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For developer 343 Industries, the honeymoon period is over. It's been three years since Halo 4 came out for the Xbox 360. Halo 5, built for the more powerful Xbox One, is the studios' second shot at what was once the biggest franchise in gaming. Now, after all the marketing hype, after all the flashy television adverts, after all the fictional investigative audio files on Soundcloud, after all the promoted tweets and the carefully constructed hashtags, has 343 done enough to step out of Bungie's shadow and into the spotlight?Halo 5 works in much the same way as previous games in the series. The "Golden Triangle" of shoot, grenade and melee is once again core to the gameplay. The "30 seconds of fun" design, where you're thrust into mammoth levels and expertly drip-fed frantic firefights, is present and correct. Your Spartan, a super soldier who wears tank-like armour, feels as powerful and weighty as you'd expect. You really do thunder around the virtual battlefield, smashing through walls, punching aliens and ripping turrets out of concrete.
But this time you're more mobile. The addition of sprint as a default Spartan ability upset some Halo fans when it was revealed, but I find it fits snugly into Halo 5. Your thruster pack powers air boosts, dodges, a shoulder charge and a ground pound move (nail someone with the tricky to pull off ground pound in PVP and you'll find it hard to resist cheering). There's also the addition of a clamber, which lets you climb up onto platforms. All these abilities combine to give Halo 5 impressively fluid movement that helps you quickly and efficiently climb up to the high ground or sniff out flanking positions. The fact Halo 5 whizzes along at 60 frames per second is a wonderful bonus.
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