The grapple shot changes everything. Attached to a supersoldier waking on a broken, half-sundered ring six months after his flagship’s destruction, it reshapes mobility, combat and exploration in one verb: enemies yank into melee range, mountains become climbable, and every battlefield gains a vertical dimension no previous entry attempted. The disorienting cold open, complete with unfamiliar villains and questions about where everyone has gone, settles quickly into a campaign far more coherent than its predecessor’s, and once the grapple is in hand the game snaps into its most fun form in years.
The open world earns its size. Capturing FOBs, rescuing squads, hunting HVTs and dismantling propaganda towers keep the huge map constantly rewarding rather than empty, with a map-clearing rhythm familiar from Far Cry layered over unmistakably classic sandbox gunplay. Fast travel stitches the regions together, Valor drives progression unlocks, and enough content dots the terrain that the loop of “can I climb that?” never runs dry. With enough patience, anything scales, and the Wasp unlocks mid-campaign make the remaining cleanup feel like a reward rather than a chore.
Plasma weapons are finally re-armable, the most drastic sandbox change in years, and the rocket launcher returns to its classic look after a previous entry’s redesign misstep. The mangler takes the opposite path, nerfed so hard that three shots barely kill a grunt, and enemy vehicles vastly out-damage their player-piloted counterparts; a single rocket no longer destroys a Ghost, which shifts vehicle balance sharply against the player. Equipment and grenade switching feels awkward in the heat of combat, and the map cannot be paused mid-ride, two interface quirks that recur throughout.
Difficulty spikes feel unfair rather than hard. Spongy elites soak damage in elite-heavy arenas, snipers are the most common cause of death across the whole campaign, and the Harbinger’s arena kills in moments with little counterplay. Enemy encounters otherwise reward improvisation, but these spikes stand out against combat that is otherwise the series’ most flexible, and they hit hardest during HVT hunts where the open world’s looseness meets the tightest damage checks.
The story works better than expected, followed willingly despite several beats that confuse more than they explain, and the new AI companion’s hidden nature gives the middle act its tension. The pilot’s relentless complaining grates throughout, a characterisation choice that makes his eventual arc land softer than intended, though sympathy for the character sneaks in anyway given what the framing puts him through. The campaign’s emotional beats land more cleanly than the previous game’s tangled plot, and the post-credits sting sets up future threads without demanding anything from the current story. Visual fidelity supports all of it: the ring’s biomes render sharply enough to make even a controversial trailer close-up look unrepresentative of the finished game.
One completionist frustration outlasts the rest: found audio logs are not marked on the map, and hunting down the last unlistened entries without any record of which ones are already collected turns a near-perfect finish into a guessing game. It stings more than the miss itself, precisely because the collection is otherwise worth completing. Skulls remain optional and skippable for anyone indifferent to modifiers, and the Spartan core upgrades reward thorough play without demanding it.
Overall, this is the most fun the series has been in years, with the grapple shot reinvigorating combat and exploration across a huge, constantly rewarding open world. Unfair difficulty spikes, spongy elites, vehicle-balance complaints and unmapped audio logs are real gripes, but they are gripes, not doubts, and the sandbox carries the campaign regardless.
