Am I the only one who doesn't like the whole Spartans charging in and taking on fifty guys in CQC?
People say that's what they've always done canonically, but I'm not sure I'd agree with that. I never read the comics, only read the ix books up to Ghosts of Onyx, and the Spartan IIs weren't doing things like this unless they really, really needed to. They had extreme mobility, but only really used it to get to better positioning for ranged firefights instead of whatever this was.
The longest close range engagement I can remember is while they were training in the dark cave/room/underground thing against the marines in exosuits. And they did so because of stealth more than anything.
The largest close range engagement would be the initial battle in Ghosts of Onyx, and that was because dozens of them had just been obliterated in an airstrike and they needed to reach the only available cover. Additionally they were only forced into a 300 vs few thousand battle at close range because the Covenant forces there decided that their best chance was to hit the Spartans out in the open.
When the Spartans fought the thousand grunts in revenge for the group of marines that were killed they used traps, explosives, mobility, and their guns at range. Both on Reach and the planet where the Keyes Loop was coined you had Spartans setting ambushes for simple columns of grunts. Never mine hundreds of enemies at once.
They don't do crazy close range things like this because of what can happen to people like Will, who died taking on two hunters at close range in GoO.
Or half the Spartans who got incinerated by the Pelican explosions in First Strike.
Or the guy who died while setting the mines in First Strike.
Or how the one guy from grey team was almost overpowered by the Arbiter at hand-to-hand combat until one of them decided to retreat.
They do lots of crazy things, like throwing a tac-nuke up a carrier while on stolen banshees, or hijacking wraiths and carving a path through hundreds of Covenant. But they do so while exposing themselves to a minimal amount of danger. They do as much as they have to and no more.
And now they're gliding across fields of ice while shooting the Covenant with pistols and dodging falling spaceships when they didn't even need to and I feel like a wet noodle for even posting this.