Microsoft's iconic space marine Master Chief returns to begin a new trilogy as gamers head to the Forerunner planet Requiem and battle a force more powerful than anything humanity has ever faced in Halo 4. Set four years after the Covenant War, the Campaign mode finds up to four players working together to help Master Chief battle a variety of foes, uncover ancient secrets, and deal with Cortana's instability. Halo 4 also includes the new Spartan Ops co-op multiplayer mode, in which up to four gamers can join forces for weekly objective-based missions and cutscenes.

Competitive multiplayer remains a key part of the Halo experience, with players creating their own Spartan-IV warrior and then accruing experience by taking part in various game modes. The War Games mode fits into the overall narrative, serving as a large training simulator in which Spartan warriors fight one another in a variety of multiplayer game types, including Slayer, Regicide, and Infinity Slayer. Players can now completely customize their loadouts with a primary weapon, secondary weapon, grenade, and a variety of armor upgrades like jet-pack boosting, camouflage, and a new kind of X-ray vision.

Gamers can equip new abilities by earning Spartan Points, and all the experience they accrue allows them to progress from level one to level fifty. When players hit level 50 they unlock Specializations, which, over the course of ten more levels, give them the ability to further customize their characters into eight specific classes like Pioneer, Rogue, and Operator. There are ten basic multiplayer maps, but an updated version of the Forge mode returns to once again let creative gamers edit and share their own map designs.