Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the most recent game in the franchise Halo Infinite. After all the shit 343 Industries had put the fanbase through, expectations were really low for this game, and then got even worse when people saw the reveal trailer, which necessitated a delay to polish the game up for launch. Since then, I’m aware that the game has been through some major highs and lows, so I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot going in. Could 343 finally right the ship and deliver a worthy follow-up to Bungie’s trilogy? Read on to find out…

Love

• The Gunplay – As far as I’m concerned, Halo Infinite has the best gunplay of the franchise since Halo 3. Shooting enemies just feels so good. This is largely because your shots feel like they have real impact when they land and there’s some really satisfying feedback that goes along with it. This is best exemplified with the big power weapons, which impact with a massive explosion of fire and colour and a satisfyingly loud bang. Even smaller, standard weapons like the Mauler pack a punch and are really satisfying to blast away your foes with. It feels like they took a cue from Doom (2016) and put a ton of effort into making sure that combat makes you feel like a total badass.
• Enemies Have Personality Again! – The Covenant in the first couple Halo games had so much personality, making them into some of the most fun video game enemies to fight. Grunts screaming and running when you started killing their comrades, contrasted with the tactical, honourable combat of the Elites made the game feel like it wasn’t just a simple shooting gallery. This was eroded away over the course of the series, with them eventually just feeling like regular video game bad guys that you need to shoot to win the game. In Halo Infinite though, the Covenant soldiers have so much personality again. This is largely due to them being extremely chatty – you’ll hear Grunts acting arrogant, only to immediately start squealing and freaking out when they see you, Jackals obsessing over collecting your bounty, Brutes yelling taunts, and Elites steeling themselves for battle, etc. All this chatter almost makes me feel sorry as I mow them down by the dozen.
  • Also, on a somewhat related note, the enemy variety in this game is fantastic. There have been different tiers of each Covenant troop in all previous games, but they’ve been expanded here and are more notably differentiated in my opinion. For example, let’s look at just the Brutes: we’ve got the standard Brutes, multiple variants in heavy armour, guys with jet packs and heavy weapons, chieftains with various weapon configurations, and even melee-only berserkers who rush head-long at you. Oh, and any one of these can have shields and various weapon combinations, making the variety of combat scenarios even among one enemy type truly vast. Good God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually really enjoy fighting Brutes in this game!
  • On another related note, I love the UNSC banter in this game. They spout all sorts of cheesy one-liners which perfectly capture the feel of early 2000s video game writing.
• New Weapons – As usual, Halo Infinite introduces a bunch of new and remixed weapons and, due to this game’s emphasis on fun gameplay, there are some truly awesome additions. My personal favourites are the Skewer (which fires a massive, impaling spear which one-shots most enemies), the Hydra (which is kind of like a Halo version of the 40k boltgun, with an alt-fire mode that homes in on enemies!), and the Heatwave (a shotgun that allows you to set its spread to go horizontal or vertical, making it much more accurate at longer ranges). Making things even better, most guns have special upgraded versions which you can get, which make them even more devastating to use. Legitimately, the only weapon I don’t like is the Disruptor Pistol, but everything else I will gleefully pickup and mow down the enemy with.
• Grappling Hook – Ever since Halo 3 introduced equipment pickups, these games have really struggled to introduce an equipment ability which really sticks with you. The Grappling Hook is easily the best addition to the core formula, bar none. I (perhaps notoriously) hate open world games with dull traversal, but the grappling hook makes swinging about this world quicker and more entertaining, while also opening up space for creative mobility during combat. Making things better, the grappling hook has offensive abilities too, allowing to you grab distant weapons and items, and you can also hook an enemy to swing in for a melee strike. It can also be upgraded to stun enemies, which can be really helpful when you’re getting beat down by a particular guy with a power weapon and need to close the distance to them quickly.
• The Story – Halo Infinite‘s narrative is definitely an improvement on the previous two 343 Industries games. While Halo 4 was bogged down by lore and Halo 5 was vapid and rushed, Infinite takes a more cinematic, character-driven approach that makes it feel more akin to Metal Gear Solid 5 than its two predecessors. The overall story here is basically a throwback: you’re on a Halo ring and the Covenant Banished are trying to activate it, so you have to stop them. The villains also have a fairly large role in the narrative and often show up to taunt you directly. So, while they are fairly generic and melodramatic, at least they leave more of an impression than, say, the Didact or Eternal Warden did. It takes a while to get there, but this story does end up being fairly entertaining by the end.

