As of writing, I am near 250 hours in Halo Infinite.

Halo Infinite launched as a really promising new start for the Halo franchise, unfortunately it has quickly become almost entirely abandoned by the devs with releases only for new battle passes to sell more customization to players.

I really enjoyed the campaign‘s approach to a semi open world. Exploring with a warthog full of marines was a blast and I loved coming across patrols and outposts to clear. The mountain terrain with tight paths was not very well suited for the scorpion, but the other vehicles felt great in most of the spaces. The story was very interesting for new and old fans, and I would have loved to see where 343 took the next chapter, because it was seemingly meant to be picked up in a future Infinite DLC, unfortunately it seems almost all of the infinite campaign team was laid off or moved away from campaign, so it will become another 343 story thread that just gets dropped.

Multiplayer in infinite is probably the closest to classic Halo I think fans have seen in a long time. 343 did a great job of combining the new movement features from H5 with the classic feel of older Halos to make it broadly liked. The weapon sandbox feels very well tuned and I enjoy using most tools given to players. Maps are great, but 343 has heavily relied on fan-made maps in Forge to supplement most of their playlists, I do not think a non-forged, dev-made map has been released in almost a year and a half.

Forge is probably the best part of infinite. I am not a forger, but the tools that 343 have made available to players are nothing short of incredible. It is a shame that there is still no action sack playlist almost four years in, but you can still play through the customs browser if you would like.

Firefight’s silent death was a big disappointment. 343 promised it would be out soon, released firefight king of the hill, and then silently pushed back and then canceled the release of true firefight. Halo 5’s warzone firefight was at least an interesting twist on the firefight formula, KOTHFF is just spawning forge AI and making them go to a point, wave after wave.

Customization has improved in a lot of ways and gotten worse in others. 343 has slowly broken out of their core set up that came at launch and now allow shoulders, helmets, and visors to be used on any core, which is a great change. Unfortunately, so much content is locked behind paywalls that feel exploitative, which is the modern live service game landscape. The costing system was a cool idea, but it should not be a total replacement for selecting your own colors. It took over two years to have the color white, which is ridiculous. It sounds like 343 put themselves in a significant amount of tech debt in designing the customization system, and breaking out of it has been a technical challenge, which is a shame.

I think Infinite can be summed up with the unofficial motto of 343 Industries, “3 steps forward, 43 steps back.”

Truly baffling how mismanaged this project must have been. My heart goes out to any and all people who had to work on anything regarding this game. A multi-billion dollar company is incapable of giving the resources and the scope required to NOT end a half-a-decade development cycle with this bland, copy-pasted rehash. The grappling hook is goated, thank god, but even the implementation of alternative equipment sucks. They had to bring back the Halo 2 Gondola Ride, everyone's favourite masterclass in waiting for an encounter to end. This Halo sure could be infinite if they were willing to reuse the same environments a few million times more.

After years of hearing how this game was bad, how this game was a disappointment, I finally bit the bullet, bought a Series X, and played the game. My thoughts?

I kind of loved it?

It's not perfect and it's got a lot wrong. The story is extremely confusing and told poorly, and the environments have no variety art wise, but god damn if this game isn't fun as all hell. The gunplay has been polished to the best its ever been in the franchise. Greatly improving upon 4 and 5's lackluster gunplay and balance, Infinite marches to the beat of its own drum. Not quite Bungie Halo, but not quite old 343 Halo either, the gameplay is extremely fresh, exciting, and fun.

This applies to the multiplayer as well, again being one of the best the franchise has seen in a LONG time. I'd say its my second favorite multiplayer experience behind the legendary Halo 3.

All in all, I really enjoyed my time with this one. The campaign could have used a little bit of a rewrite story wise, and I would have LOVED some other biomes to explore on the Halo ring, like the snowy peaks, swamps, and deserts we saw in past games. In the end, I can't complain, I finally got to play a Halo game that made me feel something again.

Welcome back Chief.

The following is a review of Halo Infinite around the campaign's launch.

Campaign: They knocked it out of the park. 343 finally gave us a Halo game that understands what made the OG trilogy great, with open environments, familiar enemy types (NO MORE PROMETHEANS!), and a Chief that is more of a symbol of hope rather than a rogue spartan. This is what Halo should be. The open-world didn't have a whole lot of empty space, with there always being a band of Banished enemies around the corner in between points of interest. The grappling hook made traversal and combat way more unique too. The story and characters are great, with Chief, Weapon, and Echo-216 having some great interactions and moments to shine. The villains are menacing and actually raise the stakes. Escharum might be my favorite villain in the franchise. The audio logs help fill in the gap between Halo 5 and this game, with its own set of interesting revelations to reveal. My only complaints are with the new monitor we meet being a really stupid character and the Cortana stuff not being handled in the best way. Other than that, I had a blast grinding out the campaign, and I cannot wait to see where the story goes next.

Multiplayer: This might mechanically be the best FPS multiplayer in the industry. Some of the best movement, gunplay, balancing, and gameplay variety I've seen in a while. The maps are all great and so is the ranked playlist. Modes like Fiesta also keep the game going. The problem? It's not a lot of content, despite it all being quality. There aren't a lot of Big Team Battle maps right now, and with this game being touted as a live service, I really hope future updates can help sustain this game's playerbase, because it is really not a lot right now.

Overall, I think 343 delivered, but only time will tell whether they can keep the game alive.

Halo Infinite falls into a weird zone for me. On the one hand, the actual moment-to-moment game play is as good as it's always been (Some may argue even better), and it's a pretty decent looking game in spots. On the other hand, the story falls into the trap of being another "bridge title" for the next game in the series, and quite a few things are left unanswered. I'm also not a huge fan of Open-World games, so this diminishes my enjoyment of the game slightly. Additionally, I'm still pretty annoyed at 343 for the questionable choices they've made in regards to the multiplayer, especially when it comes to Battle Passes and Customization. I'll occasionally boot this up once and a while for a few matches, but if I want to play a really good Halo game, I'd probably just go to the MCC.