HALO INFINITE is a fun shooter. Immense beautiful production design. Best of the Halo series.

— John Carpenter (@TheHorrorMaster) January 16, 2022

I want to hear about it from you guys here. I haven't played it. I want to believe.

It's my favorite Halo, purely because it actually delivers on what I thought the promise of the OG halo was, an awesome shooter set in a wide open world.

I like it. The actual shooting and movement and the part where you play is the best Halo has ever felt, full stop.

The story is fine. I like how they handled most of it, but I have mixed feelings on the ending.

I need to play more to really evaluate the open world. I don’t think it’s super additive, but after doing the first island, I ignored the open world and mainlined the campaign missions. Maybe there’s good stuff there that I didn’t see, but I wasn’t impressed by what I did experience. It just wasn’t compelling or particularly fun to navigate, and it most seemed like there wasn’t much to justify its existence.

I greatly enjoyed it. I like the open world enough that I've nearly 100%'d every activity and collectible. However, others' observations that it's not particularly dense or meaningful are generally well-founded, and the game never really does big set piece moments. That said, taking into consideration the troubled dev cycle and COVID, I'd say it was a solid first attempt, and I ultimately still had fun. Future single player content definitely needs to refine the concept.

Narratively I'm almost entirely satisfied. It also suffers from not having as much depth as it could've, and I suspect cuts also affected this area as much as it did the open world mechanics. I don't have a problem with how stripped back the narrative was compared to previous titles as I view this as an opportunity to relayer the foundations.

I'd say it's definitely worth a Game Pass trial (or even a regular month at $10) and your time, if for no other reason than to evaluate it yourself.

It's a ton of fun!

The story is OK (which is pretty high praise for 343 at this point) and I think they did the best they could with the metaphorical corner they painted themselves into with H5.

The enemies look\sound great and are fun to shoot at. They finally got the art style right on all of them. The weapon sandbox is good overall, vehicles could use some work in areas. The grapple ability is just so much fun, everywhere, all the time. Fun for the sake of fun. I could throw fusion coils at enemies all day.

The world is really fun to explore and full of tons of details and easter eggs. I love the atmosphere when it turns from day to night (pro tip, lower the default brightness settings and see what I mean!). The biome does get repetitive after a bit. Replay value is yet to be seen, but I think it will get better once they get the actual missions to be selectable to play on the fly.

One thing I've always really enjoyed in all of Bungie's Halos, is changing up how I play an encounter just for the no-strings attached fun that it is (that might be "what if I tried this encounter without using X weapons, or only went on foot?*) and the FOBs & Banished facilities would be PERFECT for that kind of replay... but I can't do that unless I start up a whole new campaign. The game does suffer because of this. Remember, these aren't the missions, but the little mini-missions you can do in the open world. I'd love to see a game mechanic where the Banished actively try to take back a FOB that I captured, that would be pretty cool.

Whatever plans they have for expanding campaign\open world consider me interested!

MP is fun too (with blemishes of course) but topic for another time.

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*True story, replayed H2 campaign on MCC a few months ago and on the Delta Halo mission (the one with "kicking ass in outerspace, wish you were here" line) I decided to skip taking the warthog. In all the time I've played, I never did that before. Doing so, when I came to the area where you need to extend the bridge (a wraith is on one side and you get a scorpion drop) I went on foot around the perimeter and found some dead ODSTs and a sniper rifle that I never knew were there. Blew my mind, 18 years later!

I'm obviously the minority here then. I was/am pretty disappointed on most aspects of the campaign.

The story was "meh" to me. The goals of the antagonist were shallow and there didn't seem to be any stakes.

Missions seemed stale and repetitive. They built a beautiful open world, then used it for the missions of "go here and blow this up. Now go here and blow this up." The multiple boss battles were annoying to me. If you didn't have the right weapons, it was just a bunch of constantly running away and pecking away at the bosses life meter. You either won, or died and started over gradually increasing with each attempt.