Mixed

• Scan Pulse – Halo Infinite introduces a “scan” button, which will send out a pulse which briefly points highlights all weapons, enemies, and interactable objects in the vicinity, and will display where your objectives are. It’s definitely handy, but it also just feels like a crutch: I constantly want to press this button to make sure that I’m not missing anything. The only reason I don’t do it is because that’s really fucking annoying to keep up, so I just resign myself to missing things. That said, there are times where you actually do need it, because you can’t find some random panel where you need to press a button to advance the mission, and it won’t make that clear to you. Maybe it’s just like this because modern games have gotten so big and detailed that it’s way too easy to miss anything important, but it feels like an inelegant solution to the problem.
• The Characters – A character-driven story needs its characters, and while they are a bit of a mixed bag, what we get here is an improvement on the last couple games overall. First of all, Master Chief is back to being the effortless badass he was in Halo 2, and those Doom (2016) influences have helped make his dry humour even more awesome. Where things get a bit more mixed is in the supporting cast:
  • The Pilot is a coward trying to flee, but gets caught up with Master Chief and becomes exasperated as he gets dragged into danger again and again. He can be somewhat annoying as a result, but he does grow on you as the game goes, and at least I can understand and sympathize with him.
  • The Weapon, on the other hand… I’m really mixed on her. She’s our new AI companion, who is an incomplete copy of Cortana that was supposed to find Cortana, destroy her, and then delete herself. However, upon Cortana’s deletion, the Weapon finds herself still operational, much to her confusion. Her personality is noticeably different compared to Cortana; the Weapon is much more childlike and inquisitive. While she is fairly well fleshed out as a character and I’m glad they’ve gone to the effort to differentiate her from Cortana, she just ends up being kind of annoying to me. Some of this is down to her dialogue, which can be fairly cringey. She’s also our objective-giver, so after every single objective you complete, she’ll say something along the lines of “oh hey we need to go find ____ to advance the story, lets go do it!” This bothers me, because I can just feel the developers prodding me every time she says something like this (which is a lot). Like… it’s an open world, I’ve got camps to capture and soldiers to rescue, I can see my objective markers, just let me do what I want to.
• Open World Structure – I am fairly burnt out on open world games, so I was pretty concerned about how Halo Infinite would fare as a result. Luckily, it works out fairly well I’d say, although there are some pretty big caveats to that. One of the most revolutionary aspects of the early Halo games were their massive, open sandboxes, so going fully open-world just feels like an evolution of that concept. I think it’s best summed up this way: playing Halo Infinite is like playing Combat Evolved the way you imagined it in 2001. That said…
  • Big caveat #1: Halo Infinite is basically a carbon copy of the Far Cry open world structure which has become very tired in the past decade. For most of this game’s runtime, you’re just capturing bandit camps and dealing with a bunch of filler side quests which provide very little incentive to complete them, other than checking off some boxes on your mini-map and allowing you to spawn more powerful weapons and vehicles at captured bandit camps. Surprisingly, this didn’t wear thin for me (perhaps because the game has a fairly reasonable playtime), but if you’ve been playing more open world games than I have, then this may be a bigger issue for you.
  • Big caveat #2: Halo Infinite has the worst level design of the entire franchise, bar none. Since 343 Industries cannot curate encounters or force you to complete missions in a certain order, objectives are absolutely swarming with enemies, and your missions are extremely generic: press X buttons to expose power cores that you need to blow up, kill all bad guys in the area, blow up X objectives, etc. This would be unacceptable in any previous Halo game, but for some reason, being open world makes this less of an issue for me, even though in the back of my mind I know I prefer a more curated, creative, and diversified approach. The gunplay in this game is just so good that it props up issues like this which would have sunk a weaker game. I think this is why, as much fun as I was having playing the game, I just didn’t find myself wanting to play it as much as some of the other games in the franchise, and my play sessions end up being shorter and more spread out than for, say, Halo 2 and 3.

