A palette shift announces the new direction before any system does: greenery and ice replace the series’ grey-brown corridors, and the campaign follows a soldier’s nightmares toward a hereditary connection to the enemy swarm. The focus on a new protagonist lands as earned rather than imposed, and the surrounding cast carries more character weight than the series has attempted before, with a protest arc, a rivalry and a family loss all threaded through the shooting. Structurally this is the most distinct entry yet, layering two large semi-open hubs and a companion-upgrade meta over the classic cover combat, and the combination mostly works.
Jack’s ability system is the best mechanical addition. Components scattered across the world unlock flash bursts, homing shock traps, hijacking, cloaking, shields and stim, and each meaningfully reshapes encounters rather than padding a menu. Hijacking stands out: turning enemies, eventually even Scions, against their own lines becomes the most satisfying tool in the kit and rewards aggressive positioning. The upgrade tree gives exploration genuine purpose, since every optional objective feeds abilities that change how the next fight plays.
The open hubs deliver the campaign’s structural highlight. The ice valley of Act 2 is dense with side objectives (lost outsiders, comm towers, condor wrecks, waterworks, scavenger crews), each feeding components and secondary missions, and thorough exploration pays continuously. The desert of Act 3 is weaker, emptier and thinner on content despite inviting the same thoroughness, and the contrast between the two hubs is stark. Set pieces still land hard when the structure narrows: the rocket train, the bridge drop and the launch escape deliver the most memorable action beats.
Mount Kadar’s horror stretch bookends the campaign’s best material. The warden encounter at the lab and the matriarch fight bracket a run of stasis tanks, sires and dread-soaked corridors, and the matriarch battle itself is the most tense, drawn-out fight in the package, long enough to feel genuinely dangerous. The New Hope facility threading through this section gives the story its creepy anchor, and the horror flavour suits the series’ bluntness better than expected. Escalation is well paced across these chapters, and the fights escalate from skirmish to siege with real momentum.
Not everything closes cleanly. The ending is abrupt and open-ended: the queen goes un-defeated, one supporting character’s fate is left ambiguous, and the whole war remains unresolved, which lands as a cliffhanger where closure was expected. A teased thread allowing brief control of the Locust appears once during a vision and is never explored again, a narrative opportunity left conspicuously on the table. Both choices feel deliberate rather than accidental, yet deliberate omission still reads as withholding.
The final act stumbles mechanically too. The beacon-defend sequence is repetitive, and losing all five beacons after building each one renders the earlier work moot in the most deflating way. AI and checkpoint bugs add friction: a skiff boost bug, teammates wedged in geometry, one broken boost-give sequence forcing a checkpoint reset, and snatcher pathing that lets enemies skip objectives entirely. Smaller oddities persist as well, including unclosable subtitles for non-verbal audio cues and a chainsaw remap onto RB that takes adjusting after four prior entries. The Hivebusters DLC, by contrast, is a tight self-contained story with a fun squad dynamic, closing the package on a high note.
Overall, this is a rich, occasionally buggy but thoroughly satisfying package whose semi-open hubs, Jack upgrade meta and character-heavy story refresh the formula without breaking it. The open ending and the repetitive final-act defence blunt the closing hours, and the desert hub underdelivers against its snowy counterpart. Hivebusters restores the momentum, and the whole earns its place among the series’ stronger entries.
