Halo 4 Limited Edition -Xbox 360

I'm a bit older than the typical Halo demographic, and one of the major reasons I play it is to keep my brain tuned up. As such, I play campaign more than multi-player.For me, then, the value of a Halo game has a lot to do with how engaging the campaign missions are. The original Halo CE and Halo 2 both had very good campaigns that I was content to play many, many times. Halo 3, Halo ODST, and Halo Reach, by contrast, had campaigns that simply didn't hold my interest past two or three run-throughs. I slogged through them the first time more out of a determination to finish than because I liked them, and only repeated them a couple of times before going back to Halo 2.Now, at last, Halo has a campaign I have had fun playing the first time. Here are some of the things I liked about the campaign.- Nice variety of missions and environments- Engaging story line- New, interesting enemies to fight- No Flood to fight (I'm not much on zombie shooting)- Better availability of weapons and ammo. In Halo Reach's campaign, I felt like I was scrounging for ammo half the time. This one gets back to Halo CE/2 days, where they do a good job of leaving appropriate weapons and ammo at various points in a level.- Very nice rendered scenery - reminiscent of Halo Anniversary edition, but somewhat better- Good cutscenes, both visually and in terms of promoting the story. Finally, finally they got the faces right on the human characters. I'll be watching these all the way through the first several times through the campaign.- Hard to get lost in a level - good signaling about the correct way to go- Good use of extra capabilities in the campaign, especially the jet-pack- Smooth vehicle piloting. The Pelican was an absolute piece of cake to fly, for example. The Warthog felt pretty natural.- Good sounds. The vehicles and weapons have a richer, more natural sound, which makes the experience more immersive.There are a few less-than-perfect things to note. The variety of weapons can be bewildering, and I'll have to do some experimentation in future campaigns to figure them all out. One run-through isn't enough to master all the weapons, or even to become generally familiar with all of them. As usual, it's all too easy to fall off an edge when fighting - sometimes I wish the entire game had a "guard rail" option to turn on.I also noticed a bit of glitchiness on one weapon - the boltshot. It seemed to sometimes not fire on a click the way I expected. That might be because it has a "hold and fire" mode reminiscent of a plasma pistol overload, but at times it just felt a bit wrong.Those are minor issues, though. I'll be putting this campaign through its paces plenty more times, I think. I don't know if I will grow as attached as I did to Halo 2's campaign, but we'll see.*** Update 16 Nov 2012 ***I didn't really get into the Limited Edition goodies in the original review, so I'll add a bit about that. The main reason to get the Limited Edition, I think, is the downloadable content. The details on what you get are in the product description, but in terms of tangible, physical items, you basically get a poster and notebook from Spartan Gabriel Thorne. The notebook is interesting to read if you're into the Halo backstory, and includes a mildly useful UNSC weapon summary. I've uploaded a picture that shows the notebook both closed and open. For size reference, it's about the size of a DVD case.The downloadable stuff includes some specializations you get right away (instead of having to work for them), some spiffs for your armor, some map packs, and access to an extended edition of the Forward Unto Dawn series. If you expect to get the map packs anyway, you'll pay almost as much for them as the gap between this edition and the regular edition. So this isn't a bad deal, but it's not a must-have collectible either.After playing the campaign a couple more times, I still like it, but I have two more comments about it.First, but I noticed that the music is pretty dull compared to earlier versions. It sounds like generic, off-the-shelf video game music, instead of the powerful compositions by Martin O'Donnell in Halo 1 through 3. It's not even as good as the Halo Reach music, which I thought was a step down from earlier Halo games.Also, there is no detectable improvement for the AI that controls the Marines who accompany Master Chief. They will still walk right in front of the player, run him over with vehicles, and other silliness. This detracts at times from the immersive experience of the campaign; you'll be in the middle of kicking some alien butt, and then WHAM, you're run over by a Warthog driven by your allies. But the campaign doesn't have that much fighting with the Marines, and it's no worse than previous versions, so I'm not too upset about it. Ally AI is an area I'd like to see more investment in, though.