Hate

• Skipping Over the End of Halo 5 is Cowardly – As much as I enjoy this game’s throw-back to classic Halo and its fantastic gunplay, I just cannot get over the fact that it skips over the end of Halo 5 and basically soft-reboots the entire franchise to not have to bother dealing with the consequences of it. For all my problems with Halo 5, the ending was downright bold. Only a handful of humans managed to escape Cortana before she fires EMP bombs at all worlds resisting the AI takeover, blasting them into the stone age. This hinted at a future game that’s scrappier and lower-tech, where we have to scavenge for better weapons and armour, akin to The Terminator. Plus, Halo 5 barely even started to deal with Cortana as our new main villain, so having her die off-screen before Halo Infinite begins is borderline insane and makes this entire extended universe of continuity feel like a joke. Instead, it’s back to the ol’ status quo: Chief fighting the Covenant on a Halo ring. Is that all this franchise will ever be? Because that’s a depressing future if it is…
  • Granted, Infinite does touch on this storyline in its final hours, but it’s done in such a way where it feels like we skipped over an entire game’s worth of plot and consequences… like, imagine if Star Wars went from Attack of the Clones to A New Hope. It would feel kind of weird and disjointed, right? That’s kind of what playing Infinite is like.
• Load Times – Halo Infinite has some of the longest load times that I’ve seen in a game since the PS3 era. The first time I loaded up the game, it legitimately took at least a minute just to get to the main menu. Thankfully, it loads quicker from there on, but if you’re like me and are playing this game for the campaign, there’s an extra “fuck you” in store: the game always loads into the multiplayer menu, so you have to then select “Campaign” and then go through another lengthy loading screen to play that. Thankfully, once you get in-game, there are basically no more loading screens, but it’s still enough friction up-front that I sometimes didn’t even want to bother starting the game up.
• The Other Equipment Choices Suck – If there’s one big issue with the grappling hook, it’s that it’s arguably too good… which is actually kind of a problem, because you have other equipment you can use. However, they are so inferior in comparison that they aren’t worth using at all. Like, the first equipment you can switch to is the Threat Sensor, which… highlights nearby enemies. Big fucking whoop. The only time you might want to use this is when an Elite pulls out an energy sword and uses its active camouflage. However, I would literally rather blindly fight an invisible enemy that can one-shot me than go through the convoluted sequence of button presses to switch from the grappling hook to the threat sensor… so that’s exactly what I did. I legitimately never used any piece of equipment other than the grappling hook the entire game, and never felt like I missed out for this.
• Rough Around the Edges – Halo Infinite is a game that ended up needing to be delayed for a full year in order to get it into a shippable state… and thank God they did, because the game we got is still pretty rough at times, so I can only imagine what it would have been like if it released in 2020! I’m talking some pretty stiff animations, questionable optimization (substantial frame drops are not an uncommon occurrence), random bugs, weird ragdolling (especially when you die), guns turning into unintelligible blobs that stretch infinitely across the game world, etc. Oh, and there’s one mission where you will be told that you need to visit four beacons, which will be marked on your map and everything. However, these beacons do not allow you to progress until after you’re told about the mission, at which point you are expected to walk forward a little bit to actually trigger it. On two separate occasions, I fast travelled away before the mission triggered without even realizing it, and was then left completely confused about why I couldn’t do anything at these beacons. This could be a minor annoyance, but the area you need to go to to trigger the mission is far away from any fast travel point you will have unlocked up to this point, which turns it into a giant, confusing headache which is far too easy to find yourself mired in.
• Overpowered Weapon/Vehicle Spawns – As you complete objectives in Halo Infinite, you will get “Valor” points which allow you to spawn a chosen weapon or vehicle if your Valor is above a specific threshold. Initially this will allow you to call for an assault rifle or a mongoose ATV, but you quickly start getting the ability to call in upgraded versions of the game’s strongest weapons, or even goddamn Scorpion tanks! It’s cool that they give you the choice, I guess…? But, at a certain point, you have to actively choose not to trivialize the game if you want to have fun. It also robs that feeling of excitement in the tank sections in previous games, as it was no longer this surprise awaiting you, and I just kept finding myself starting every mission with the exact same overpowered guns.
• Worst Vehicle Physics in the Franchise – You can spawn in any vehicle you want at forward operating bases (FOBs) that you capture. This sounds great, especially since it can take a few minutes to get where you’re going in this open world… however, I usually just hoof it on foot, because the vehicle physics in this game suck, particularly for the warthog and mongoose. Like, they control about as well as ever, but they crash, flip over, and get stuck on the terrain constantly, which I can only assume is due to the open world structure and a lack of polish.

Halo Infinite really surprised me. I had heard that its campaign was decent, but I’m so sick of open world games that I was not expecting much at all. Its gunplay was so immediately fun though that it sucked me in. It may look like there’s a lot of things I hated about this game, but honestly, these are all nitpicks. For literally every single one of these complaints, you can add onto the end “…the gunplay sure is fucking great though”. I had an absolute blast with Halo Inifinite, to the point where open world bullshit and a cowardly plot reset couldn’t even dampen my enthusiasm for the game.