Halo: Spartan Assault Review

Published 15th June 2014

Halo: Spartan Assault became free with Games with Gold starting early June. For free its definitely worth picking up, however if you paid the full amount for the game I would be disappointed. Halo Spartan Assault is a beautiful game to look at, its done in a typical Halo style with some gritty areas made wonderful with glowing plasma. Apart from graphical beauty however, nothing stands out at all. Missions feel like a chore very quickly, they lack creativity and seem forced to make up levels. Usually there is a single objective, for example, survive till evac, destroy wraiths, get to an certain point etc. This also creates an issue of a lack of difficulty to go with the game. Most levels feel like you needs to walk in one direction and never stop shooting. You will very rarely feel outnumbered and therefore you will never feel like Halo Spartan Assault tests your ability at any time. The only time issues arise in Halo: Spartan Assault is when ammo becomes an issue, which happens often as ammo is sparse at best, its simple to fix though as all that is needed is to find a weapon on the floor. Halo: Spartan Assault was priced at £12 on the Xbox Live Store, average price for a full arcade game. I don’t feel like it lived up to the Halo name. It plays as a top down third person twin stick shooter, very similar to Call Of Duty’s Black Ops arcade zombies map.character movement is done by the left stick and aiming is done with the left stick. Its very fluid and easy to grasp very quickly, aiming is also helped by a mild sticky aim over enemies to help at long range kills. Grenades can become problematic with a lack of throw able distance making them difficult to judge at times. There are many weapons in Halo: Spartan Assault, all are returning weapons from previous Halo games. Halo: Spartan Assault has a poor story that never really grips at any point, it does add some back story to the Halo games that add depth overall, but you have to listen and follow attentively to understand, this is because the story follows 6 different Spartans, each Spartan has their own chapter in the game, with each having 5 missions each, making a total of 30 missions that rarely take longer than 5 minutes each and never take more than 10 minutes. There is a weapon selection prior to each mission, you can purchase other weapons to start with to help make a level easier, it will also help you gain points to get gold stars on each mission if that happens to be what you want to achieve. In game credits can be attained by completing missions or via micro-transactions. There is a co-op in Halo: Spartan Assault, however it is very weak. The simple option would be to have co-op on the main missions. Instead they put in 6 co-op only missions, which means some people may never play them as Halo: Spartan Assault is on-line co-op only. The co-op missions are fun but the experience doesn’t last long, very dissapointing. Returning for Halo: Spartan Assault are dual wielding weapons, something that has been lost in Halo for a few games now. Although there is dual wielding, you do not feel that same fun emotion of actually dual wielding in a first person shooter Halo game. It brings back memories of Halo’s 1 and 2 but never quite recreates the raw emotion that those games created. The issue is that this game never quite gets to the standard that previous halo games have set. The controls are solid and very well done, however there is a lack of map creativity and the story is poor. The game never grips you fully and there is a feeling that micro transactions are almost necessary. The co-op side lacks length and any depth, but can be fun for a short burst with a friend. The graphics are beautiful but the rest of the game lets it down completely, definitely not worth buying, but definitely worth a free download with the games with gold programme.