Modern Warfare's influence has somehow seeped into Halo's feel and aesthetic. The four years of stasis have brought more than just the decline of Master Chief's only friend. Cortana answers the question why, even as the rest of the game's bloated narrative struggles to say anything at all. In a story in which you play the role of a weapon trying to save an absent people, she provides a whisper of motivation in a chamber of emptiness, a touch of love in a universe of bullets. So you must save Cortana but, in the end, it's Cortana who saves Halo 4. Her deterioration - wonderfully articulated by actress Jen Taylor - is the driving force behind a story that is otherwise bulky but weightless, a tower of myth devoid of meaning. More accurately, she is descending into rampancy, a form of AI Alzheimer's. Her voice has always been the steady hand on Halo's tiller, guiding the player through space and time - a mostly reliable narrator who offers exposition at every turn and, most importantly, brings a human voice into a soundscape otherwise filled with explosion and death.Ĭortana is dying. Not for the first time, Halo's scriptwriters turn to Cortana for the answer: Master Chief's luminous AI companion, the damsel-in-distress within. "You must save Cortana but in the end it's Cortana who saves Halo 4." A new Promethean armour ability allows you to see through walls, similar to Perfect Dark's FarSight XR-20, especially useful in multiplayer matches. Which begs the question: why? When the only people you meet in your relentless dash from Pillar to Outpost are high-ranking military officials or untrustworthy scientists, where's the motivation? Why not let the aliens rule this space junk, these empty planets, these clinically clean ships? There doesn't appear to be anyone else around to protest anyway. But when their passing goes unnoticed, either by the game's story or its systems, there's precious little motivation to take a bullet for these ciphers. You can save your comrades, the nameless cannon-fodder marines that accompany you into the fray from time to time. You can save yourself - but with instant restarts and checkpoints, death is a setback that can be measured in short seconds and the stakes are necessarily low. But people to save? You won't find many of those here. And it's a universe filled with weapons, more weapons than ever before, the Prometheans adding their armoury of esoteric rifles and machine guns to the already enormous array of killing tools. They provide the ingredients for the sprawling three-way battles the series is known for and - while their ability to warp and fly is an irritating combination - in their assured design new developer 343 Industries shows that it's up to the task of expanding the boundaries of the Halo universe. It's filled with others to destroy, of course, this time in the form of the Prometheans, an alien race of bipedal insect knights and exploding robot dogs that fight against (and alongside) Halo's more familiar enemies, the Covenant. For a game so focused on saving the universe, the Halo series is curiously devoid of people to save. Promethean Knights can deploy 'Watchers' from their carapaces, flying drones that provide shields and resuscitation to the knight should it fall in battle.īut while this one-man army has renewed purpose and a new crisis to tackle, that lack of humanity is hidden in plain sight. It's the start of Halo 4, and Cortana unsheathes Master Chief. A time of crisis a time for an old hero to take back old ground. So he's left in stasis, a dreamless sleep in a forgotten ship watched over by his only friend and companion, an AI girl called Cortana.įive years pass - an age in video games - and in this time Activision's Modern Warfare series rises to prominence, knocking Halo down the most-played charts. He is a voiceless weapon, drawn in times of intergalactic crisis, sheathed when calamity has passed. Beneath the rank and uniform he may be named John, but that ever-present helmet snuffed out the pilot light of his humanity long ago. He has no home for Christmas, no lonely wife to reacquaint with, no overgrown garden to tend to, no son to teach how to throw a plasma ball. Microsoft's flagship trilogy ostensibly drifts into history while developer Bungie, after working out its contractual obligations, wanders off to work on something new - something to prove to itself that Halo, the console shooter that changed everything, isn't the end of its story. The aliens retreat, the flames turn to ember, the hoarse choir sets down its sheet music and space is, finally, still. More specifically, it's ended with our protagonist Master Chief riding a jeep off a flaming planet into the bay of a derelict escape ship: a catastrophic boom, not a whimper, perhaps. It's the end of Halo 3 and the world has ended with a bang, not a whimper.
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