This game doesn't have any guardians...or maybe it does.
While the previous four games were well received, I don't think the same can be said for the fifth entry. This is where, unfortunately, things started to go wrong.
The trailers had story elements that weren't in the final game, whose graphics, as per usual in the franchise, are very amazing. In the trailers, Locke is hunting down Master Chief, but in the game, he wants to help him. The whole Master Chief vs. Spartan Locke is blown up to seem more important and larger than in the actual campaign, and the fight cutscene for that battle is just pathetic: fans derided it as looking like "two fat guys fighting over a cheeseburger." Because of all this...
The story is very poorly written, as it's entirely dependent on the player being familiar with the extended lore from the external source materials as well as the plots of previous games. If the player has not read every novel and comic associated with the franchise, characters and plot points will appear from nowhere with no explanation as to who or what they are. The game also undoes and cops out the emotional ending of Halo 4 by deciding Cortana is actually still alive, and not only is she alive, she's become the antagonist, outright ruining her built up character development from previous games. And if that's not enough, the story ends on a poorly made apocalyptic cliffhanger.
While it goes back to the universal loadout system of the past games, rather than the weapon unlocking of Halo 4, its campaign formula is repetitive and recycled from Halo 4. You also barely play as Master Chief, you know the main character of the entire series! Instead, you play as Spartan Locke for most of the game. There are only three missions where you actually play as Master Chief. This is because of the story is centered around finding him, which the advertising and the back of the box states. You do not also have the ability to play as any other character in Campaign, only playing as either Locke or Chief in single player. You get to play as those characters when you are in co-op mode. This makes the campaign, which can be beaten in under 5 hours, more preferable to play in co-op campaign rather in single player. Additionally, some of the missions are just "guns down" sections with no action at all. Speaking of guns, there is still no dual wielding, even after Halo 3.
While the voice acting is still good, many of the characters are forgettable and often have cardboard personalities, including Osiris, Lasky and Spartan Locke. The teammate gimmick is barely incorporated into the game's plot, with most of the extra characters having no real role in the scenes they're in. There are even character spoilers in the subtitles: rather than doing the normal thing of having unknown characters referred to as "unknown" or "?" the game immediately identifies both Cortana and the Warden Eternal before any character knows that's who they are.
The fall damage from Halo: Reach and Halo 4 is gone, now collision damage only occurs when hitting a structure at fast speeds like in Halo 3 again. The ground pound, however, is a useless ability in single-player, and the only reason to use it is to test out glitches.
The bosses are extremely overpowered, and you'll find yourself dying constantly due to the fact that there's a lot of enemies firing at you. The Warden Eternal boss is the worst, especially since it is recycled 7 times throughout the entire campaign.
The game has loot boxes in the form of Requisition Packs, which give you cosmetics and in-game bonuses. Requisition Packs are awful, you also get 18 items each pack but you only get awarded only 2 new items at a time. If there's a certain cosmetic you want there's a 0.1% chance to get it.
One of the main pillars of Halo, split-screen, is removed! This means that your friends have to buy another Xbox One console and another copy of the game if you want to play with them. This also means that if you don't have those or online friends who will play with you, good luck playing multiplayer with your Forge maps and custom game types, because you can't play split screen.
Speaking of multiplayer, you still can't play as the elites in the multiplayer. The multiplayer maps are just average with a bad map rotation, but many of the old Halo maps can be unlocked for free, which is nice. Some game modes were also removed in multiplayer from older games at first, but some were added later. On the other hand, it's great multiplayer that is an improvement over Halo 4's, even though the maps are average and some of the game modes were removed. Now though, they added some additional modes such as Infection back from past Halo games. And, for the first time since Halo 2, the multiplayer portion of the game is playable on PC (until the MCC on PC). In fact lots of content was added for free via updates.
Forge (a mode where you can build and edit maps) wasn't in the game at launch. It was added in the last 2015 update. Anybody playing between launch and the Forge update could have been turned away by the lack of the Forge mode, which was a staple of the franchise after Halo 3 introduced it. The new control layout for the Forge mode is very confusing. Thankfully, at all times there is a controls list that shows you what commands you can do in the current context on the left side of the screen. The Forge mode has some annoying limitations when making maps. There are three limits that limit the number of objects you can place on the map including the object limit of 1600 objects itself, and two percentage-based limits which are physics and collision. The problem is you can't place objects if the object you're attempting to place would push the physics or collision budget category over 100%, and the other half is the fact that the physics category quickly fills up if you place certain types of large blocks (which you would prefer to use if you're making a large map). The Forge mode uses dedicated servers even if you're the only person in the session. This causes network lag even when playing alone and also creates the problem that if you lose connection to Xbox Live, you'll be kicked out of the server and lose progress if you're the only one in the server. This is one instance where dedicated servers is actually a negative because you're not likely to play with other people in the Forge mode. The Forge mode, while not in the game at launch, was at least improved from Halo: The Master Chief Collection allowing for more complex maps. It is now possible to make custom terrain that's not just artificially made terrain with materials such as sandstone, steel, or glass, but actual nature terrain of grass, sand, and snow, by placing terrain blocks of various sizes and shapes with terrain materials used in the three open world maps. The number of objects that can be placed in a map at once has been increased from 650 to 1024, and more recently to 1600. Now there are no group object limits, too (e.g. being able to place 32 lights). The variety of objects that can be placed is dramatically increased. You can place artificial building blocks of much larger sizes than before. When the Forge mode was originally added there were only three maps and natural object themes you could place. Now there are six template maps and seven natural object themes to place, Alpine, Barrens, Glacier, Tidal, Depths, Asteroid, and Alien (the only theme not to have a template map).
Interestingly, the guardians of this game have been referenced in almost every previous release (yes, including Combat Evolved). If you've played the fourth game's multiplayer, you may have noticed that these mysterious figures are blamed for player deaths.
I don't know if the franchise will make a comeback ever soon, but Microsoft should stick to doing what they care about nowadays.
