New Halo: Reach commercial is so pretentious we want to gouge out our eyes and rip off our ears

Halo is about many things. Monosyllabic space dudes in helmets. Giving someone a thorough teabagging In Team Slayer. Shooting glorified Ewoks in the face. You know what it’s not about? Lingering shots of pensive-looking kids losing their shitting balloons in a heavy handed metaphor about humanity abandoning its innocence during the war with The Covenant.

But you’d never know that from watching the latest Reach ad, which, even by Halo standards, is the biggest load of pretentious nonsense to sully our eyeballs since a certain cry-baby pensioner went all wrong in the retinas in a war museum.

It's not that we mind game ads going down Artistic Avenue. But c'mon, the Halo series, at least in the games, is hardly renowned for its weighty, narrative prowess. We could perhaps see a Half-Life or a Team Ico title pulling off this style of advert, not that either would go down such a overtly wanky route. The trouble with Bungie's megaton franchise is there's probably no other series that so openly attracts Johnny Lowest Common Denominator. The above video simply gives a false impression of an experience that has first and foremost always been about questioning the sexual promiscuity of an online opponent's mother and murdering the shit out of these annoying little bastards...