A level playing field. Smart Scope. Sprinting. Strafing. Charging. Ground-pounding. The stabilizer. Midship. The Prophets’ Bane. Breakout mode. My first taste of the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta was filled with fascination, but these are the things I enjoyed the most. This is clearly a new Halo for a new era, but in many ways it also feels like an evolved Halo 2. And that’s a good thing.

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Let’s start with two of the big ones that sound bad but, in practice, aren’t: ADS and sprinting. Yes, Aim Down Sights, that popular shooter aiming mechanic found in the Call of Duties and Destinies of the world that, for me, pulls me out of the game world. I tend to spend the whole time with the left trigger pulled and no time admiring the beautiful scenery around you (nevermind the lack of periphery and spatial awareness). It’s called Smart Scope here, and, as 343 creative director Timothy Longo put it, “All weapons in Halo 5 have some sort of Smart Scope.” Before you start breathing into a paper bag moaning, “They ruined Halooooo,” however, know that, among the three IGN editors who played Halo 5, none of us found it offensive. This is largely because you’ll get de-scoped if you get shot, similar to Halo 2. In the end, we were still playing the overwhelming majority of the game from the normal first-person view.Meanwhile, Halo 5 practically has no choice but to incorporate sprint; it’s the one part of the design celebrated in the Master Chief Collection that feels legitimately anachronistic. Of course, Halo’s already been down this road with Reach and Halo 4, with mixed results. For Halo 5, everyone gets unlimited sprint, but with a catch: your shields won’t recharge while you’re running. That means if you choose flight over fight, you might escape, but your shield alarm will continue to inform you that one stray shot from another player who spies you fleeing the scene could earn you a trip to the respawn countdown screen. I like the penalty that wussing out of a fight incurs.Another aspect of Halo 5’s mobility is where the game really starts to separate itself from the other Halos: the thruster pack. Unlike what we saw in Halo 4, it’s a universal Spartan Ability in Halo 5. Everyone can press B and a direction to immediately dash. Everyone can sprint and charge into someone at full speed, which will pop their shields (if hit from the front or sides) or kill them outright (if hit from behind). Everyone can pull LT in midair to activate the stabilizer, letting you hover and fall very slowly, potentially allowing you to avoid grenades and explosions. Everyone can perform an insta-kill death-from-above ground-pound by clicking in the right thumbstick in midair, quickly targeting a landing point with a small radius of you, and then dashing to the ground, fist first, terminating anyone you happen to run into. All of this opens up many new doors during combat, such as dashing sideways to avoid a lethal sword lunge or more quickly closing the gap on someone you’re pursuing.The clamber ability, which allows you to mantle up ledges you can’t quite reach by tapping the A button a second time when you’re next to the edge, also helps permanently change Halo’s movement. While you won’t quite be Faith from Mirror’s Edge, you will have to rethink traversal in a Halo game. Furthermore, you can press crouch when running at full speed to slide – a tactic likely to be quite useful for avoiding fatal headshots. Everyone has it all the time, too.Notice a theme here, Halo 2 fans? “We want a level playing field,” Longo explained of Halo 5. “Everyone starts with the same set of abilities.” It’s going to take time to get used to having all these new tools at my disposal, as my brain is trained to try and strafe my way to a kill rather than dash my way to safety, and I wasn’t able to successfully ground-pound murder anyone, but it did feel immensely satisfying to get a kill from doing a running dash charge into an enemy’s spine.And what of the maps and weapons? For starters, it’s great to see Midship again – even before the maps even starts, when Halo 5 shows a quick montage of key points on each map. It’s a bit bigger now, but it’s still very much Midship, complete with an energy sword – er, Prophets’ Bane in Halo 5 (I wonder if its new name ties into the campaign storyline somehow?) – up on top above the wobbly platform that I happily stabbed a few foes with. Its ethereal white glow is so intense now that it’s almost blinding, however, which