Halo 4 Still Holds Up As The Best Halo Game Ever, 14 Years Later

There’s a new Halo game out in the wild. Well, okay, fine, there’s an old Halo game out — again. Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved, is a modern-day reminder that the original Halo game was…pretty dang good! Bungie’s Xbox launch title was a stunning display of moody tone, a massive step forward for level design, and the overall experience still holds up today. But as Halo fans wade into the nostalgia pool, I can’t help but think that Halo is far from the best Halo game. That honor goes to Halo 4.

Released in 2012 during the twilight of the Xbox 360 era, Halo 4 marked a major shift for the series. Bungie had moved on, and the nascent 343 Industries, which had released a remaster of Halo: Combat Evolved in 2011, continued carrying the Halo torch. Players widely criticized it at the time for “CoD-ifying” Halo, for playing around with lore, and for showing a more emotional side of protagonist Master Chief.

Those are all the reasons Halo 4 rules.

Throughout the original trilogy, Master Chief is stoic. Sure, he cracks the occasional clever one-liner, but is largely a man on a singular mission: protecting humanity against an existential extraterrestrial threat. Halo 4 opens that up, focusing more on the bond between Chief and Cortana, the AI construct who’s accompanied him, quite literally in his head, through all three games. At the end of Halo 3, their enemies vanquished and humanity saved, Master Chief and Cortana are left abandoned in deep space, drifting through uncharted cosmos in the busted remains of an interstellar ship. “Wake me when you need me,” he says, entering cryosleep. At the start of Halo 4, she needs him.

While Chief is still cryogenically suspended, a Covenant splinter faction storms the ship. Cortana wakes him up to do the whole Master Chief thing (shoot aliens), and it turns out they’re orbiting a derelict planetary structure, to which they make their escape. On the planet, Chief discovers Cortana is experiencing rampancy, the Halo universe is the term for what happens when an AI construct starts to degrade. Thus begins a new mission for Chief, who will do anything he possibly can to save Cortana. Partway through the game, Master Chief literally defies an order — something he had never done in the original trilogy — for her. For the first time, instead of saving billions of people, he’s only trying to save one. (Don’t worry, there’s still a galactically threatening foe in the form of an ancient Forerunner dude named the Didact, but that plot frankly takes a backseat to the Chief and Cortana throughline.)

It’s a swerve for Halo, an unexpectedly thorny, emotional story in a series known for its black-and-white bombast. But it works because it’s backed up by some seriously kickass levels. With Halo 4, 343 Industries proved a Halo game could feature a personal story without sacrificing the explosive gameplay the series made its name on. There’s a low-gravity segment. There’s a defend-the-giant-moving-fortress segment. There’s a segment with a freakin’ mech. At one point, near the end, you get to pilot one of those Broadsword exoatmospheric fighter jets — a first for Halo.

Even Halo 4’s multiplayer component was revolutionary. Halo 4 is when Halo evolved into a truly modern competitive shooter. Gone were the days of clunkily lumbering around the battlefield; you could sprint, use thrusters, and activate jetpacks to dart around the battlefield. Promethean weapons — which fired “hard light” rather than human bullets or Covenant plasma — cracked open a sandbox that had remained largely static for nearly a decade. And its maps were some of the series’ strongest; the circumferential Haven remains, to this day, one of the best competitive Halo maps of all time. (Dear Halo Studios: Bring it back!)

But the real clincher for Halo 4 is that it is the only mainline Halo game that has literally nothing wrong with it. Halo: Combat Evolved’s immaculate vibes were offset by a mission structure that essentially repeated several levels. Halo 2’s scope creep was plainly apparent in some chapters. Halo 3 killed off Sergeant Johnson, so I’ll never forgive it. A similar grudge is extended to Halo: Reach for all the friendships it ruined thanks to Armor Lock. Halo 5… we don’t talk about Halo 5. And even I can admit my beloved Halo Infinite stumbled at the start and never fully found its footing. Halo 4 has none of that baggage.

There’s a decades-old meme in the Halo community called the “Halo Cycle,” though it doubles as a fairly accurate read on fan tastes. According to the cycle, the newest game in the series is always “shit,” the previous game in the series “wasn’t as bad as originally thought,” and the game before that one is the “pinnacle of the series.” So, for instance, as the meme goes, when Halo 3 was released in 2007, it was the worst thing that’s ever happened to Halo. But then the release Halo: Reach drew everyone’s ire, leading to a reappraisal of Halo 3. (Again, according to the meme.) By the time Halo 4 came out and became the latest game for players to hate, Halo 3 was elevated by fans as the best thing that’s ever happened to Halo, knocking Halo 2 out of that position.

Halo 4 never really completed this cycle. It’s long overdue.

Halo 4 is available on Windows PC and Xbox Series X, either individually or as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. It’s also included in the Game Pass library.