Halo is ostensibly a collection about utilizing weapons to shoot aliens and defeat organized faith. However the coolest weapon within the collection isn’t a gun. It’s a sword — particularly, it’s the power sword.
You’ll have encountered an power sword for the primary time in 2001’s Halo: Fight Advanced. Sure courses of Elites would wield what appeared, on the time, like a cyan lightsaber drawn in Microsoft Paint. You’d rapidly uncover that these iridescent colour splotches actually killed you in a single hit, tearing via the Grasp Chief’s tremendous future house armor like paper. These emotions of frustration had been doubtless adopted by emotions of “Gimme that,” however sadly, developer Bungie didn’t permit gamers to make use of the power sword in Halo: Fight Advanced.
Bungie got here to its senses in 2004’s Halo 2, permitting you to really use the factor — at which level the power sword immediately grew to become the good weapon in Halo, an honor it’s held onto for greater than 20 years.
Since then, whereas many Halo weapons have undergone notable beauty and practical modifications, the power sword has largely remained the identical. (Why change perfection?) It has a horizontal hilt; two streams of blueish plasma pour out of every finish, forming mirror scythe shapes that coalesce into a pointy pointy finish. Whenever you assault an enemy, you lunge towards them, and can normally kill them in a single hit. To stability this out, you need to use the power sword about ten instances earlier than it runs out of battery — sufficient to offer you an edge however not a lot to make you invincible.
Within the multiplayer mode for Halo Infinite, the newest Halo sport, the power sword is named a “energy weapon,” or one which respawns on lengthy intervals and is taken into account the kind of weapon that may flip the tide of a match. There are many makes use of for the power sword in Infinite’s multiplayer — none of that are inherently evil, by the way in which, it doesn’t matter what folks would possibly inform you. They’re as follows:
After all, one of the best gamers have discovered much more artistic methods to make use of the power sword. Prime Halo professional Tommy “Lucid” Wilson notably pairs the power sword with a long-range rifle to bait opponents into headshots. Within the authentic multiplayer trailer for Halo Infinite, you may see one participant utilizing the explosion from a plasma grenade to launch an power sword off an remoted platform earlier than grabbing it midair and killing an opponent. (In case you someway pull this off in an precise match, you’ll get the Fight Advanced medal. Listening to longtime Halo announcer Jeff Steitzer say “fight advanced” by no means will get outdated.) The power sword grew to become so overbearing in Halo Infinite that, in December 2022, a yr after the sport’s launch, developer 343 Industries nerfed it.
However that hasn’t completed something to suppress its cool issue, because the power sword is now now not relegated to the Halo video games (or covers of tie-in novels). Etsy is rife with a whole lot of power sword trinkets. Take a look at your native renaissance faire; you’ll doubtless see a wall of wood-carved power swords on the “blacksmith.” Anecdotally, a stable half of all Halo tattoos characteristic the power sword. It has absolutely damaged containment. Can the battle rifle say that? Can the gravity hammer?
Screw the gravity hammer.