Halo 5: Forge

Halo 5: Guardians is a first-person shooter game. Players assume the role of powerful "Spartan" supersoldiers with a host of abilities, and use a combination of guns, grenades, and melee attacks in story-based campaign and multiplayer modes. Players can sprint indefinitely, as opposed to the sprint limits in previous games in the series, though their damage-absorbing shield will not recharge in multiplayer; at top speed, the player character can slide across the ground or charge into an enemy. A thruster pack allows for a speed boost or lateral movements, and players can clamber up ledges to reach higher ground.

Every weapon can be aimed while zoomed in, similar to iron sights; sustaining fire will knock players out of the zoomed view. By zooming while airborne, players briefly hover; while aloft, players can target the ground for an area-of-effect attack. A number of new weapons are also introduced in the game.

Halo 5: Guardians takes place in the year 2558, eight months after the events of Halo 4. The game follows two fireteams of supersoldiers of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC). Blue Team is led by Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 and is composed of his fellow Spartan-II supersoldiers: Linda-058, an elite sniper; Kelly-087, a scout; and Frederic-104, a hand-to-hand combat specialist. The members of Blue Team are among the last Spartan-IIs left alive.

Fireteam Osiris is formed from Spartan-IVs, a newer generation of Spartans. Osiris is led by Jameson Locke, a former assassin and tracker of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). The other members of Fireteam Osiris are Holly Tanaka, a combat technician, engineer, and survivor of a Covenant attack on her planet; Olympia Vale, a political liaison and signals intelligence agent who can speak many alien dialects; and Edward Buck, a veteran trooper who was a main character in Halo 3: ODST.

Before Halo 4's release in November 2012, 343 Industries creative director Josh Holmes began looking for his replacement for the next Halo title. Tim Longo joined as creative director in late 2012, with Halo 5 a few months into preproduction. General manager Bonnie Ross recalled that after Halo 4 the team spent a lot of time discussing where they wanted to take the Halo series, reflecting on feedback from fans about what they did and did not like. Longo and game leads David Berger and Chris Lee laid out the studio's vision for the next game from a creative and technical standpoint, setting key goals to focus on: utilizing the Xbox One's hardware and Microsoft's cloud infrastructure for larger campaign and multiplayer spaces, deeper player investment systems, and a 60 frames per second (FPS) frame rate.

Longo considered moving from 30 to 60 FPS quadrupled the amount of development work required, especially as the team also wanted the larger scale to environments. To maintain a 60 FPS frame rate, Halo 5's engine dynamically lowers the resolution at which the game is rendered during graphically intensive scenes, which are then upscaled back to the game's native resolution of 1080p. To help achieve this, 343 Industries made extensive use of Havok software. Eagerness to take advantage of the hardware sometimes came with drawbacks; the art team built fully animated cacti that responded to gunfire and blanketed the campaign maps with the succulents.

Halo 5: Guardians received an aggregated score of 84 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 101 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Arthur Gies, writing for Polygon, wrote that 343 Industries had much to prove with Halo 5 after Halo 4's online population "evaporated", The Master Chief Collection's woes, and Microsoft's need for a strong title to sell more Xbox One units. "343's response to that quagmire," Gies wrote, "[is] to return to the fundamentals of what made the series great in the first place. The studio has brought Halo's mechanics kicking and screaming into the modern era, while providing the most bombastic, co-op-driven campaign in Halo history."

GameSpot's Mike Mahardy agreed that 343 had produced some of the best iterations of the game series' facets with Halo 5. IGN's Brian Albert opined that 343 Industries had created an even bigger game than previous entries, with "the strongest combat Halo has ever seen". Destructoid's Chris Carter felt that Halo 5 failed to grab him in the same way as previous games had, "but those of you who are still content with Master Chief and his wacky adventures across the galaxy will likely walk away satisfied." More critically, the reviewers of GamesTM felt that Halo 5 was "sheepish and safe" and represented a series low.