I never used a warthog. I got it one early on and it seemed to tip over with the slightest bump. It was more frustrating than anything.

There is no campaign co-op yet. There is no mission replay yet. If you want to replay a campaign mission, you have to start a new campaign, and run the whole thing in order.

After one week, I had beaten the campaign and found all of the open world collectibles (that were available outside of campaign missions.)

One of the most fun vehicles is the hornet. It's fun to fly around shooting bad guys...wait...nope, two random banshees just spawned next to you and grief you until your hornet is destroyed.

It definitely seems like they got the campaign portion of the game to a point of "ok...it's at least playable. We can release it and add/patch things as we go."

The more I think about Halo Infinite, the more it confuses me. I would love to watch a hour-long BTS deep dive into its development, because I suspect there is quite a story to be told there. I’m not sure exactly where to start.

In some ways, it is exceptionally good and amazingly well polished. There are elements that feel like an incredible amount of time, care, and iteration went into really perfecting them. And at the same time, there are parts of the game that are so shockingly undercooked that it’s confusing to see these desperate elements in the same game.

One comparison I’d make is that it feels like The Library from Halo CE, but a whole game of that. I don’t think there is anything about the Library that is bad, per say. The combat encounters are fun and intense, the atmosphere is great, there’s a nice mix of tension building and explosive action. It’s just that there’s way too much and it’s all kind of the same so it just blurs together into a vague mush without enough unique highlight moments to justify its length.

Another, perhaps more accurate comparison I’d make is that Infinite feels to me like a AAA studio made a 2-3 hour proof of concept campaign with incredible production values, and then hit the copy/paste buttons to turn it into a 12-15 hour campaign. There’s so much and so little game there at the same time, if you get my meaning.

The feel of the combat is phenomenal IMO. Master Chief has never felt so fun to control for me. It all feels fluid and fast yet precise, nicely “modern” while still somehow feeling like “halo” the whole time. The grappling hook is a riot to use, and the various new mechanics involving it are excellent additions to the combat sandbox. I will say that I really don’t like most of the new weapons. Nearly all the covenant/banished weapons just don’t click with me in terms of looks or feel. But I really enjoy the human weapons. Not a harsh criticism, but a bit of a missed opportunity IMO.

The real problem for me comes down to the fact that the game gives you this amazing sandbox, and then has you facing the exact same kinds of encounter for 98% of the campaign. There’s shockingly little variety to the kinds of encounters you find yourself in. I look back at the first 3-4 hours of Halo 3, where you go from the Jungle to the more close quarters fighting in the UNSC base, to a sprawling warthog adventure across the plains, to an industrial complex with a mix of intense indoor swarms and epic outdoor anti-vehicular combat that climaxes in a mongoose fleet taking on a Scarab and it’s supporting aircraft. There’s like 5 times as much gameplay variety in that one portion of Halo 3 as there is in all of Infinite. The term “set piece” has a lot of negative connotations for some people, but I think the older Halo games delivered an incredible range of setpiece moments in the best possible sense of the term. Moments that stood out as unique or different in exciting and compelling ways, and begged to be replayed over and over. Infinite has very few of these moments… in fact, there are only 2 or 3 that come to mind when I look back at my campaign play through, and the rest of it is a monotonous blur. And those moments that do stand out are nowhere near as good as the 15-20 best moments from any of the original Halo games, IMO.

