Customizable loadouts, uncommon in the mainline Halo campaigns, let you pair the assault rifle with a rocket launcher right out the door. That's not to say Spartan Strike is bereft of features. There are very few extended breaks in between gun battles. marines joining the fight, it's a mystery that Spartan Strike lacks multiplayer, especially when it was one of the big draws of Spartan Assault. Thrilling moments, like vanquishing energy sword-wielding elites, often make high-score incentives a secondary priority. The odds seldom feel overwhelming, but there's still a lot of death to go around. Whatever your objectives, it's the abundance of Covenant and Prometheans that serves as the game's connective tissue. Holding your ground in a limited space offers a glimpse of how a Fireflight mode would work as a twin stick shooter.
Again, these are short missions, and the simplicity of these assignments works well for Spartan Strike. A given stage will involve one, or a combination, of the following objectives: get from Point A to Point B, destroy X objects, or survive for X seconds. If you've played Spartan Assault (and you should have already, if you're a fan of Halo's expanded universe), the Spartan Strike mission objectives will be very familiar. The same goes for the mounted gun atop a warthog, which doesn't suffer from overheating. The battle rifle bridges the lethality of the sniper rifle with the firing rate of the assault rifle, and, as always, makes short work of any elite. As in Spartan Assault, transposing familiar enemies into an overhead-camera perspective works, because of the familiar weapons used to kill them. Even without the first-person view, killing up close in Spartan Strike quenches the bloodlust for these troublesome halflings. Much like the Rappys in Phantasy Star Online and the blackbirds in Bloodborne, the Halo Grunts are the series' annoyance incarnate, which makes melee kills with rifle butts all the more satisfying. Spartan Strike's bite-sized five-minute missions fit in well with a straightforward story involving the Artifact of Doom plot device trope. It might be inconsistent to see Prometheans in a story arc related to Halo 2, but that doesn't dilute the gratification of making them disintegrate, especially when using their own weapons.
The 15 years Halo has been around offers more than enough time for minor timeline errors and potential retconning. Conversely, the location shift to Gamma Halo (also known as Installation 03) is a less engrossing environment, as, for the most part, it's a generic jungle accented with Forerunner architecture.
Although your player-character functions like a one-man army, nothing detracts from the implied accomplishments of the soldiers in the surrounding areas. While you're guiding a Spartan-IV along a commercial district in the foreground, UNSC troops are holding their own on a bridge in the background, hundreds of yards away. The raised visual perspective of Spartan Strike shows off New Mombasa as a highly vertical metropolis. In Halo 2, New Mombasa was a war-torn battleground where Master Chief was just one of countless soldiers tasked to repel the Covenant. Spartan Strike is never monotonous, partly thanks to its vehicular sections.Įqually engaging is the opportunity to revisit familiar areas from the main series. Through much of Spartan Strike, the Conduit is subjected to a football-like change of hands between the UNSC Marine Corps and the Covenant. It is also a tried and tested sci-fi term that has been used in Mass Effect, Dead Space, and as the title of a Sega-published first-person shooter. In this case, the artifact is called the Conduit, a device that functions as a Promethean portal key. Spartan Strike's bite-sized five-minute missions fit in well with a straightforward story involving the Artifact of Doom plot device.
#HALO SPARTAN STRIKEPC SERIES#
From a continuity standpoint, Spartan Strike takes bigger risks than Spartan Assault, setting reprisals from Halo 2 while giving more screen time to the Prometheans, who weren't introduced to the series until Halo 4.
As the follow-up to Vanguard Games' Halo: Spartan Assault, Halo: Spartan Strike is not only a spin-off, but also a top-down shooter that reinforces the notion that Halo need not be limited to the first-person perspective. That's where all the spin-offs and novels come in. Right from the landmark battle aboard the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, the Halo franchise has almost always been a team effort, even though Master Chief has done most of the heavy lifting in the mainline series.
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