Spartan

What surprised me about Halo: Spartan Assault wasn't -- you know, that it isn't a Halo game, really, at all. That much I knew going in: that this is a twin-stick shooter set in the Halo universe. No, what surprised me was that the gameplay is pretty bare.

Spartan Assault emulates the weapons and grenades of a first-person Halo game, but the top-down perspective removes any sense of verticality, and the zoomed-out perspective minimizes battle tension. Again, it's no surprise that this isn't much like other Halos, but what's surprising is that Spartan Assault doesn't bring anything new to the table to replace these legacy features. The gameplay just feels insufficient.

Also, the levels are short. I only did a couple, but evidently they're all just a few minutes long. The game's "story" is told exclusively inbetween mission sets - that is, not even inbetween each mission - and isn't very interesting anyway, just recounting some rote-sounding human-on-covenant conflict. Not a lot going on.

I didn't remember, until I'd stopped playing, that Halo: Spartan Assault had started out as a mobile (Windows Phone) game; the high-fidelity graphics are a good distraction from that. But the game's overall lack of depth makes perfect sense in that context. Despite its relatively-high production values, Spartan Assault as a whole comes across as too shallow to be a "real" video game.

Progress: Finished level A-2.