Halo Infinite is a game with incredibly high points to suck you in, and incredibly low points to remind you why you stopped playing in the first place.
I’ll be discussing both multiplayer and campaign.
Firstly I need to praise the general design of the game. Spartans and the Covenant have never looked this good. The design philosophy of many halo games were shoved together in the best way. Elites for example maintain their iconic appearance from the earlier Halo games, but they stand tall and dodge nimbly like an Elite from Halo Reach. Many enemies are at their best. Brutes finally feel unique and interesting to fight, with variants that snipe you, charge you and melee you with their bare hands, and everything else in between.
After what Halo went through with 4 and 5, it’s nice to see the designs return to tradition in the strongest way possible. Things look like what they’re supposed to.
Secondly a lot of guns feel really good. The sound design and animations are excellent, guns feel great to shoot, they have punch and sound powerful. Even the assault rifle and sidekick are ridiculously capable guns. Even if the weapon sandbox can be lacking a bit, a lot of typical mainstays seem to be missing, and their counterparts don’t really do much to fill the role for them.
The regular shotgun, the Spartan laser, the magnum, flame thrower, SMG, etc. it’s weird that these weapons are missing. Many of them are fan favorites and have very important roles in the sandbox. The bulldog doesn’t compare to the regular shotgun at all for example. No one shot kill potential, so the energy sword always beats it now, and you can’t really have those silly multi kills with it like you could with the OG shotgun.
Now the campaign is open world. This is bad. Halo maps were all about being big but they were hand crafted for the cinematic angle. Music cues would play when you do specific things or get to specific points, animations would play when you enter rooms or destroy things, and massive set pieces are crafted for you to fight in. This is all gone in Infinite. Instead you will go to a set base and fight there, things feel more like firefight than a Halo mission. Sure there is some story going on in the background but it’s genuinely kind of bad. Don’t get me wrong killing legions of aliens is fun but it really does get kinda bland after a while, especially since the game’s difficulty is questionable. Outside of insta kills you never really get bursted down or blown up by enemy focus. The AI is smart but not very aggressive. Leading to a lot of situations where you’re running circles around them while they struggle to even land a hit. There are also the bounty hunting missions where you fight unique enemies, issue is a lot of them don’t really have more health so you enter a mission area and just immediately one tap the enemy grunt that’s apparently supposed to be a super dangerous boss. Everything just kinda feels a little lame when the charm of a grappling hook and cool looking enemies wear off. Open world is a plague that ruins every game series it touches, and that continues here.
Now the multiplayer is generally pretty fun. I’m far from the best at it but I do have a pretty good time generally. My biggest gripes mostly lie in the gun balancing. Time to kill seems to be wildly inconsistent. At the same time, many guns feel like they take the same amount of time to kill enemies. This sounds ridiculous I know but I have examples. The heatwave and bulldog both require 3 shots to kill in most situations. The assault rifle can rip someone to shreds while they attempt to kill you with the pitiful joke that is the commando. The sidekick can drop someone very easily with headshots but body shots do pretty much nothing. The sniper in this game just feels so awful I’m not even sure why, shock rifle too. Plasma Pistol and Ravager are genuinely awful I don’t know what they’re thinking with either of those guns.
I want to like a lot of these guns more, they sound great and have nice animations, they’re just ridiculously unreliable and annoying to use. Which is bad since the default starting items like the AR and the sidekick are so competent it’s actually hard to justify dropping them sometimes.
Quick side note but I hate all the vehicles in this game. They completely ruined how vehicle destruction works and made a lot of them feel ridiculously weak for balance purposes. The warthog turret takes hours to kill someone but doesn’t have any spread for the most part. Bad trade. The chopper’s guns aren’t explosive at all anymore. The Scorpion feels like it blows up if someone looks at it funny. And the new mechanic of vehicles going into critical mode before blowing up is so stupid. Firstly it just denies players the satisfaction of blowing things up. Spartan Lasering a filled warthog in halo reach was like popping a Christmas cracker, the medals and violent explosion was so satisfying and that’s completely gone now. Vehicles just feel inherently too tanky at points too, and don’t really show visible damage like they did in older games. Such a ridiculous downgrade after all Reach and Halo 3 did to make vehicles amazing to use and blow up.
Lastly. The micro transactions. Like what the fuck? I know things have slowly gotten better but this game will always be bad due to this stupid store reliance. Reach had a perfect model for unlocks but no no now that the game is free to play they need to be sure you can’t have shit without spending more money. I understand this is probably due to Microsoft’s meddling, but I nearly faint seeing my favorite helmets or an armor coating that I like being sold for 25 dollars plus tax.
Halo Infinite is a disappointment more than anything. Because the framework is there. This could have been Halo’s grand return, and it was at first. But the cracks are impossible to ignore, and I’ll always be frustrated with how this game was handled.
