H alo 5: Guardians is released for Xbox One this Tuesday. We have been able to play through the game’s campaign and spent some time with the limited pre-release playlists in multiplayer. However, we are withholding our final verdict until we have tested the game’s multiplayer on fully-loaded retail servers with all available game modes.  If Halo 5’s mission was to allow Microsoft’s Xbox One to flex its technical muscles, it is an immediate success. Moments after you are strapped into new hero Spartan Locke’s mechanical boots, you are staring over the precipice of an icy mountain warzone. Craggy cliffs dusted with snow stretch into the distance and among the bluffs flit the aerial fleets of two battling alien races. Hundreds of ships dipping and diving, the purple and blue plasma of the monstrous covenant and the orange hard light of the robotic Prometheans criss-crossing the sky. Further down the canyon, a covenant drop ship lies in flames. Closer in, a covenant Elite is trying to stick an energy sword where the sun doesn’t shine. Time to pay attention.  Halo has always been one for visual spectacle, verdant planets, massive enemy vehicles and monolithic structures trading blows in vivid and expensive dioramas. And Guardians’ decadence knows no bounds, the most busting of blockbusters, whizzing along at the promised 60 frames per second, enemies teem over its landscapes ready to be blasted to smithereens. It is the first game of this generation which has had family members pausing to coo over its visual grandstanding: “My, isn’t it pretty?”  But Halo 5 needs more than aesthetic splendour. The sci-fi opera has always been an integral part of the Xbox machine, but Guardians is the series's most important entry since the original redefined the first-person-shooter for consoles.  Important for its publisher: Microsoft needs Guardians to shift Xbox Ones while their console languishes behind Sony’s PlayStation 4 in the sales stakes. And for its developer: 343 Industries, set up to curate the series after original developer Bungie left to make Destiny, needs Guardians to be the moment it steps out of the shadow cast by the previous incumbents.  If nothing else, Halo 5 is where 343 has learned how to make the game its own. Halo 4 was a splendid tribute, but felt like a developer mimicking what went before in order to steady itself. Such conservatism cannot be afforded here. It is still Halo, of course, all fast-paced skirmishing and fizzing laser-fire interspersed by meaty vehicular combat, but 343 has made more fundamental adjustments.  Most significant are the controls, adding in a handful of extra abilities to make you feel more like the seven-foot, bionic-armour-clad super-solider you are supposed to be. A nippy dodge, a rhino charge, a space-clearing ground pound.  My personal favourite is the ability to briefly hover mid-jump when you squeeze the left trigger to aim down the sights. Even the relatively simple addition of being able to mantle up onto platforms grounds you into the world and lends an extra sense of inertia. It is weighty and immediate and aggressive, encouraging fleet-footed offense even as you move up the difficulty levels.  With the extra tools and the fact that Guardians is designed with four-player co-op in mind (any gaps are filled in by AI and have the chance to revive you if you fall), 343 feel confident in bombarding its players with bad guys.  Arenas are wide and vertiginous, with plenty of vantage points and cover spots for your squad to take up. A great deal of Guardians takes place in the open-air and while levels are – to all intents and purposes – great big corridors, there is enough variety in the setting and topography to keep things interesting.  The three-way battling against the different factions returns too. Covenant are sharp and tactical, Elites flanking you while Grunts draw your fire. The Prometheans, meanwhile, are a swarm. Robot dogs snap at your heels while you try to deal with soldiers taking shots at you from distance.  Fighting the covenant is still more fun, but the Prometheans are more finely tuned than in Halo 4. The beefy Knights cannot teleport anymore, though now need to have specific bits shot off before they’ll go down. While the watchers, flittering drones that provide shields to ground troops, are not such bullet sponges. Promethean shootouts are still chaotic, but aren’t as fiddly.  Whoever you fight, there is a consistently intoxicating rhythm to Halo’s shuddering ballet. Weapon ammo is quickly exhausted, but a selection of the game’s arsenal – human, covenant and Promethean – always litters the battlefield. Each fight is a breathless scrap, running clips dry against an overwhelming force, making dashes under fire to scoop up fresh ammo, snap decisions on armament (shotgun? Sniper rifle? Energy sword?). Guardians’ combat takes Halo’s classic, compulsive loop and bolsters it, packing more variety into its core systems than any other shooter.  But that diversity doesn’t run through to the game’s scenarios as well as it could. The gunplay is always terrific fun, but the pace is kept on full-throttle. A constant bombardment that can occasionally exhaust.  