The open world is another big mixed bag. Now, I play a lot of open world games. So when I go into Halo Infinite, there is no “wow factor” to the novelty of having a huge open space to explore. If you’re a Halo fan who never plays open world games, this change might be more impactful to you. But for me, there’s nothing special or amazing about having an open world space to play in. More specifically, the open world in Infinite doesn’t feel as large as it technically is, because it’s all the same. It’s a very monotonous environment with the same small handful of structures and features replicated over and over, from one end to the next. On top of that, the mechanics of the open world are like a decade behind other open world games. Compared to any of the recent Assassin’s Creeds, Far Crys, heck, even GTA 4, the open world systems and mechanics feel incredibly hollow and sparse. Strangest of all is the fact that the open world does seem to have phenomenal potential for co-op fun, especially when you factor in the field bases where you can choose whatever vehicles and equipment you want and then head out into a mission. But, there’s no co-op, and no way to replay campaign missions other than starting a whole new campaign. We’ve been told these features are coming, but I just can’t understand how a Halo game shipped without these features. I remember how shocked many of us were when Destiny shipped with no theatre or forge modes… now basic elements like co-op and replayable missions are being treated like post-launch support.

And yet, despite all these criticisms, I still enjoyed playing through the campaign because the combat is so damn good, and the presentation is so fantastic. But once I hit the ~3 hour mark, I was very much ready for the game to add something or surprise me in some way or take a detour in another direction, and it just never does. And the more time that goes by without me playing it, the less desire I have to go back. The multiplayer is mechanically fun, but there are amazingly few maps or modes, and 343 completely shit the bed when it comes to the progression/unlocks features, so much so that the player population has already tanked.

Finally, I won’t get into the story much, but I’ll say that I enjoyed some elements of it, but overall it didn’t land for me. There are some technical storytelling reasons for this (which I won’t go into here), but above all else, the characters were a big miss for me. The vast majority of the game focuses on only 3 characters (including Chief)… I thought one of those characters was fine, one was a bit annoying, and the 3rd was so fucking unbearable that I wanted to blast him into space and out of the game within the first hour, and it never gets any better. So that made it really tough for me to get invested in what was happening.

Overall, I think it’s definitely worth playing. In part because there’s some genuinely great fun to be had, and in part because it’s just such a strange game :)

Is Infinite canon?

*drums fingers on his desk*

From a story point of view, I think that Infinite is a very poor story with decent presentation. If I had to put numbers to it, I'd say that Infinite's story is a 5/10 with a *very* wide standard of deviation. Some moments are top notch, and other moments are pure cringe, and it feels like a third of a game stretched out into two thirds or maybe even four fifths of a game.

Because it pretty much is.

Keep in mind that some of this is speculation, but it's no secret that Infinite's development got rebooted in 2018 or so. And one of the recent Halo novels, which was released in 2020, is about Blue Team scrambling around on Reach, fighting the Banished, defending colonists and searching the ruins of CASTLE Base for something that is hinted to be the spare clone brains that Halsey mentioned in her journal. That clone brain was obviously used to make the Weapon. In a perfect world, this probably would have been the first third or the first half of Infinite, with the Banished boarding of the Infinity taking place halfway through the game.

I don't know if a complete Halo: Infinite would have been a good story, but IMO it would have been a *better* story because there'd be less of the Weapon and the Pilot. Or at least there would be more to the story than those two.

The problem with the Weapon and the Pilot isn't that they're bad characters. There's not anything inherently bad about them like there was with Captain Del Rio*. The problem is that... well, imagine if Halo: Combat Evolved deleted Captain Keyes and Sergeant Johnson from existence. That just leaves Cortana and Foehammer, and this hypothetical game fills the void with their personal drama. Foehammer was fine the way she was presented in the original game, but there would be nothing wrong with adding lines of her being apprehensive about being stranded on Halo, and lamenting that she lost everyone she cared about on Reach.** But when you fill level after level with that plotline in pursuit of a more character-driven story, the result is a bland, one-note mess.

There really needed to be a Sergeant Johnson and a Captain Keyes in this game. Or, in the interests of branching out and not telling the same story all over again, give us an Ellen Anders or a Colonel Quartich or some other character archetypes to play with. Give me a hardass major who'll fight the Banished with sticks, a rock, and a private if that's all he has. Give me a fresh-faced lieutenant who's sorry to have missed the Human-Covenant War.

