Ranking Every Mainline Halo Game
If you've known me for any length of time, you know that Halo is one of my favorite game series of all time (well the Bungie-era at least). It's been my special interest since first playing Halo 2 back in 2004-2005. So, I wanted to rank all the games from the mainline series (so no Halo Wars, MCC, Spartan Assault). Spinoff's are fine. Basically if it was on MCC or features a campaign with Master Chief, it's on this list. Without any more wasted time, here we go, every entry ranked from worst to best
The Worst - Halo 4
Ah, the bastard child where it all went wrong. Halo fans might be surprised at me putting 4 below 5, but here me out. Halo 4 was the first entry from the newly formed 343 Industries out of Bungie's rotting corpse. The campaign... was decent. I liked the story, the emotional tension and the attempt to make Chief a character with more depth. The things that held this back was the changing of art styles from Bungie's to this more overly-detailed style (I mean this not in terms of graphical fidelity, but just the random shit put onto the armors).
The Prometheans were a fucking SLOG to fight, especially the knights which just felt like bullet sponges and gave basically no damage feedback. The multiplayer is competent, but it tried too hard to be more like Call of Duty with it's loadout system and the absolute bastardization of Infection. 4's biggest sin is that it's just mediocre across the board.
Halo 5
It shouldn't be a surprise that this game ranks so damn low on the list. While I think the multiplayer is fun, it's definitely not Halo. I remember being hyped for this game, with Chief in his poncho and the Hunt the Truth marketing. It seemed like it would be good, but literally none of that happened. You play most of the campaign as this new character, Spartan Locke, and his fireteam (accompanied by Edward Buck, the GOAT himself), Which was... a choice. It's what Imagine fans of MGS felt playing MGS2 and getting stuck with Raiden, but at least history vindicated MGS2. Halo 5 will receive no such luxury. The campaign was a mess, they immediately undid the gravity of Halo 4's ending and the "death" of Cortana by making her basically AI Hitler.
Don't even get me started on fucking Req packs... I can see it being a thing for Warzone I guess, but they locked Armor, weapon skins, everything behind it. I rank this one above Halo 4 only slightly because I've spent much more time on this entry than 4 because the multiplayer was more fun. Despite 4 having the better campaign, it isn't enough to salvage it to a higher ranking. 5 did multiplayer, gunplay, and even forge far better than 4.
Halo Infinite
Halo Infinite I give props for being a decent return to form. The art style feels more in-line with what Halo used to be. The campaign was competent like Halo 4, nothing amazing, but it had good moments and I found The Weapon to be adorable and Brohammer a fun character. The open-world design is novel, but it fucks up some enemy AI, and it feels closer to a Far Cry game (and I mean that as an insult).
Multiplayer is decent as well from when I played it years ago. The problem with this entry comes from a few points. 1) the live service model sucks for every game that isn't an MMO imo. 2) unlocks through gameplay is non-existent. 3) the campaign being priced at $60 is a fucking joke. I Don't wanna hear anyone being like "WeLl ThE mUlTiPlAyEr Is FrEe", yeah you can play it for free, but it's completely neutered to monetize it to high hell. The campaign is at-best $30. Overall, not bad... but not great. Art style returns more to it's roots, multiplayer is good, and campaign is fine. It's the best thing to come out of 343 studios.
Halo: Combat Evolved
The game that started it all. While I appreciate this game for it's significance, it is the weakest of Bungie's games in my opinion. The first act for me is the best part of the game, I know people GLAZE Assault on the Control room, but I find it overstays its welcome, especially when you basically do the mission backwards in Two Betrayals. The campaign has great beats though, the introduction of the Flood damn near turns this game into a horror game. You can play campaign with up to 2 people, but multiplayer allowed up to 16 with System Link (this was before XBOX LIVE where you had to physically be connected to each other via ethernet). It's a fine entry, and a great game considering it's Bungie's first run, just not my favorite.
Halo 3: ODST
This game is great. People still sit in the shower contemplating life while this game's soundtrack plays in the background. ODST's biggest sin was it's price at launch, it was at best $40, not $60. Besides that, this was a great entry. The rainy city atmosphere, the jazzy soundtrack music made by Michael Salvatori and Martin O'Donnell. This game nails the isolation atmosphere when you play your Rookie segments. The game has you mostly playing as the aforementioned Rookie as you piece together what happened to your team, Alpha-Nine, after shit went sideways after the covenant ship went through slipspace in New Mambasa. Between each Mambasa Street segment was a mission where you play as one of the other members from Alpha-Nine (Buck, Romeo, Dutch, and Mickey) to piece together the story and eventually catch up to them. It's fantastic.
Now as far as PvP multiplayer, there isn't any. However, the game included the Halo 3: Mythic disc which had Halo 3's multiplayer and all the DLC's packaged in. It did introduce Firefight, a PvE gamemode where you try and hold out as long as you can with up to 4 other players against waves of enemies.
This game also was culturally significant for the fan base because this was when the legendary Recon helmet became available for the average person to obtain. For context, Recon up to this point was only given to Bungie staff and people who were big in the community or did something cool (examples: JohnCJG for his Arby n' the Chief web series, and that one guy who got killed by a traffic cone). Overall a great entry.