I’ll be discussing both multiplayer and campaign.
Firstly I need to praise the general design of the game. Spartans and the Covenant have never looked this good. The design philosophy of many halo games were shoved together in the best way. Elites for example maintain their iconic appearance from the earlier Halo games, but they stand tall and dodge nimbly like an Elite from Halo Reach. Many enemies are at their best. Brutes finally feel unique and interesting to fight, with variants that snipe you, charge you and melee you with their bare hands, and everything else in between.
After what Halo went through with 4 and 5, it’s nice to see the designs return to tradition in the strongest way possible. Things look like what they’re supposed to.
Secondly a lot of guns feel really good. The sound design and animations are excellent, guns feel great to shoot, they have punch and sound powerful. Even the assault rifle and sidekick are ridiculously capable guns. Even if the weapon sandbox can be lacking a bit, a lot of typical mainstays seem to be missing, and their counterparts don’t really do much to fill the role for them.
The regular shotgun, the Spartan laser, the magnum, flame thrower, SMG, etc. it’s weird that these weapons are missing. Many of them are fan favorites and have very important roles in the sandbox. The bulldog doesn’t compare to the regular shotgun at all for example. No one shot kill potential, so the energy sword always beats it now, and you can’t really have those silly multi kills with it like you could with the OG shotgun.
Now the campaign is open world. This is bad. Halo maps were all about being big but they were hand crafted for the cinematic angle. Music cues would play when you do specific things or get to specific points, animations would play when you enter rooms or destroy things, and massive set pieces are crafted for you to fight in. This is all gone in Infinite. Instead you will go to a set base and fight there, things feel more like firefight than a Halo mission. Sure there is some story going on in the background but it’s genuinely kind of bad. Don’t get me wrong killing legions of aliens is fun but it really does get kinda bland after a while, especially since the game’s difficulty is questionable. Outside of insta kills you never really get bursted down or blown up by enemy focus. The AI is smart but not very aggressive. Leading to a lot of situations where you’re running circles around them while they struggle to even land a hit. There are also the bounty hunting missions where you fight unique enemies, issue is a lot of them don’t really have more health so you enter a mission area and just immediately one tap the enemy grunt that’s apparently supposed to be a super dangerous boss. Everything just kinda feels a little lame when the charm of a grappling hook and cool looking enemies wear off. Open world is a plague that ruins every game series it touches, and that continues here.
Now the multiplayer is generally pretty fun. I’m far from the best at it but I do have a pretty good time generally. My biggest gripes mostly lie in the gun balancing. Time to kill seems to be wildly inconsistent. At the same time, many guns feel like they take the same amount of time to kill enemies. This sounds ridiculous I know but I have examples. The heatwave and bulldog both require 3 shots to kill in most situations. The assault rifle can rip someone to shreds while they attempt to kill you with the pitiful joke that is the commando. The sidekick can drop someone very easily with headshots but body shots do pretty much nothing. The sniper in this game just feels so awful I’m not even sure why, shock rifle too. Plasma Pistol and Ravager are genuinely awful I don’t know what they’re thinking with either of those guns.
I want to like a lot of these guns more, they sound great and have nice animations, they’re just ridiculously unreliable and annoying to use. Which is bad since the default starting items like the AR and the sidekick are so competent it’s actually hard to justify dropping them sometimes.
Quick side note but I hate all the vehicles in this game. They completely ruined how vehicle destruction works and made a lot of them feel ridiculously weak for balance purposes. The warthog turret takes hours to kill someone but doesn’t have any spread for the most part. Bad trade. The chopper’s guns aren’t explosive at all anymore. The Scorpion feels like it blows up if someone looks at it funny. And the new mechanic of vehicles going into critical mode before blowing up is so stupid. Firstly it just denies players the satisfaction of blowing things up. Spartan Lasering a filled warthog in halo reach was like popping a Christmas cracker, the medals and violent explosion was so satisfying and that’s completely gone now. Vehicles just feel inherently too tanky at points too, and don’t really show visible damage like they did in older games. Such a ridiculous downgrade after all Reach and Halo 3 did to make vehicles amazing to use and blow up.
Lastly. The micro transactions. Like what the fuck? I know things have slowly gotten better but this game will always be bad due to this stupid store reliance. Reach had a perfect model for unlocks but no no now that the game is free to play they need to be sure you can’t have shit without spending more money. I understand this is probably due to Microsoft’s meddling, but I nearly faint seeing my favorite helmets or an armor coating that I like being sold for 25 dollars plus tax.
Halo Infinite is a disappointment more than anything. Because the framework is there. This could have been Halo’s grand return, and it was at first. But the cracks are impossible to ignore, and I’ll always be frustrated with how this game was handled.