Going to give a recommend with the caveat that this is a very buggy game so buyer beware.
Pros:
I think it’s a very faithful *evolution* of the original game, not a replacement.
The sandbox is excellent. Every gun is given a niche and a use against the different factions. Gone are the Bungie-era days when half the sandbox - including the iconic Assault Rifle - is useless on higher difficulties. I love how punchy the AR is and how much fun it is to mow down goes with fully automatic rifle at medium range. There is no gun that can cleanly take down every enemy type at every range. You have to pick the gun to adapt to the situation, and every gun has a niche and fulfills its niche excellently.
The revamped level design and combat encounters are a stark improvement compared to the original game. People don’t like to hear it but the original CE level design is outdated and boring. Most levels except for the vehicle sections boil down to narrow corridors after narrow carrier. You’ve got human spaceship corridors, purple alien spaceship corridors, gray alien structure corridors, and in the latter half of the game, all of those same corridors except WITH ZOMBIES. Boring. This game doesn’t get rid of the corridors but it at least makes every corridor play differently with different enemy positions and compositions. What they’ve done to 343 Guilty Spark and the Library are truly excellent. But there are improvements to every level.
A lot of people complain that the game’s enemy AI got downgraded from CE but I would disagree. I really like the reach AI. Elites are very aggressive. Once your shields are down they will beeline to you to smack you in melee for the instant KO. Jackals aggressively flank you. And the changes they made to the Hunter AI make them really truly fearsome.
While many would say that CE’s flood being hyper aggressive at charging the player is a good thing, I would disagree. Hyper aggressive flood means that medium range weapons become a lot harder to use and justify against the flood. I like that I can opt for the pistol or the beam rifle against the flood and they aren’t totally useless options. I get that the hyper aggressive CE flood was trying to go for a specific horde feel, but it gets really tiring after a while constantly running and kiting flood. When I play CE I get exhausted and bored fighting the flood and praying for the game to end by the time I get to Keyes. Not so here. Here I can experiment with the sandbox with different weapons other than the Shotgun to fight flood. I really enjoy that they have energy shields to all elite combat forms as it forces plasma weapons back into the sandbox. And the tank forms are awesome and really fun to fight in every encounter they appear in. I feel that the flood is a stark improvement over CE’s in my opinion.
Cons:
The game is just buggy as hell, even after the first patch. Two weeks after release, I still experience major stuttering in certain sections of the game. My custom keybindings are reset every time I close and relaunch the game. And there was this really weird issue where pressing Resume Solo Game into Pillar of Autumn would play the Main Menu music in the game itself.
And if you have Frame Generation enabled, the game will *halve* the 30fps cutscenes down to 15fps for some ridiculous reason. Thankfully there’s a mod on nexus that fixes this. But holy crap this really ruins the game.
I hope that they fix these bugs eventually. But they were a huge annoyance for me so I would caution people to wait even longer for more fixes before buying the game.
Another thing I didn’t like were the new bonus missions. Remember how I was glazing their new level and encounter design in the original missions? Well they certainly didn’t put that same effort into these missions. Levels were bland and boring. It looked visually boring too as the repeated purple alien corridors for 3 levels straight were really tiring. They tried to spice it up with some open space areas and some of those corridors are white instead of purple. But… it was nothing fantastic. The story was nothing to write home about. Don’t buy the game to play these missions. I did really enjoy the space battle at the end though!
Conclusion:
If I could give a mixed rating I would. But I don’t feel like the game deserves a Do Not Recommend. There are legitimate improvements to the main campaign. I really enjoy the new sandbox. I would be happy to play a Halo 2 Remaster going in with this sandbox and AI. The experience is just bogged down by bad bugs.
The game visually looks great and plays great. I’m also really encouraged to see modders already modding the game. That would breathe some extended life into this game.
