It’s unfortunate that 343 decided to make the Flood the only enemy you’ll face in the game’s five co-op missions because you rarely get a chance to enjoy some of the more interesting aspects of Spartan Assault like the vehicle levels and the more strategy oriented gameplay of taking down bigger Covenant enemies.Īnd while three of the five missions in co-op essentially boil down to a timed survival mission, there are some pretty unique co-op elements. Don’t buy it.While the main game has you only facing off against Covenant forces like grunts, jackals, brutes, and elites - the co-op mode pits you against the most annoying enemy in Halo lore - the Flood. I’ve no idea why this exists, or why you would ever want to play it.īasically, it’s a load of old gash.
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Halo’s bloody brilliant, and Microsoft’s bizarre inability to get their shit together and sell it to PC gamers makes me truly sad. But that’s not very funny, and anyway, I don’t want to look down on Halo. I wanted to make a joke here about how PC gamers can now look down on Halo and laugh, because we can now look at Halo from above. Apparently it’s coming, but for goodness sake what year is this? There’s a baffling loadout system that lets you spend XP or actual real-life, honest-to-god-you-have-to-be-kidding-right, money, on new (and mostly pointless) items that are consumed each mission. The control scheme for the Scorpion Tank means you can only travel in straight or diagonal lines. You can, however, compete for high scores, making the game slightly harder by applying ‘skulls’ to each level – the idea being that if you limit the ammo drops and remove your health, you might have a bit more fun. You can’t play co-op, and there’s no competitive online mode.
There’s no sign of the Warthog, for instance, nor the Flood, nor any of the Promethean enemies that made their debut in Halo 4. It’s the ambition of the Halo FPS games that allows for this variety but Spartan Assault never capitalises on what Halo can do. One mission might see you escorting snipers into position, the next driving a Covenant tank in an ambush. Missions are short (you can burn through most in five minutes or so), and to be fair, the game does try to mix them up. When it does get hard, it gets hard unfairly: killing you for unavoidable mistakes (getting out of your vehicle too close to another will instantly kill you) or because it just decides to place arbitrary checks in front of you – one mission in which you have to hammer down a set of doors while fighting off troops is arbitrarily tough because there just isn’t enough ammo to do the right amount of damage. The one trick that makes you smile for two seconds is the idea of suicidal grunts: running towards you with twin grenades. In Spartan Assault, they display the same behaviour, but it’s just not fun enough: an Elite is just a Grunt with a bigger health bar, and a Brute, when they finally appear, is just an Elite with an even bigger health bar. They’ll walk and move to make them into interesting baddies. Halo’s enemies were meant to be fought from ground level, not from space. Spartan Assault never manages this: there just aren’t ever enough enemies on screen, nor do they ever feel particularly dangerous.įor another: it’s repetitive. The thing I’ve always liked about twin-stick shooters is a sense of escalating chaos – the idea that you’re only just keeping a lid on waves of baddies. Spartan Assault’s major crime is that it’s incredibly, stupefyingly boring.įor one: it’s almost absurdly simple. Spartans can also punch baddies in the face, and where the level design demands it, they’ll ride vehicles and gun turrets. There are plasma and frag grenades, and they carry the same effects: plasma grenades will stick and explode, frags will bounce. The same restrictions that make the first person games Halo are present: you can only carry two weapons at any one time, alongside grenades and an armour ability.