Halo: The Master Chief Collection: Halo 4

Knights take a long time to bring down, teleport away when hurt and return with full shields, and can kill in one hit with a lunge or a Binary Rifle. Watchers revive and shield them, catch grenades, and fly off when shot. Crawlers arrive in packs, and the ranks look too alike to tell which Knight carries what. The Prometheans come up in 12% of all reviews and in 25% of the longer ones (31% of the longer negative reviews and 20% of the longer positive ones). Players describe Knights that "absorb bullets like balls of rubber," and one puts it plainly: "It's not fun to shoot at Prometheans, they feel like obstacles and less like fun bad guys to shoot like the Covenant."

Several reviews draw the same line between the two enemy factions, one of them in these words: "the game is at its best when you are fighting covenant but terrible when fighting prometheans." Another rates the campaign "Fun until the Forerunners show up, so about 3/8 of the game is worth playing." Some players like the new enemies. One calls the Knight an "Absolutely fantastic new enemy to fight," and another says Knights "aren't actually that bad when you adopt a more aggressive play style."

In 10% of reviews the charge is that Halo 4 does not feel like Halo, or that it plays like Call of Duty. The reasons given are sprint and loadouts, quick-time events, redesigned enemies and weapons, a new score and a heavier focus on story. "It's not Halo. It's call of duty wearing halo's dead skin as a fur coat," one player writes. A few reviewers who played the Bungie games first in the collection describe the switch to Halo 4 as jarring, and some say they would rate it higher as a standalone shooter.

One long positive review pushes back: "this is not Call of Duty in Halo pyjamas; this is Halo to the bones." Other defenders put the complaints down to resistance to change.

Reviewers complain that the game never explains why the Covenant, including the Elites who fought alongside humanity at the end of Halo 3, are hostile again, that the Didact gets little screen time and a thin motive, and that the Forerunner backstory arrives in one long cutscene and in optional terminals. Complaints about the wider plot appear in 10% of reviews. "The game introduces you back into the world of halo in a very confusing way, handwaving away why you fight the covenant again, for example," one player writes. Another found that "In order to understand its lore or its narrative elements, you must read a trilogy of novels that were released before the game." Even a recommender says "The Didact is not an interesting villain." Long-time fans also object to retcons, such as the reveal that the Forerunners were not ancient humans.

Several reviews describe two stories of different quality inside one game: "It felt like they hired a professional author for the former, and a self published fanfic author for the latter," one writes of the Chief and Cortana thread versus the Didact. Others find the plot easy to follow: "Contrary to common claims, you don't need a bookcase and a thesis to understand Halo 4."

The art direction draws comment in 8% of reviews, most of it negative. Players dislike the bulkier Elites, the reptilian Grunts and Jackals, the new Spartan armor ("the biggest sin of all is Chief's armor looks truly abysmal.") and the busy, glowing Forerunner architecture. Part of the complaint is practical: grey Prometheans against grey walls are hard to pick out, and enemy ranks are hard to read at a glance. One player asks "which idiot thought that making your enemies the exact same boring colour as the entire map was a good idea?" A smaller group likes the more detailed look: "Great art style, doesn't look like a cartoon."

Spartan Ops, the episodic co-op mode that replaces Firefight, comes up in 6% of reviews and draws far more complaints than praise. Players describe 50 short missions on recycled maps with the same objectives ("For first five episodes you're playing through the same couple levels that are just repurposed"), enemies that spawn on top of the player, and no matchmaking, so most people play alone against encounters tuned for a team: "the amount of enemies does not scale with the number of player." One player simply asks, "Please add matchmaking for spartan ops, I don't want to play the missions alone." Achievement hunters resent having to finish it solo on Legendary. Players who brought a full squad liked it more, and one says "episode 6-10 are actually pretty fun" once the early episodes are done.

Players describe small reserve caps and dropped guns that vanish quickly ("Why do weapons despawn after 10 seconds?"), which pushes them onto Promethean weapons that feel like copies of guns they already had. Ammo comes up in 5% of reviews, and among the longer reviews in 15% of negative ones and 6% of positive ones. One writes that "you run out of ammo so quickly you'd think the famine skull was active," referring to the series' ammo-starving modifier, and another puts it as "I love having to spend all my ammo on Knights and still run out of ammo before they die." Recommenders joke about it too: "i loved the part where i had no ammo (the entire game)." One player sees an easy fix: "If you just increase the ammo caps the game instantly becomes bearable to play."

Reclaimer, the fifth mission, holds the bug players report most often. After the Lich is destroyed during the Mammoth escort, a section of terrain fails to load and the player falls through the map or gets stuck. About 1% of reviews describe it, from launch week in November 2020 to reviews written in late 2025. "Reclaimer mission unplayable because terrain will disappear making you stuck unable to complete the mission," reads one. Players trade workarounds, from restarting the mission to waiting before boarding: "Do not get back on the Mammoth until the ship goes up; otherwise the glitch will occur." Other reports include a door in Composer that would not open, players stuck in floating sniper towers, missing sounds, and co-op sessions where "the lag is 10x worse, to the point where we can't even complete a single level."

Separately, about 1% of reviews report Halo 4 failing to start or install at all (a fatal error on launch, black screens, content listed as missing, anti-cheat or Xbox sign-in errors), most of them in the first year after launch. Some of these are faults in the collection's launcher and accounts that affect every game in it. "Can't even get it to work because of that stupid fatal error," one player wrote in launch week.

The final confrontation with the Didact is a short sequence of button prompts with no boss fight. "Final Boss fight was a quick time event 1/10," reads one review, and another calls it "just a lazy cop-out that required you to push a couple of buttons when the prompt told you to." Players who see quick-time events as out of place in Halo object to the ones elsewhere in the campaign too, and the finale and the other quick-time events together come up in 3% of reviews.

Some players find the campaign's structure repetitive: corridors and arenas linked by objectives to hit a switch or destroy a glowing core. In one player's words, objectives are "largely 'go to X marker and press a button'", and another asks "why is there a mini-cutscene every time you push a button?" A few miss the wider, multi-route levels of earlier games and point to invisible walls.

A small group finds the lighting hard to look at: heavy bloom, lens flares and camera shake, with no setting to tone them down. "I find the game quite hard on the eyes, it's just excessively shiny and bloomy in areas," one player writes, and another notes "there is no option to turn of screen shaking and motion blur."

Some players who compare it closely with earlier games say the AI took a step back: Covenant enemies stand still under fire, and allies drive badly or fire at corpses. "Friendly AI is super stupid and will shoot dead bodies instead of live enemies," one writes.