Game play wise Halo 4 is awesome. The story sucks. The lack of variety in enemies makes for a dull experience.
It would have been better off if Master Chief had died at the end of Halo 3.
So I finally got my copy of Halo 4 and I have now beaten the campaign. I have not played Spartan ops yet, but let me put it this way: As long as it's something that doesn't directly include the Master Chief then it could be worth something.
Main story: Somehow a forerunner has survived millennia imprisoned inside a forerunner shield world. So the only surviving forerunner is evil. They saved the evil guy... After the rings were fired killing all life, after countless ages he tricks you into releasing him.
...from inside his own cell, he tricks you into releasing him, by manipulating his prison... Did I mention he knows magic? Or the force, because he does force grip you. Oh! I know! How about the part where you NEVER fight him? Or the part where he personally does nothing more than force grip you? At the end you do 3 quick time moves to plant a grenade on his chest and Cortana saves you from him AND kills him. And then she saves you from a nuclear explosion from the warhead you detonated... WITH YOUR HAND. No, you didn't even lose a pinky.
BTW, no, I can't explain how Cortana had the ability to save the chief. She just DOES.
Well they did it. Chief is now the second coming of Christ himself. You find what remains of a Forerunner's memory stored in a computer and she admits to having sown the seeds to Humanities rebirth. Ok, that I can deal with. Wait... 343, what are you doing? Stop. Stooooooooooop! She continues "Yes, I laid the ground work for your being. You, your armor and your AI companion. I arranged it so you would be here to defeat this threat."
W.T.L.F.
So the forerunners had the power to set things in motion to create ONE individual over numerous millennia, insuring he gets augmented into an experimental warrior, gets experimental armor, and an experimental AI. Not only that, but battle off the covenant and defeat the flood AGAIN since they couldn't do it right the first time, only to end up at this world to defeat this Forerunner that doesn't know what time is. Yet they couldn't put a round between this evil forerunner's eyes?
Oh and Lasky? You know how forward unto Dawn ended with him as a grizzled captain who says "We're going to get chief"? Yeah, no. He's a young hopeful officer on a ship that ends up in the area because they found some coordinates from a forerunner site. Oh, and you know how at the very end of the last episode the Infinity has a bunch of smaller support craft with it when they go to jump to get the chief? You know, like real battle groups to protect big important ships? Turns out the ships weren't going to the same place because the Infinity WAS THE ONLY SHIP THAT SHOWED UP. Oh, and the guy that actually is the Captain? Says "screw you chief, you're crazy. I'm going home." Like the chief didn't just save the human race four years earlier.
Not to mention the Infinity, the BIGGEST ship ever built by mankind to this point, crash lands on a planet and within a day, after no serious repairs, takes off for space again...
This is why it would have been better off if Chief had died. There is no way that man would fade quietly into the night. He has nothing but fighting. But there gets to be a point where upping the ante just makes it that less real. He has changed from being a soldier doing what he can to save mankind into Hercules... He has no one to settle down with and raise a child with, and hell if they keep what the books say he's sterile. Even if they dont keep that, there's NO WAY they can logically have Cortana be the mother of his child. If he survived Halo 3 he should have, at best, made kick ass appearances throughout and moved on, but not been the main character. There are other Spartan twos. Share the love.
How about the fact that besides hunters (only 4 in the campaign) there are 3 kinds of covenant and 3 kinds of forerunner lackeys? Grunts, Jackals, Elites. Knights, Dog things, watchers. ...That got boring.
The game looks great, plays great, but the plot holes are so big that they are in fact black holes. Didn't you know 4 years in cryo sleep magically upgrades your armor? The content from their miniseries, which was awesome, doesn't match up with what went on in the game. It's not that it breaks the halo universe, it's that it breaks logic. There is some serious potential from 343, but I feel that everyone BESIDES the Halo 4 campaign story team could come up with some awesome stuff.
Otherwise RIP Chief