Lasky and Halsey and (I think) Locke and Blue team make an appearance in the data pads, but they have zero presence in the story. And there is an additional Spartan character in the multiplayer and tutorials, but she's a bad reaction to Sarah Palmer. She's so kind and motherly, she doesn't feel like an officer. I realize that Sarah Palmer was criticized for being a brash asshole, but completely reversing the formula doesn't work.***

As for the villains... meh. It's standard 343i writing. Once is an example, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern. The main villain sits in his throne room for the whole game, throwing taunts and legions of mooks at you.

As far as villainry in Halo goes, I think that the gold standard for writing and presentation is going to be Halo 2 and Halo 3, because the main villain had clear goals and he took clear steps to achieving those goals

-Recover the Sacred Icon
-Sideline the Elites
-Fire the rings
-Ascend to godhood

The Prophet of Truth taunted us exactly once, because he had bigger things to worry about. Every other time we communicated with the Hierarchs, it was a natural and organic part of the story. IE, it happened because the Master Chief was crashing their party.

Escharum's plan is simple:

-Goad the Chief into fighting him in hand to hand combat.
-Go out in a blaze of glory.
-That's it.

OK. That's a little harsh. Escharum's beef with the Master Chief is really what the campaign is built around, but he does have other goals. An honest assessment of Escharum's goals are:

-Repair the Halo ring.
-Wipe out the remnants of the UNSC, or at least prevent the survivors from stopping him.
-Take revenge for Doisac by firing Zeta Halo at Earth, using that nifty cone-shaped Halo blast effect mentioned in the Forerunner novels.
-Fight the Chief and go out in a blaze of glory.

The problem is, the presentation of the goals is pretty lackluster. There's statues where Atriox boasts that the Banished won because they are strong, and they are strong because they are strong, and they don't need the Covenant or gods. Escharum has holograms where he boasts about how the Banished are strong and they are honoring Atriox by following the will of Atriox, and Zeta Halo is going to be used against Earth.

The Banished are so much better when you learn that Cortana apocalypse'd Doisac. The Brute homeworld is gone. The whole reason why the Banished are beating their chests like a legion of howler monkeys is because they came from behind and ganked Cortana****. The reason why they're repairing Zeta Halo and going after Earth is because Earth created smart AI and unleashed Cortana on the galaxy. Frankly, I'd be pissed too.

But this is left until a late-game reveal. Seriously, if you learn that Doisac is gone and you haven't already grabbed all the upgrades you want, you're kind of screwed, because you're locked into the endgame. But because this reveal is so late in the game, Atriox and Escharum and the Banished have nothing of substance to talk about. But they'll talk anyway, and they'll do it over and over and over, because Halo Infinite is a third of a game stretched out into a full game. That's the tragedy of this game. There's the bones of a good story in there, but because of development issues, it's buried under a lot of padding.

Note that I think this is a quantum improvement over Halo 4 and 5, which were just plain bad stories.

Infinite has a lot of strengths, and if 343i can keep an even keel, I think that they'll start producing some very good games. For one thing, the Covenant races are back as primary antagonists. Brutes, Elites, Grunts and Jackals have potential to be compelling villains (Or allies) in a way that undead Forerunner killbots don't.

Likewise, Marines are back in a way that they weren't in Halo 4 and Halo 5. Not only that, but the UNSC and the Banished have that familiar look to them, even though the Banished are their own faction with distinct technology.

I guess Infinite's biggest strength is that it feels like a Halo game made by a different company than Bungie, rather than a different game developer using the Halo brand to do its own thing. It reminds me of Halo Wars in a way. That's why I'm looking forward to seeing where 343i goes next.

Infinite's biggest weakness is vagueness and pacing. The pacing is largely because of how much story content was cut, but... well, I think if 343i had written Halo 3, the first half would have gone like this:

Master Chief: What's going on?
Miranda Keyes: Truth's here, on Earth. We don't know why, but whatever it is, it's bad.

