Fireteam Raven (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Thursday, November 03, 2022, 10:16 (754 days ago) @ Cody Miller

With all this talk about 343 and Halo and whether they can do anything good, I went out and played Fireteam Raven. 343 is listed as a developer alongside Play Mechanix. I have no idea how the workload was divided, but I gotta say:

It was pretty fun.

The game is an on rails shooter. The cabinet is made up of 4 force feedback guns beside two booth style seats, and 2 screens put together so you have an ultrawide view. 4 people can play, and you're a team of ODSTs playing during the events of Halo CE. You start on the Autumn, crash land on a different spot from the MC, fight covenant and hold off the flood on the ring, and end by protecting the Master Chief's Banshee as he flies from Keyes to the Maw (spoilers: you all die when the ring explodes). It's like a greatest hits mashup of Halo. You're fighting flood on Silent Cartographer, using Falcons on AotCR, and even fighting that big ass flood juggernaut that was cut from the game.

You get to use pretty much every weapon from the game from the Pistol to the Shotgun to Rocket Launchers to Shade and Warthog Turrets to Falcon Grenade Launchers. You also get grenades every now and then as a secondary attack. There's a part where you have to kill swarms of popcorn flood with the needler haha. My only ding is that you can't charge the plasma pistol!

It was also surprisingly fair. As an arcade game you'd think it would suck money and kill you often, but the rate at which we died was shockingly reasonable. There's 6 missions, an I probably continued once per mission. You never ever feel like some bullshit happened, it's all totally based in how well you can shoot. Gun tracking was always spot on.

So yeah. 343 did a good thing with Halo. Fireteam Raven is easily better than Halo 5.

I played it at 343 several years back (thanks, kornman!) and really enjoyed it, but I don't think I got to play the full story arc. I looked it up and apparently, a Dave & Buster's nearby has one! Thanks for the reminder.