Oh of course, but the designs and story backgrounds for the design choices have been better in past Halo games. I believe Ghaleon made a post on it in the Halo 3 thread about "the overarching story of Halo 3 was lackluster, but its microstories or the reason to go from one encounter to the next were much better than the other games." I think that still rings true, and in turn directly applies to the gameplay at hand.
I'm gonna use ONI Sword Base as example: the mission consists of clearing out an area. Nothing happens as a result other than you are asked to push out and get communications online and reactivate an AA battery. That gameplay that I just did feels really unimportant. Meanwhile I have communication from my Spartan squad as well as the other troopers. If I reactivate the AA gun, then there's still going to be enemies at the base. It really makes the player feel like their actions were meaningless.
And most of the missions follow a similar feeling of "Does my action here really affect anything in the long term story or the short term gameplay?" There wasn't much that was great about the first few missions. Tip of the Spear had a new low for Halo having the on-the-rails section, but it had the potential for having an incredible high with Spire. But limited amounts of AI dampened what could have been an amazing sandbox gameplay section. LNoS suffers from each section being far to short to get any sort of enjoyment out of it. Exodus and New Alexandria are probably the best missions in the game, but that's not saying a whole lot(Don't get me wrong here though. These are probably on par with missions like Crow's Nest and the next to last Arbiter mission in Halo 2). And the last 2 missions are mainly Firefight sections with some uninteresting pushes between sections.