Everything runs smoothly on the control front… until the time comes to sprint with precision. It’s during the game’s chase sequences that its shortcomings being painfully obvious. There are few things more maddening than being on a target’s heels only to clamber up a wall or dive into a pile of hay because you get too close to it. The game is simply too finicky for its own good in this regard, and you’ll end up replaying these sections far more often than you should because of it.

New to the campaign is a series of optional “strike force” missions, which is meant to take sort of a real-time strategy approach. You command units, moving them to defend or attack various points, while retaining the ability to jump into any one of them and take direct control. On paper it sounds pretty cool. In practice it feels like a work in progress. Unmanned units are largely impotent and splitting your forces never works. Instead you just end up ordering everyone to advance on a specific locale and jump from one unit to the next, killing as many enemies as you can. If Treyarch plans to bring the concept back next time it definitely needs some fine tuning.

There was no reason to mess with Halo’s controls, and the only notable difference between what you’ll find here versus Halo 3 is the addition of armour abilities (introduced in Halo: Reach). Gunplay is tight as a drum, allowing for precision aiming whether zoomed or firing from the hip. Vehicles handle exactly how you remember from the cumbersome Scorpion to the fishtailing Warthog — speaking of which, the game seems to assume you’ve played before as there were no instructions (at least on higher difficulty settings).