*** Update 8 July 2013 ***When I wrote the review above, I had not yet had time to play Spartan Ops. I've played it a lot since then, and overall liked it a lot.For practice and replayability (is that a word?), Spartan Ops is as good as campaign, and perhaps slightly better. Spartan Ops does have a story line, but it's told mostly through cut-scenes, and the game play is only tangentially related to the story. It's a good story, involving Catherine Halsey and artifacts on the Requiem Forerunner planet.Note, though, that Spartan Ops is really optimized for co-op play. You can play it alone, but on the higher difficulty levels, it's rather frustrating. You'll get swarmed a lot by enemies with no real ability to deal with it, and then sometimes spawn right in the middle of another swarm. So on the higher levels (Heroic and especially Legendary), get used to dying a lot if you play solo. I've had a lot more fun playing Spartan Ops co-operatively.Spartan Ops does have one serious flaw, and it shares that flaw with the campaign. Dropped weapons disappear in seconds. Halo Reach had this problem too, but the times to disappearance seem shorter now.This is probably appropriate for multi-player, because ordnance drops mean there are lots of heavy weapons that become available. If they all stayed around, that would bias the play against skill with more routine weapons.However, it makes zero sense in campaign and Spartan Ops for weapons to disappear that fast. If you are holding a weapon, you can't drop it because you want to use a different one for a while and then come back to it. When you drop it and move away to fight, it disappears. You can't pick up an enemy weapon and then drop it so that it will hang around either.Halo CE, 2, 3, and ODST did not work this way. Disappearing weapons in Halo 4 has been the single most frustrating thing about campaign and Spartan Ops for me. Please, 343, do something about that for Halo 5. It really hurts the replay experiences to be locked in to certain weapon strategies. And I cannot believe that the game performance would be affected by leaving a couple of dozen weapons touched by the player hanging around indefinitely the way it worked in the earlier versions.

The Limited Edition of Halo 4 is a product that is either worth it or not. This product, meant for extreme halo fans, carries with it special online multiplayer content, avatar props and clothes, the full series of "Halo 4: Forward unto Dawn", and a special UNSC Infinity briefing packet. Though this packet does contain a lot of extra content, much of it is a one-time use thing. If you are a dedicated Halo fan and have followed all the games this Limited Edition is for you.The online content is very unique as well as very noticeable. The content this box gives you is a special unique emblem and background emblem, a weapon skin for your assault rifle, and a uniquely designed recruit armor set. The emblem guarantees that's if you use it people will know that you bought the Halo 4 Limited Edition. The assault rifle skin is also a very noticeable feature during multiplayer. Whether it is you holding it or if you picked it up off the ground players will recognize that you have a special skin on your weapon. Finally the armor set has a unique design that is almost noticeable. The armor set allows for a new way to color your character but one placed in a matchmaking game all player become red or blue and this special decal becomes unnoticed. Overall, two out of three extra content is very noticeable for online and if you want your character to stand out I would recommend buying this special edition. If you do not care too much about how your player looks and just want to get right in and kill people then saving your money could be a good bet for you.The avatar props and skins are just another added bonus of buying this box set. Since I do not edit my avatar I have not uploaded this content to my hard-drive. The content includes an Avatar Cryotube prop and an Avatar male and female version of Spartan armor. If you do like to edit and change you avatar an these two add-ons will help you to stand out amongst your friends.The "Halo 4: Forward unto Dawn" is an action packed, live action, series of the events leading up to Halo 4. If you are a true Halo fan and have been craving a Halo movie than this is a must have. It is very exciting and includes information that relates back to Halo 4. (**Spoilers**) After watching this series there are multiple characters to show up in the Halo 4 campaign. These videos also add to the background story to the whole campaign as well as parts of the special Spartan Ops missions and storylines. They make you feel that you know more about the connection between characters than others who haven't seen this series.Over all this Limited Edition is a must have for Halo fans that want to be recognized on the halo network as dedicated players'. If you crave new exciting info for Halo than I definitely recommend this Limited Edition set, the extra $40 is very much worth it.