Halo: Reach
I know this one is also technically a spinoff, but you literally can't talk about Halo without mentioning this game. It's too massive to ignore. God, this game... I remember when this game got announced and I about shit my pants. Okay think about this for a minute. You've been a fan of Halo for a few years now. You know some of the lore, then all of a sudden. You see this trailer. "You got Spartans on the ground sir, we're not going anywhere" still sends chills down my spine. If you know Halo, you know about the doomed planet, Reach, which makes that line hit SO damn hard... They literally are buried on that planet... They really aren't going anywhere.
The campaign takes you through the shoes of the new Noble 6, which for the first and only time let you use YOUR custom spartan in the campaign. YOU were noble 6 for all intents and purposes. Throughout the campaign you're basically watching the fall of Rome. You know the story isn't going to end well, but you want to see it out. You're part of this team of mostly Spartan-IIIs, Noble team. Featuring Carter (Noble 1), the fearless leader. Kat (Noble 2), the only woman on the team and has a cool robotic arm after it got blown off (you actually see how in one of the trailers as well as the death of the Noble 6 that came before you). Jun (Noble 3), the stoic sniper. Emile (Noble 5), the guy who totally was Bungie's answer to Ghost from Modern Warfare 2 with his big fuck-off knife and the skull carved into his visor. And Jorge (Noble 5), the only Spartan-II (the same spartan generation as Master Chief), heavy weapons guy, and gentle giant. As the campaign progresses, you watch your team get picked off one by one until you make your final stand after delivering the Package (Cortana) to the Pillar of Autumn. The campaign is tragic, but ends with a bit of hope.
The multiplayer was fantastic in this game. Gamemodes like Invasion pit Spartans against Elites in a sort of hold-the-line objective style match where you fight to not be pushed back. Custom Games got made even better with more options and more map possibilities thanks to the new and improved forge. Tons of good maps, hell Forge World alone was like 5 maps in one.
Some notable changes came primarily with armor abilities which replaced the regular pickups traditional of previous Halo titles. You also had probably the best armor acquisition system in the form of Credits which you earned by just playing the game and used it to buy the armor you wanted. Firefight returns from Halo 3: ODST, but adds even more with the ability to customize loadouts, health, enemy spawn, everything. And forge got cranked up to 11 with a ton of quality of life features. Gunplay was also changed, adding bloom which essentially force players to pace their shots and crouch in order to improve accuracy.
Overall, great game to still come back to
Halo 2
Halo 2 is contested for being THE best Halo game for many, and for good reason. This game is damn near perfect. Gunplay is fantastic and was at it's peak in this game. The story was the best that Bungie put out, splitting the campaign between Chief and the Arbiter, two legendary characters telling stories from opposite sides of the battlefield.
Multiplayer was amazing here. The formation of XBOX LIVE sent this game into the stratosphere. Allowing up to 16 people to connect over the internet and talk shit and bragging about banging the opponent's mom.
Gunplay was at it's peak in this game with a "easy to learn hard to master" system where you could pick up on little tricks like the BXR combo. Dual-wielding was introduced in this game and was only 1 of 2 games (the other being H3) that allowed you to pick up 2 guns and fire them both at the same time.
The story, the multiplayer, the soundtrack, the atmosphere all comes together in this beautiful package. I cannot glaze this game enough, it was the console-seller for the Original XBOX. However, it's beat out by one game.
The Best - Halo 3
I wish I could go back in time and witness the main menu to this game for the first time. It's beautiful. The mix of the main theme and Never Forget never fail to make me feel a certain type of way.
The campaign is the sendoff to the trilogy, with the entire marketing behind the game "Finish the Fight". While the story isn't as deep as Halo 2's, it's bombastic and cinematic. The stakes feel high, and everything led up to this. For the first time you can play 4 player campaign co-op. Player 1 plays as the Chief, Player 2 the arbiter, and player 3 and 4 are some random elites.
The multiplayer was at the series' peak in this entry. Hundreds of thousands were online playing this game. XBOX LIVE only got better. Infection became an official game mode (where in Halo 2 it was just "Zombies" and operated on an honor system and was basically a homebrew gamemode), Griffball made it's debut here where you basically try to plant a bomb in the opposing teams goal and everyone has Gravity Hammers and Energy swords.
Now the critiques. The gunplay in this game isn't as good as Halo 2's either, with weapons like the Battle Rifle feeling like a downgrade. And as mentioned before, the campaign isn't as deep as Halo 2's with some characters becoming more 1-dimensional. Now despite this, why is Halo 3 better? It's the better package.
Not only do you have a solid, albeit simple campaign and a great multiplayer, but you also have theater mode which allowed you to relive previous games, save your best clips and make cool screenshots. File share let you showcase on your profile the aforementioned clips and screenshots as well as custom gamemodes and maps made in forge. Oh yeah, Forge was introduced in this series which allowed for damn near infinite fun with the amount of different maps that can be made. Custom Games was more expansive than ever, allowing you to basically create whatever gamemode you wanted. You could give everyone 3x speed and 1-shot-to-kill. You had infection game modes like Fat Kid where survivors try to escape this slow-approaching, nearly invincible zombie.
This game is the best in the series to me because it is the complete package. It also holds a special place in my heart as the first Halo game I REALLY got into. While Halo 2 ensnared me, Halo 3 became my obsession as a kid. It's still a game I frequent thanks to the revival projects and some fun groups I play with.
Thanks for reading!
Halo is a special series to me, as you've probably guessed. And I haven't glazed this game enough, there's so much I could talk about, but this article has to end at some point.
If you read this whole article... damn, I'm kinda surprised. But hey, if you wanna play some Halo sometime, feel free to reach out to me via email!