Halo 5 Update: Hammerstorm!

To my, and to Halo fans every where's pleasure, 343 industries has dutifully kept their promise of releasing regular, free content to those who play Halo 5. This is because 343 doesn't want to separate the player base between those who pay for DLC and those who don't. 343 has been upholding their word with monthly updates, all of which bring new features and unique game play to the game. Before we get into the details of the February update, I'm going to reiterate on the past updates.

Back in November, we got our first update, Battle of Shadow and Light. Here, 343 gave us 48 new REQ unlockables, including new armor sets, and new Warzone weapons. Along with these, 343 gave us a new game type with its own playlist in Arena matchmaking. Of course, this is Big team Battle, which is an 8v8 large scale map Arena based game type.



In December, we received my favorite update, Cartographer's Gift. For the first two months of playing the game, along with much of the Halo community, painfully waited for Forge to be released. But it was well worth the wait, because Halo 5's version of forge is the biggest expansion to the map building game type in all the Halo's to come. We received several features that have been long awaited by Forgers, such as copy and paste functions, grouping, vastly improved scripting, and much more. We also got four new maps to play around with in multiplayer. In addition to Forge and new maps, we now have our good old SPNKR Rocket Launcher back, coming in several forms of REQ cards. This especially makes me glad to see, because the community has been begging for this version of the Rocket Launcher since the showcase of  new Halo 5 version. It makes me happy to see 343 responding to community feedback, and incorporating it into their updates. This will be the first of several throwbacks to old versions of weapons.

The first update in 2016 was Infinity's Armory. This update was pretty small compared to others, but we still got some new content. First, we got a new map for Arena playlists. We also received
some new armor sets. My favorite part of this update of course was the Halo 2 BR. This gun gave me major nostalgia, and is loads of fun to play with.

Now for the most recent update: Hammer Storm. Here we got another new map, and several new REQs, including new armor sets. But the most notable thing about this update is that we got 3 new game modes: Community favorite: Grifball, Assault, and Fiesta. Now that we have assault, we can recreate many other gametypes in custom games, such as ricochet from Halo 4. I especially look forward to when I can play fiesta, so that I can more easily get Spartan Laser kills, among other power weapon kills, as I am trying to get all my weapon commendations complete. Along with Grifball, we got the Gravity Hammer (of course). He also got our 3rd throwback weapon, the Halo CE magnum. This thing is amazing, skinned the same as in Halo CE, and even has a completely different shader on the weapon to give it that authentic look. 

Those are all the updates so far, but there is still much to look forward to, as there is still four confirmed updates to come. There is already speculation on which these titles mean. Hopefully, Memories of Reach will feature armor sets and old weapons from Halo Reach. Hog Wild will most likely introduce new Warthog variations and gametypes. The final update is pretty self explanatory: Firefight is coming back!