Halo Infinite

I genuinely did enjoy a lot of my time with Halo Infinite, but the moment I realized I was about to start the final mission of the game I realized that this game was never going to capture the essence of the series it claimed it would, honestly I don’t think they were ever trying to.

Halo Infinite is a step up from 343’s last title, but at the end of the day it still falls victim to all of the studio’s shortcomings; and despite the return of the classic artstyle, this is arguably the least “Halo-like” game in the series.

Every installment in this series since Reach has strayed further away from the original formula, which makes sense since the games are now being made by different creatives and developers. However this game’s jump to the Open World format, along with many different gameplay and direction decisions takes it beyond just a different take on the series and ultimately makes it feel more like its own IP, vaguely inspired by Halo.

A common criticism I’ve had with Post Bungie halo games is that it feels like the developers are overthinking which direction to take them. In my opinion, Halo’s greatest strength has always come from being accessible yet rewarding experience; feeling immediately comprehensible for new players yet having the mechanical depth to still have a pretty high skill ceiling (In both single and Multiplayer). Halo Infinite, however, Has so many mechanics and systems at play that, while not overwhelming, that sense of accessibility feels lost. With the entire game world being saturated with specific damage-type explosive barrels and identical bases to capture and operate; then populated with so many variants of the same enemy that it’s hard to tell which rank each variant is, the game effectively trades all immersion for constant reminders that the skill ceiling exists and if you’re new you know how bad you are.

The core gameplay is fun, but almost completely devoid of Halo’s key elements. Every weapon has hard scoping, sprinting and Doom Eternal style movement mechanics are necessary to get around and battle tougher enemies, You can refill an alien weapon’s ammo without finding a new one, and the actual tradeoffs between damage types has been minimized, with all weapons, even automatic and plasma guns doing head-shot damage. All these little changes don’t need to be bad on their own, but they add up and ultimately make the gameplay feel too generic and like anything else you’d get from any other Triple A studio these days.

Even the actual way the Universe is explored through the game feels lacking. In previous games each faction felt distinctive in their appearance and weapons, but in Infinite not only is there very little visual identity between the weapons of each faction, but enemies will some-what frequently use UNSC weapons against you, making the banished feel far less distinctive as an enemy than the covenant did. All this alongside all weapons having headshot damage and reloading makes them all feel too similar.

The Story and campaign rivals Halo 5 in narrative failure. The story isn’t nearly as frustrating to sit through, but it is arguably worse in that nothing really happens, yet plot-lines and characters are buried so that they can’t even be revisited. Without spoiling anything, very few characters from previous games appear in Infinite, the closest we get to representation from any pre-existing supporting cast are some collectable audio files. Worse yet, major storylines are entirely resolved off-screen, while the main campaign takes the player through dull objective after dull objective, with actually essential information to the plot being deeply confusing and largely reliant on the player collecting hidden audio files to make even a little sense.

All around Halo Infinite is a perfectly fine open world action game; but as a Halo game it fails spectacularly, and strongly suggests the devs at 343 would be more comfortable making their own IP than trying to modernize Halo. While as a longtime fan I have almost nothing positive to say about it, I won’t rate this any lower than a 7 because the game does very little “wrong” from an independent design perspective. It merely fails to revive the franchise it promised it would.