I encountered a few bugs with the games A.I. Occasionally your squad will get stuck behind walls and not advance to the next objective. You have to forge own ahead yourself, which usually results in quick death. Thankfully though, the squad always seems to get unstuck after you re-spawn.
The sound in the game is top notch. Your squad mates and enemies are talking all the time, whether it be taunting or yelling out strategy. The sound effects are well placed in surround sound speakers and give you a good sense of where you are. The music is well-matched to the mood and energy of each scene.
I only have a few complaints. If your squad mates’ volume and speaker placement was more dynamic it would be easier to find them when they are downed. The game has three sliders for the audio: sound effects, music, and voice. Turning down the sound effects and turning up the voice is necessary to hear over the constant gunfire. However, this causes your enemies voices to be harshly loud at times.
There is so much right and so much wrong with the online component of the game. The actual playing online is great: it is the setup that is horrendous. In all the matches I have played online I have never encountered any lag. The graphics almost always look as good as they do in single player. A few times I played on maps that looked washed out.
There is a cooperative nature to every match type. I think this goes along way to the reduced amount of name calling and griefing that happens online compared to other games. Horde mode is particularly fun because of this. In this mode, a team of humans face against waves and waves of computer controlled Locust. You are forced to work with someone else instead of compete against them.
Actually getting online and enjoying a match is a different story. It typically takes about two and half minutes to sign in, find a match, and have the pregame lobby start. During the first week of play, almost every time I signed in, the search was restarted several times.
The online text is so uninformative that I am not exactly sure how the online matches work. Each online mode appears to be a playlist of different game types. For example, the Elimination Mode includes Warzone, Execution and Guardian. In the first pregame lobby, everyone votes on what match type they want to play and on which map. You then play enough rounds of that mode on that map, until one team has reached the required amount of wins. For some reason you cannot quit between rounds, unless you exit back to the 360 dashboard. And no one can join between rounds either. In the majority of sets I have played, it started out 5 versus 5 and then ended up 5 versus 3 because people dropped. If it gets below a certain number of players the set is simply dropped, even if the needed amount of wins is not reached. At least I think that is has been happening; the game gives you no text information as to why you are booted back to the online menu. It would be nice to be able to pop on for a single round of a chosen game type but that does not seem to be possible.
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