I’m slowly progressing with my themed playthrough. While I wasn’t “cheating” during gameplay I haven’t fully committed to the new approach (no cyberware, no hacking) and still kept the default parts “just in case”. Well, no more - I finally sold all of the remaining gear and left only the basic eyes (can’t remove them, unfortunately) and the tiger claw tattoo (I’m only using it as a… well, tattoo and a background detail for my character). I’m in the middle of act 2. I’m done with Aldecaldo’s and most of Evelyn’s side of things, still waiting for Takemura to finish playing recon for the parade floats (first time I’m not doing it with him). I was a bit surprised because it looks like my different approach started to change things in the story - I’ve noticed V taking small cues from Johnny in a few places despite the fact I tried to act in a way that doesn’t give him control. I might have to work harder to avoid that going forward. Other than that things go pretty smoothly, even if I need to be reminded sometimes that I’m way more fragile this time around. Even then, it’s more manageable than I though it would be (until I get to some of the Phantom Liberty missions that is). I hope I can keep this up until the end. This might sound like I’m joking but I finally had my first noticeable issues with the game during this playthrough. - Sometimes enemies are able to spot me through the walls temporarily. It’s pretty inconsistent and gets fixed rather quickly but I never had this problem before. - During the final Delamain quest game wouldn’t load the level properly on checkpoint reload and dropped me in a building where half of the models wouldn’t render. This led to occlusion freaking out and whole parts of the level phasing in and out pretty aggressively, even when not moving. I’m stubborn enough I tried to finish the mission anyway but things got bad enough my head was starting to hurt after a while (and I’m not particularly sensitive to such things). Thankfully reload from the menu fixed that.

Some things that caught my attention: - Devs forgot (?) to normalise the movement vector when moving with turrets, running forward is slower than running forward and to the side. I found it funny for some reason. - There’s no flashlight issue I had with H2A! Granted these are two different games but I’m glad that’s not a problem here. - Voice acting can be a bit hit or miss. Most of it is really solid but some of the lines I’ve heard are not great. - Cortana getting all chunni was not on my bingo card but I’ll take it. - The Flood is finally how I imagined it. It’s not a huge challenge but the whole section with it feels much better than in previous games. The bloom however… oh man, the bloom. - What do you mean “Earth is all we have left”?! Did covenant somehow managed to destroy every single human world? When did that happen? I though it was only some (maybe most) of them. - It really feels like human ships (especially Pelicans) have a higher chance of being shot down than reaching their target. Kinda unfortunate, really. - Some in-game cutscenes look weird in ultra-wide, like they’re cut off vertically. - I really could not care less about Gravemind. It’s the weakest part of the game for me. - The game was way more fun on Heroic than H2. This is it for the original trilogy. All in all I’m a little underwhelmed - not because the games were bad, far from it. It’s just… after hearing so much about H1-3 it’s impossible not to build up some steep expectations towards those games and, as I mentioned last week, I tend to be way more demanding from stuff hyped to such degree.
Finally, there’s simply the case of my own bias. In case of Halo I simply prefer the sombre/bittersweet/tragic/whateveryoucallit tone of Reach and the few books I read. Action Halo is cool but it doesn’t speak to me the way those other entries do. With whining out of the way let me say that the journey through these games was a pretty enjoyable one. I had my criticism towards some of the gameplay segments and the difficulty of H2 but neither of those soured my time with these titles in a significant way. All 5 entries I played so far hold up better than expected. Next (and last) stop: Halo 4.

Just started this one so here are my initial impressions: - I appreciate Covenant going back to alien speak, makes them more… well, alien. - Going back to fighting Covenant, if only partially, makes sense from the story perspective but it’s still a bit of an underwhelming decision. - I really like how the guns feel and sound, really punchy. Grenades on the other hand feel way worse. - Music sounds more generic this time. It’s not all bad but it’s noticeable. Lets see how the rest of the game fares.

Well, I forgot I even had this thing installed so that pretty much sums up my interest in the game. I gave it a shot but it’s just not for me apparently. Oh well.