may be an intentional weapon balance/design decision. The only other weapons I saw were the pistol, assault rifle, SMG, battle rifle, DMR, and sniper rifle, along with regular and plasma grenades. All felt comfortably familiar, save for the SMG, which is now much more potent at close range. The rocket launcher shown in one or two of the screenshots on this page was M.I.A. I can also confirm that Halo 5’s pistol is much closer to its weaker Halo 2 variant than, say, the hell-bringing Halo 1 version. My initial impression, though, is that the Battle Rifle is once again the jack-of-all-trades that’s ideal to get your hands on for most situations.Empire, meanwhile, is a small-to-midsize map with lots of verticality and not much open ground. I took a quick liking to it. Sniper rifles spawn at either end of the room, with HUD markers calling out their locations as well as if they’re currently available. It’s on Empire that I came to appreciate the voiceover-acted battle chatter, another feature that sounds like it could be cheesy at best or disastrous at worst, but is in fact highly useful. Your Spartans all talk to each other whether you’ve got an Xbox Live headset or not, and they skip the banter and get straight to relevant talk that mirrors how a real-life pro team would communicate. “Reloading snipes!” one player’s Spartan will say after he rips off a few rounds from his sniper rifle and presses X to reload it. Another might call out the map location where he’s spotted an enemy. This could prove to be a brilliant feature if there’s enough chit-chat to cover all scenarios, and if that dialogue is smart enough to cue properly every time. But so far, so good.Finally, the Forge map Crossfire is where we tried Halo 5’s new Counter-Strike-y mode, Breakout. Teams battle with no respawns to back them up, often leading to tense, one-on-one cat-and-mouse encounters. The first team to five round wins claims victory in the match. I quite enjoyed this, particularly because it really emphasized Halo 5’s return to weapon balance and the fight for power weapons, eliciting a tangible tension the longer I stayed alive.As for the beta itself, which runs from December 29-January 18? It builds a Competitive Skill Ranking system into its playlists, which Longo says “modernizes” Halo 2’s popular online ranking system. Also, 343 will allow fans to vote online for what maps and modes are added during the final two weeks of the beta. And call it a hunch, but something tells me that this early peek won’t be the last time we get to play Halo 5 before it launches. Longo was quick to emphasize that this is an “arena beta,” saying, “Halo 5 has other multiplayer experiences within it, not just arena.” So will we get a taste of vehicles and larger-scale combat in a second beta closer to release? Anyone got a Magic 8 Ball I can shake?As for complaints? I have one, but it’s not about ADS or sprint. Instead, it’s the controls. I’ve fought a lot of things in Halo over the years: the Covenant, the Flood, the Prometheans, and other players on Xbox Live. But until I played Halo 5, I’ve never had to fight Halo’s controls. And yet here I was with my first taste of 2015’s biggest Xbox exclusive, and for a series whose calling card is its buttery-smooth feel, I couldn’t get past the fact that I felt like my Spartan-IV had been doused in molasses. I tried cranking the thumbstick sensitivity from the default 5 up to 7, and then all the way to 10, but to no avail. Unlike the other Halo first-person shooters – four of which I’ve been playing extensively of late via The Master Chief Collection – the gamepad in Halo 5 became a barrier between me and the game rather than a natural extension of my hands and brain. I couldn’t line up headshots, aim smoothly, or ultimately have as much fun as I should’ve been having. Several other first-time players I polled after the session felt similarly.Of course, before we even sat down to play, Halo 5 studio head at 343 Josh Holmes told us, “We want feedback early enough in the production cycle to make changes. We really want to make this the best Halo game it can possibly be.” Well, Josh, consider this your first piece of external constructive criticism: please give me back Halo’s smooth controls so that I can fully enjoy the great ideas you’re packing into this modern evolution of Halo 2, because I think you’re really onto something here.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan , on IGN , catch him on Podcast Unlocked , and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.