced down the Lancer type, which could seemingly teleport — called a “phase-run” — from across a distance to melee us head-on; if you’re smart, you’ll dodge once you see a Lancer disappear in a crackle of electricity.
We eventually got the hint that using close-range weaponry (like the shotguns left scattered about the battlefield) was the way to hold our own against these Knight variants. But monitoring Crawlers is also important, as letting them collect in batches is a lethal mistake. Take them down from a distance to whittle away their numbers.
Even with the chaotic mix of new weapons, enemies, and environments, though, our goal remains simple: get our MJOLNIR-armored heiney to the Infinity with those IFF tags in tow. Once aboard the massive vessel, we spot Halo 4’s transmedia tie-ins as Chief runs into Thomas Lasky and Commander Palmer: Lasky is a character first introduced in the live-action web series Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. “Never thought I’d see you again,” quips Lasky with a grin. Palmer, a Spartan-IV soldier herself, dismissively looks MC up and down, then snorts, “I thought you’d be taller.” What follows next is a flurry of meet-‘n’-greets with Infinity friendlies, including Captain Del Rio, who quickly assigns you the task of clearing a landing zone for an incoming Pelican.
This meeting highlights not only the way in which Halo 4 aims to tell its story — by encompassing all the fiction from the books, web series, and comics — but by also giving these characters new depth via painstakingly-done motion-capture.. Lasky’s face, Palmer’s armored movements, and Del Rio’s grizzled, old soldier frown seem light years ahead of the nowseemingly inert character models in Halos past.
But time is short and our path to the landing zone lies ahead, past a particularly hairy handful of set-pieces that force us to break out the Railgun to dispatch powerful foes. As you forge ahead, you’ll come across squads of marines — they can provide back up if you keep them alive through the Promethean onslaught.
It’s during this endeavor that the scene with Cortana snapping at us takes place, but our mission (which spans three stages — “Infinity,” “Reunited,” and “Eviction Proceedings”) isn’t just a delivery system for letting us know our A.I. companion’s about to undergo some changes. Rather, it jumps wildly from one epic set-piece to the next, with one hell of a twist thrown in for good measure. What lies just beyond the corridor you access after Cortana’s outburst is a huge landing zone filled with…Covenant. Could they be in cahoots with the heretofore unseen Forerunners?
We certainly have our suspicion about enemy alliances, and throughout the ensuing chaos — which includes a Scorpion Tank run as well as a showdown on a makeshift airfield while piloting a Manta mech — Chief repeatedly lays much of the mayhem’s blame squarely on the shoulders of the Didact, an ancient Forerunner who MC believes has united the Covvies with their Promethean buddies. In fact, in a heated exchange between Del Rio and Chief, our favorite Spartan insists that they continue their hunt for the Didact while “he’s vulnerable.” But that chase is saved for another day as the stage ends.
Still, there’s plenty more of Halo 4 content we’ve been able to get our hands on (including an additional mission, as well as scads of multiplayer content including a mode that casts you as a member of the Flood), and you can learn about all of it in our December issue, which will land on store shelves (and in customer mailboxes) in early October! In the meantime, we close this preview with a first-look at the cover of the issue – keep an eye open for it!
