Our first impressions of Halo 4 are of refinement - everything is sharper and smoother - but the reality is that there were fewer issues hanging over from the last generation in need of redressing. In its new 1080p60 guise, Halo 4 is both a celebration of 343's accomplishments (we'd almost forgotten how good the performance capture and facial rendering was) but also an example of the remastering uncanny valley we also saw in The Last of Us on PS4. When it looks good, it's simply stunning, but lower quality assets - mostly ground textures in the Infinity stage - do stand out as incongruous, particularly when texture filtering doesn't show quite the improvement we would hope for.
Another aspect shared with The Last of Us is a more inconsistent frame-rate, certainly in comparison with the more solid Halo 3. When we hit the magic 60, the experience is phenomenal, but the dips beneath are quite noticeable, and briefly interfere with the interface between player and machine in terms of controller response. Based on the context in which the dips are happening, it looks like Halo 4 may well be more CPU-limited than GPU - a reminder of just how capable the last-gen consoles were in that regard, particularly in the latter years when developers really pushed the older hardware to its limits. On the whole though, it's difficult not to be enthused by an Xbox One version of Halo 4. Looking back to our original coverage of the Xbox 360 version, we're reminded of just how beautiful this game was - and is. Even a 1080p port should be something very, very special.
