See, I didn't see them as that brightly coloured - The general colour of them all, if memory serves, was silvery-grey-blue with orange weapons - Whereas the Elites were a variety of colours, the grunts were too, the jackals less so, and the hunters less so - Although metallic blue and orange is a pretty good mix, even if it was spitting green death. The most monotone part of the Covenant was the vehicles - Purple with silver across the board if memory serves. But, likewise, I'm glad to see the back of that clusterbiff of 4 & 5.
Hum...... might be just me. My memory of the new Prometheus in Halo 4 were "shoot brightly highlighted bits". Similar to pretty much every other games out there. Then there's the reviving drones and super annoying and unimaginative dogs. All with glowing neon "shoot here" notices. Whereas the Covenant in Halo 1 to 3 had a unique style among other games, a style that worked well from Xbox 1 all the way to modern graphics. C
To be fair, 4 is the one I've played the least, very closely followed by 5, and my memory is not known for being the best!
For the most part, I don't think you've missed a thing. Halo = Aliens all bad all hate humans, murder all in the face. All it brings to the table, IMO, is a really well polished gameplay experience. Plus grappling hook. FWIW, I don't consider the story 'good' because.. Well. It's at the point where there's so much supporting lore in books and comics and non-FPS games that it's very.. Star Wars-y. If I hadn't played Halo Wars 1 & 2 I'd have no frame of reference for a huge swathe of the characters mentioned in the game that aren't Cortana or Chief.
One other thing I have found is the AI in this game is really decent, retreating from danger, dodging etc Makes a change from the deaf dumb and blind enemies in Deathloop, COD etc
