Game Reviews

Five 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. A time of crisis; a time for an old hero to take back old ground. It's the start of Halo 4, and Cortana unsheathes Master Chief.

But while this one-man army has renewed purpose and a new crisis to tackle, that lack of humanity is hidden in plain sight. For a game so focused on saving the universe, the Halo series is curiously devoid of people to save. 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.

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. 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. But people to save? You won't find many of those here.

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. You can save your comrades, the nameless cannon-fodder marines that accompany you into the fray from time to time. 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.

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.

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. 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.

Cortana is dying. More accurately, she is descending into rampancy, a form of AI Alzheimer's. 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. So you must save Cortana but, in the end, it's Cortana who saves Halo 4. 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. Cortana answers the question why, even as the rest of the game's bloated narrative struggles to say anything at all.

The four years of stasis have brought more than just the decline of Master Chief's only friend. Modern Warfare's influence has somehow seeped into Halo's feel and aesthetic. It's in the beginning, as you haul yourself up an elevator shaft on the crumbling Forward Unto Dawn ship, dodging incoming projectiles with QTE-lite inputs. It's in Master Chief's iconic suit, now Teflon-coated like Sam Fisher ready for a night on the tiles. It's in his weight, still unmistakeably floaty when you jump but heavy-footed when you run. It's in the tactical packages dropped into multiplayer when you score the requisite kill streak, and in the perks and customisable dog-tags: all the borrowed trappings of Infinity Ward's success added to the Halo recipe. It is, most obviously, in the control scheme, which for the first time allows you to discard your Halo muscle memory in favour of Modern Warfare's, aiming down the iron sights with a squeeze of the left trigger.