One mission later:
Miranda Keyes: We just got word! Truth is here, in Africa!
Master Chief: What's he doing?
Miranda Keyes: Good question.

One mission later:
Master Chief: Where are all those ships going?
Miranda Keyes: Truth is digging something up.
Master Chief: Digging up what?
Miranda Keyes: Something big. And ancient.

Later that same mission:
Master Chief: OK, I've plugged into the Covenant battlenet. What are the Covenant saying?
Miranda Keyes: Oh, no! This could be the Ark! Truth might be trying to fire the rings!

Yet another mission later:
Truth: *Opens the portal*
Miranda Keyes: Now I understand. This wasn't the Ark, it was a portal to the Ark. Let's go!

Halo 3 pulls off the same bait-and-switch with the portal under Voi, but it does it in two steps: First the exposition in Crow's Nest that sets up the excavation and hints that it's the Ark, and then the actual opening of the portal.

Infinite has a problem with pacing caused by all the padding needed to turn the Zeta Halo levels into a full game, but it's still frustrating to plug the Weapon into a terminal only to hear that the Banished are up to something, or that the data she found feels old and somehow lonely. It's trying to push a mystery too far, and it's a trend in all the 343i games so far.

Halo 4 was a slowly unravelling mystery as to what Requiem was and what was calling in the UNSC Infinity. Halo 5 was a slowly unravelling mystery (but not the one that was advertised!) as to what Cortana was up to, how she survived, who are the Guardians, why is the Warden Eternal, when is the Warden Eternal?

Infinite tried to make a mystery out of why the Banished wanted to sterilize Earth, and what happened with Cortana, and what the Harbinger is after. This led to encounter after encounter with the Banished talking circumspectly about what happened to Atriox, and Cortana and the Forerunner monitor referring to the Endless with oblique references.

Halo games have mystery and mystique, but they don't have to be built around a mystery. Take Halo 2, for example. There's no mystery as to what the Covenant are doing and why. They're hunting for the Index so they can fire the Halo array, and the Master Chief is trying to stop them. The fun in the story comes from the detours (The battle of Earth, the Heretics on the gas mine) and the curveballs that the story throws at you. Truth betrays the Elites and replaces them with Brutes, triggering a civil war! The Flood is coordinated by a central intelligence, and that intelligence can negotiate!

The same can be said of Halo 3. There were mysteries, but those mysteries were not key to understanding the central plot. Hell, forget Halo entirely and look at the greatest action-adventure film ever made. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark tells you everything you need to know about what the Ark is and why the Nazis want it in the first ten minutes of the film. The rest is a race to the key to the Ark's location, and then a serially escalating battle over possession of the Ark of the Covenant.

And I'd like to see stories like that told with Halo.

If you've read through this entire mess, thank you. All the points above aside, I am fairly positive about what 343i has done with Infinite, and I hope the team is healthy enough to deliver many more campaigns. Here's to a decade of smooth sailing.

*Existing solely as a hate sink and an obstacle to the MC is a bad foundation for a character, especially when Del Rio was right about everything, and yet the game still acted as if he was wrong.
**OK, maybe there would be tonal issues, as Foehammer sounds pretty cheerful in the games. Being wary of Halo and lamenting her lost ones would make her character more determined and grim, which would clash with the delivery of some of her lines.
***I think you could have handed Palmer to a different writer, and she would have been much better received by the fans. There's an early draft of Halo 4 where she is first seen leading a fireteam out of a Pelican into combat in search of Lasky. I have no idea why that was scrapped, because it was actually pretty good. First impressions matter, and and meeting her as she leads troops and kicks ass would have been infinitely better than finding her hiding behind a blast door without her helmet. Not sure what could have been done about Spartan Ops, though.
****Somehow? Probably with help from the Harbinger, but this is left frustratingly vague. And now that I type this out, I realize that the Harbinger was dug up after the Banished had control of Zeta Halo, so... *Shrug*