Recent reviews by Veretax-7

Sony reverted the account linking requirements, so now I am doing my Super Earth duty and reverting my review as well.

This is a great game, so long as it can stick to its guns and keep releasing content that the whole player base can fairly access and unlock.

Best campaign 343's made yet. The actual story and dialogue is actually worth listening to and good emotional moments. The "open world" isn't as content-rich as the term would imply nowadays, especially compared to other games with an open world, but you get to appreciate the scenery of a real Halo world.

Multiplayer might be a bit unrecognizable for people who haven't touched Halo since the early days, mostly because of the weapon choices and balancing. The sandbox balancing is off to a good start, with maybe only a few tweaks to things like shotgun damage. I know, I know, I miss my plasma rifles and DMR too, but honestly they would have to be reworked into being unrecognizable in order to not step over other guns in the meta.

The game's still pretty young, so I'm overlooking other concerns I have right now like the playlist offerings and battle pass progression. 343 should really just copy what they did for MCC and stop trying to reinvent the wheel, it works better than what we have now and they can improve on both titles at the same time if they just stuck to one model. We need more maps too, but again it's too early to tell how often they plan to expand on that.

Overall solid game release, hope they keep it up with some more content

Played the game since Year 1 when Warmind+CoO became free with the game, stopped a bit after 3 years, then came back around end of 2021. Some people who knew of the game when it came out had (and still have) a negative view of it, but it's changed quite a lot since release; way more activities and an objectively better armor/reward system each year, especially with the Shadowkeep update.

Obviously an MMO with PvE activities designed to be challenging with a full fireteam is going to be a lot more fun with friends and/or a clan, but with the exception of endgame content a lot of it is soloable with enough dedication.

Some cons: it gets really grindy every now and then and they tend to keep the best stuff as paid cosmetics. If they lower the price a bit and make getting bright dust a bit easier, the price tag would be easier to swallow. In my case, I've spent $20 on cosmetics since release but none since Year 3 because the few things I wanted to buy so far cost almost as much, if not more than a season pass, what the actual hell.

If you want to try the game, buy the season pass for whatever season is out at the moment (should be $10 iirc with the exception of Undying) and see if you like the new content as the FTP stuff isn't really indicative of the rest of the game. If you like what you see, definitely try and get some friends and/or a clan to tag along with raids and dungeons.