I guess I'll keep doing these every week until someone asks me to stop.
Episode 8 was pretty good. I'd put it on even ground with 7, and both of those are below 6.
Asset reuse: there was much of it. Two cases of it were very well done (
), but the others were...maybe not so much (
). You know it's a Halo game when the friendly AI is too stupid to aim at the giant glowing orb that says NEUTRALIZE in big letters. The levels in my first spoiler tag were reused very well, it was a case of the maze being rearranged or adjusted just enough to play out pretty differently. That's really what I'm looking for out of asset reuse - make the levels different enough to justify their existence as separate entities. The others were either not particularly fun or felt very, very similar to their previous uses.
Encounter design is hit or miss, better than the last half of the season but par for the course in this half. I found I spent a lot of time waiting for Phantoms to drop troops off, which isn't usually a barrel of fun (seriously, fuck those turret grunts, their pinpoint accuracy from extreme range while the phantom is barreling past making it hard to hit them is annoying). Drop pod style enemy spawning this week is a dramatic improvement over the hot garbage that was last week's engine room's Futurama People Tubes dropping people directly onto the players' heads. Again this week, the bane of fun returns with a vengeance: Gold Fuel Rod Elites. Stop it. Please. At one point I was bumrushed by two at once and was dead before I could even react.
If you've enjoyed the last couple of weeks, this is around that quality bar, which is to say it'll be pretty fun if you've got a friend to coop with, occasionally frustrating but mostly fine solo on the higher difficulties.