At last, we’re on the doorstep.

Surely now – a year on from its original planned release date – we are nearly in the presence of Halo Infinite‘s story campaign. The wheels are set in motion for a committed launch, and though the game’s release will be aping all manner of giant hulking spacecraft in Halo lore by crash-landing without some of its parts, at least it won’t be on fire. You know, metaphorically speaking. We can hope. I’ve been playing a lot of the game’s multiplayer “beta” that’s basically just final release code, and it’s fantastic, so that’s promising at least.

As you may recall if you perused any of this site’s 2020 output, I spent a decent chunk of free time last year playing through and writing about the PC ports of the Halo campaigns – most of them in co-op while weaving through connection errors, bugs and other technical hurdles – in an effort to get ready for an otherwise-intimidating leap of faith into a dense, lore-soaked story spanning (officially as of last month) decades – plural. As you may realise if you perused any of this site’s 2021 output thus far, I haven’t been spending a whole lot of free time this year doing any of those things.

On one hand, a break from the series was just what the doctor ordered; on the other, it kinda seems like the whole ordeal (and make no mistake, it did feel like an ordeal at points) isn’t really worth much if it isn’t finished. But at the time of writing, there isn’t much time left in the year; there has been a pretty constant stream of new things to play and watch throughout 2021 and almost nothing about Halo Infinite‘s launch has seemed set in stone until quite recently. So to finish this lengthy project, I’ve taken inspiration form – stay with me – the Kingdom Hearts series.

Yep, for all intents and purposes I’m packaging the three remaining Halo campaigns as if they were a twisted sci-fi gun-spraying version of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD ReMIX or Kingdom Hearts 2.5 HD ReMIX, and the mental gymnastics required to get us to that comparison are surprisingly light. Both collections repackage three older games using the same formula: one headlining main-series title, one title with “spin-off” vibes (though this is no indication of lesser polish or quality) and one lesser-regarded title presented only as a collection of cutscenes. Spot the incredibly neat coincidence yet?

Basically, I set out to play the Halo 4 campaign to completion on my own time by myself, allowing the “spin-off” Halo 3: ODST to be a co-op side project as time and schedules permitted – with no pressure to finish the game because that’s the only Halo campaign I’d already seen through entirely long before this project began. That leaves Halo 5 as the stubborn outsider that I decided was best left experienced via cutscenes and/or story summaries on YouTube, for reasons including but not limited to:

• It’s the only Halo game that still hasn’t come to the PC, and there’s still no sign of it doing so;
• Though I loved Halo 5‘s multiplayer enough to lift it firmly into my top five games the year it came out (and that was a very competitive year), the campaign is almost universally panned as being short, repetitive and unsatisfying;
• Perhaps more than any other Halo campaign, Halo 5‘s is designed around four player co-op, and there’s no way I can be bothered going through the hassle to get a fully-stacked willing team together given the above factors.

So that’s the setup. Got it memorised?

Halo 3: ODST

What a game! No sooner had I booted up the opening mission with my long-suffering Halo co-op mate Toby than I was hit with a wave of 2009 nostalgia I hadn’t yet experienced on this long PC campaign journey. This was one of my very first tastes of dark, moody Triple-A HD gaming back in the day, and the polished visual contrast between shadowy night-time city streets and funky alien weaponry is preserved superbly in ultrawide aspect ratio today. But the game’s art is certainly not the main reason why this campaign such a stellar reputation within the series.