Played through the first two missions of Spartan Ops, and a bit of the third. Quick thoughts.
Land Grab was probably more fun than I had in the entire Campaign, so it's off to a good start. Just a nice, big sandbox to play in with lots of toys and a surprisingly large number of enemies dropped in. Just messing around I was using Ghosts, Wraiths, long range DMRing, close range FRG romps and a bit of vehicle boarding via ambushes. If this is at all indicative of how Spartan Ops missions will be set up, I'm pretty excited.
The second mission was a pretty straight forward mini-level, complete with the Campaign's maddening "press three buttons to progress" mechanics, but it was the right bite-size, concentrated flavor of combat.
The third mission was Prometheans and I turned it off there, since I have come to really not enjoy fighting them. (More on that another time.)
I'm looking forward to seeing where the series progresses. 50 missions is going to be a LOT of content.
Some less positive observations:
As reinforcements were dropped off in Land Grab, every one of them got a waypoint marker, a little red wedge arrow over their heads. At one point there was a solid red mass of such markers clustered up where a pair of Phantoms dropped guys off. This is an example of when information meant to be helpful was in fact annoying. And then, when I got down to the last five guys, the radio dude tells me he's going to paint the last targets for me, something done in Reach's Firefight to help you clean up rounds. So the red arrows changed color. Were they a bug?
Too much information is a theme I noticed. The radar now packs so much information into it, it actually takes something away from the game. It not only has an enormous range, but it seems to flag enemies who are not moving. It also now has markers on the edges to flag enemies who are not even in radar range yet, telling me there are going to be some enemies within this 50 yard radar soon. The consequence is I find myself reflexively using the radar more than I ever have before, because it's telling me what's around every corner. And around the one after that, for good measure. I think I'd rather play with no radar, than one that telegraphs encounters this thoroughly and so far out. (And I don't like playing without radar, historically.)
A notification that a Challenge has incremented pops up every single time you contribute to completing one. Today there are Challenges for killing Elites, Grunts and Jackals. So, every single time I kill one, a big text box popped out of the right side fo the screen to tell me. The box itself is about 3x the size of the one that was used in Reach, so it's already intrusive. But Reach also set thresholds to let you know how you were progressing on the Challenge. If the goal was to kill 100 dudes, we'd get updates at 25, 50, 75 and then 100 when it was cleared. The goal to kill Grunts causes this giant box to pop up 100 times. This got obnoxious in five minutes, and I hope it's dialed way back.
All in all the game is just dumping too much information on me. Too much advance notice of enemies, too many Challenge pop ups, too many waypoints for enemies and objectives and ordnance and allies and so on. It adds up to a very cluttered experience.
But what I objected to the most was what happened when I died: no checkpoint, just a multiplayer style respawn. I was playing single player, and the realization that I had both unlimited lives and no consequence at all for death was a saddening one. I'd long since accepted that Spartan Ops was not a survival mode. But a mode where there is absolutely no consequence for dying? And in fact doing so is beneficial, because you keep your progress and get a refueled load out for doing so? I understand the reasoning when playing online - they want it be an arcade/multiplayer type of experience, but the lack of a checkpoint system in single player is upsetting. That means even in single player it's just a matter of throwing enough bodies at an encounter to break them.
Halo campaigns are, for me, fun in part because they force you to learn from your mistakes. I'll try an encounter one way, fail, and then try a different approach. And when that works, maybe next time I'll try something totally different and see how that works, to mix it up. Spartan Ops lack of a checkpoint system removes that from the game. Now, if something doesn't work, if my approach was flawed, I don't have to learn from it. I get both the benefit of killing some dudes, and a respawn with a refueled load out. So in some ways you get rewarded for failure.
Not sure if that's something that can be tweaked post-ship. But the total and complete removal of any challenge at all, nevermind survival, is going to suck a huge amount of the replay out of the mode for me. I hope there are ways to update it to a more traditional checkpoint system.