You will switch from on-foot skirmishes to vehicles, piloting a stomping Mantis robot or flying a covenant Banshee onto one of their own gigantic ‘Kraken’ battle stations, which is always entertaining but always focussed on straightforward destruction. Blow up these air vents, destroy these generators.  There are a couple of moments within the campaign that actually lower your weapon entirely; investigating a distant human outpost and later strolling through a UNSC encampment on the Sangheili (Elite) homeworld. But even these are accompanied by nagging reminders to get back to blastin’ already.  It doesn't help that Guardians' narrative is so po-faced. Halo's portentous lore has become increasingly complex over the years, with novels, TV series and comic books building on the games' alien blasting. Guardians jumps straight in after the events of Halo 4 with little pause for explanation, Jameson Locke and his Fireteam Osiris battling Prometheans as they search for the UNSC's most wanted: scientist and AI creator Dr. Halsey. If you don't know your Unngoy from your Kig-Yar, you might find yourself a little lost.  No matter, Guardians quickly (and smartly) pushes the details to the peripheries, sending Locke off to hunt down series hero Master Chief, who has gone AWOL.  With the addition of ever-present companions, there's a definite attempt to insert some humanity into a series traditionally lacking in it. It works to an extent, feeling part of a team gives you more narrative motivation for the fight, but plays it so straight as to be humourless.  Locke is a terse company man who I'm betting is no fun at parties; Holly Tanaka is the tough, sassy one while Guardians can't even wring the wry charm out of Firefly actor Nathan Fillion, who returns as Edward Buck. Olympia Vale is one of the more interesting members, a studious type who understands many alien languages. If you play as Vale in Co-op (online only, I'm afraid, split-screen fans) you'll hear and read alien dialogue that the others can't.  The narrative is suitably epic and grandstanding – and makes a bold decision with a long-standing character – but takes itself far too seriously. Which, for a game about purple aliens, planet-destroying super weapons and bionic soldiers, seems a little off-key.  343 has nailed the systems with Guardians, but it still hasn’t found its Silent Cartographer moment. There is no marquee mission, no one stage or story beat that sticks in the memory. Partly this is because Guardians doesn’t throw open its sandbox in the same way that previous Halos have, giving players freedom to explore a vast expanse, instead jumping between large but tightly-contained levels.  This gives tremendous visual variety, hopping between UNSC installations, glowing Forerunner constructions and gorgeous organic planets, but lacks cohesion and scale. Cast your mind back to the first game’s Assault on the Control Room, that epic trek through snowy climes and underground bases, or Halo 3’s Tsavo Highway. These were journeys. Guardians, meanwhile, takes a tauter and more linear approach. Previous games have felt like worlds, while here they feel like, well, video game levels.  Consistently thrilling video game levels, mind you. Guardians’ only true misstep comes in a bafflingly recurring boss fight against a Promethean Warden which would have been the game’s low point the first time it comes around. By the fourth you would wonder if 343 had lost its marbles if the rest of the campaign wasn’t so consistently good. A glistening, sumptuous adventure enabled by one of the finest combat systems the genre has seen.  And that system is what 343 hopes will form the basis of Guardians’ extensive multiplayer. Nothing in that combat is left behind for competitive play and against other human beings, it is arguably even better. The extra abilities give combatants the chance to outmanoeuvre and outthink opponents as well as out-shoot them. This added layer of skill is another sign of Halo’s pursuit of the eSports scene, with the Arena mode focussed on even-starts and fast-paced matches. Breakout is a breathless combination of Last Man Standing and Capture the Flag. Stronghold has players vying for control of points on the map. Swatnums, meanwhile, is a brilliantly skittish mode played on small maps with shields disabled and players armed only with pistols.  Rather than grafting modes onto all-purpose maps, each of the multiplayer levels seem tailor-made to specific modes. Small circular arenas for Swatnums, multi-tiered boxes with cover spots and smart sightlines for Stronghold.  Breakout even has its own style of wireframe maps perfect for its hide and go seek style of play. Between Arena’s high competitiveness and the sprawling new Warzone mode, 343 could has a strong basis. Though it is impossible to judge just how strong from the limited pre-release playlists we had access to. If 343 can keep the servers rolling and expand upon this selection they could be onto something special.  We will explore more in the coming days.
Halo 5: Guardians is the most important entry into the Xbox's sci-fi shooter series since Combat Evolved, here is our detailed campaign review and early multiplayer impressions ahead of our final verdict.