Disintegration

PC, PS4, Xbox One

Our love affair with Halo began two decades ago, and it’s been one since the flame dwindled. Playing Disintegration, though, feels like a fresh breakup at that point when everything reminds you of your ex. There might be a bit of confirmation bias at work here: after all, we knew about the involvement of Bungie veteran Marcus Lehto going in. Nonetheless, the connections are hard to ignore.

It’s right there in the face of Romer Shoal, the bucketheaded robot hero who looks as if Master Chief has been on the Atkins in an effort to squeeze into his new racing jacket. And in the scenery too, which features a lot of the same Pacific Northwest touchstones as Bungie’s alien worlds – in this case, because the game is actually set there, along with futuristic versions of Arizona and Iceland. We’ll always be a sucker for skyboxes that mix mountain ranges with sci-fi superstructures, and for plasma weapons that arc lazily through the air. But the parallels run deeper than just these trappings.

Lehto was there for Halo’s transformation from realtime strategy game to system-selling console shooter. Disintegration has gone through much the same process, but this time, it got stuck halfway through. The result is part firstperson shooter, part realtime strategy and part dogfighting vehicle combat game. As Shoal, you pilot a gravcycle that hovers a few feet above the ground, trading shots with enemy units and issuing orders to a squad of four allies with robotic boots firmly on the ground.

The cycle is Disintegration’s one unmitigated triumph. The bob and roll of its movements, the way it rocks when punched by an enemy missile, the constant thrum sitting beneath it all – there’s a weight to the cycle that stops it from ever feeling like you’re just noclipping over RTS battlefields. It’s as smooth a ride as any Ghost we’ve ever hijacked, though you can’t use the speed boost to run enemies down. So, okay, maybe not completely unmitigated. But watching Shoal’s fingers work over the controls, there’s a sense of direct connection between his actions and yours, especially if you’re on a gamepad. We play on PC, but after testing out an Xbox One controller we never look back. Choosing thumbstick over mouse isn’t a decision we’d usually make for a strategy game, which is an admirable feat on Disintegration’s part – but perhaps hints at the depth on offer here.

The main thing we’re reminded of, over and over, is a moment familiar to any Halo player: you encounter a squad of marines, pinned down by enemy fire, and mount a counterattack, before leading them into battle somewhere across the map. Disintegration recreates this specific loop multiple times in its campaign, having you encounter friendly troops who fight alongside your own squad. But really, the entire game feels like it’s grown out of that one moment, granting a wish many of us have whispered as we reload the checkpoint yet again to save the life of a shotgun-wielding trooper we’ve grown oddly fond of: if only we could tell them what to do.

Unfortunately, it’s a wish that Disintegration only goes halfway toward realising. As squad leader, your options are limited to pointing your troops towards a location or enemy, and telling them when to unleash their cooldownlimited abilities. It’s closer to the tactical shooters that stepped onto consoles in Halo’s wake than a full-blown strategy game – but even compared to a Brothers In Arms or Republic Commando, it’s fairly shallow.

You can’t individually order units, so it’s impossible to do something as simple as posting half the unit at an objective while pushing one of your tank-like behemoths forward to soak up damage. Spot a threat, like the mini minefields laid down by some enemies, and you’ll rarely have chance to steer them clear before it goes off. And while the enemy AI is nimble, constantly repositioning and healing, your own troops fare less well: like a toddler, they’ve got just enough independence to get into trouble. Command the squad to prioritise an enemy and they’ll all rush in, regardless of whether their weapons are designed for close or long range. Direct them to capture a health node and, once activated, they’ll wander away from the glowing green bubble before they get a chance to benefit. Where the gravcycle controls are precise down to the jointed steel finger, issuing squad commands makes it feel like your hands are bound up in tape.

The special abilities fare a little better: time slows to a near-halt, giving you ample opportunity to line up the trajectory of a mortar strike to disable the biggest threat or take advantage of a bunched-up group of enemies. But there are just four of these abilities (mortar, grenade, time-slowing field, AoE ground pound) and the campaign assigns them for you each mission, ensuring there’s no strategic planning to be done outside of combat either.

The scrappiness of these systems feels like it should matter less in Disintegration’s multiplayer modes, which pit two teams of five players against one another, each armed with their own gravcycle and squad of ground units. Unfortunately, this theory proves impossible to test because, at launch, matchmaking can’t even manage to find a single game. And so we’re left with a ten-hour campaign that takes that famous Halo maxim of ‘30 seconds of fun’ and turns it into a threat.

Granted, there are some incredible half-minutes to be had: ducking your bike under a bridge and popping up behind a foe preoccupied with your squad, or swooping in under enemy fire to recover an ally’s brain and revive them as the game-over countdown hits single digits. But these are outweighed by the moments that don’t work, when marking a piece of cover leads your squad to stand in front of it, or you’re hit by an unseen missile because you needed to issue a command in the opposite direction. At these times we regret that old wish, and think: if only we didn’t have to tell them what to do.

Like a toddler, your own troops have got just enough independence to get into trouble