Damn man, might wanna take a chill pill, though for the most part I agree, just not with the same...zealous fury.
The aesthetics are all screwy. Seems like every part of it belongs somewhere else and not to Halo. None of it really combines to create a unique, pleasing, functional feel.
The Prometheans look like they're lifted from Metroid and their environments are boring and sterile, and get old very quickly (Forerunner environments have arguably always been like that, yet they don't become quite that boring as you don't see them all that much in the other games. When they're pretty much everywhere, it gets old fast).
The Covenant have lost practically all of their unique visual appeal and sense of culture, perhaps going into full blown regular dumb enemy monster territory. I used to wonder what the different species were really like, where they came from and what they used to be before the whole Covie gig. I wanted to know more about them. Now I don't.
The Spartans and marines, rather than having rather unique yet functional and practical equipment in a genre that's filled to the brim with hilariously overdesigned BS now look more like they're geared out with schizophrenically designed teched up, overdesigned versions of things pulled from Crysis and Dead Space. This goes for the human environments too, they just look overly teched up and 'futurized' for the hell of it. One of my favourite things about the setting was that they rarely overdid the human tech, now it just looks unfunctional, silly and rather indistinct.
Despite these changes it was still a rather enjoyable game. There was nothing in the campaign mode that was really all that bad, and definitely nothing that was so far as a dealbreaker. The dealbreaker is the multiplayer.
The vast majority of changes to the multiplayer gameplay seem to have been made just for the hell of it with no real reasoning behind them, other than perhaps 'It'll be different and cool', paradoxically intertwined with the other reasoning which seems to be along the lines of 'Other games do this, lets do it too'. Basically every decision made here is a bad one, from bigger things like the imbalanced weapons and flawed create a class system, to the smaller ones like no longer being hit out of scope view and the fact that the Infec-...Flood can no longer use regular weapons due to the changes in the new mode.
There's actually quite a lot more stuff that's now different, and I really don't feel any of it is positive. Getting into matches with essentially the same mode each time (cos everyone now plays every mode like a deathmatch even more than they used to, probably because of the new challenges and slow levelling) where everyone uses the same guns because nothing else is worth using on what are likely the most camper friendly maps in the franchise has basically ruined this game for me. The maps no longer have any real significant features, thanks to the random weapon spawns and the fact that many of the default guns effectively eliminate the need to move around regularly to get kills.
There is not a single thing I feel Halo 4's multiplayer does better than any Halo game before it. It isn't an 'abomination', it just isn't fun to play and isn't memorable.
Since multiplayer is where the replay value is primarily at and I see the multiplayer as valueless, I'll probably trade Halo 4 in towards the upcoming Gears game. Funny thing is this was the other way around a couple years ago when Reach came out.
The aesthetics are all screwy. Seems like every part of it belongs somewhere else and not to Halo. None of it really combines to create a unique, pleasing, functional feel.
The Prometheans look like they're lifted from Metroid and their environments are boring and sterile, and get old very quickly (Forerunner environments have arguably always been like that, yet they don't become quite that boring as you don't see them all that much in the other games. When they're pretty much everywhere, it gets old fast).
The Covenant have lost practically all of their unique visual appeal and sense of culture, perhaps going into full blown regular dumb enemy monster territory. I used to wonder what the different species were really like, where they came from and what they used to be before the whole Covie gig. I wanted to know more about them. Now I don't.
The Spartans and marines, rather than having rather unique yet functional and practical equipment in a genre that's filled to the brim with hilariously overdesigned BS now look more like they're geared out with schizophrenically designed teched up, overdesigned versions of things pulled from Crysis and Dead Space. This goes for the human environments too, they just look overly teched up and 'futurized' for the hell of it. One of my favourite things about the setting was that they rarely overdid the human tech, now it just looks unfunctional, silly and rather indistinct.
Despite these changes it was still a rather enjoyable game. There was nothing in the campaign mode that was really all that bad, and definitely nothing that was so far as a dealbreaker. The dealbreaker is the multiplayer.
The vast majority of changes to the multiplayer gameplay seem to have been made just for the hell of it with no real reasoning behind them, other than perhaps 'It'll be different and cool', paradoxically intertwined with the other reasoning which seems to be along the lines of 'Other games do this, lets do it too'. Basically every decision made here is a bad one, from bigger things like the imbalanced weapons and flawed create a class system, to the smaller ones like no longer being hit out of scope view and the fact that the Infec-...Flood can no longer use regular weapons due to the changes in the new mode.
There's actually quite a lot more stuff that's now different, and I really don't feel any of it is positive. Getting into matches with essentially the same mode each time (cos everyone now plays every mode like a deathmatch even more than they used to, probably because of the new challenges and slow levelling) where everyone uses the same guns because nothing else is worth using on what are likely the most camper friendly maps in the franchise has basically ruined this game for me. The maps no longer have any real significant features, thanks to the random weapon spawns and the fact that many of the default guns effectively eliminate the need to move around regularly to get kills.
There is not a single thing I feel Halo 4's multiplayer does better than any Halo game before it. It isn't an 'abomination', it just isn't fun to play and isn't memorable.
Since multiplayer is where the replay value is primarily at and I see the multiplayer as valueless, I'll probably trade Halo 4 in towards the upcoming Gears game. Funny thing is this was the other way around a couple years ago when Reach came out.