Halo Infinite, 343’s third installment in the beloved franchise originally from Destiny’s creators Bungie, starts off with the aftermath of the fall of the UNSC at the hands of Atriox. First introduced in Halo Wars 2 along with his Banished, a group led by the brutes that branched off from the covenant at the height of their power. The Banished have overrun the UNSC leaving the chief adrift in space where he is found later by echo 216.
So is the campaign good?… Yes! The new RPG’esque style of Halo is actually a welcome change to the norm. While the main campaign is still pretty linear on how it is completed, the addition of side quests such as high value targets and the capture of Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) is a great time sink and provides more to do for the player.
After waking up the chief, you head to the surface of Zeta Halo to retrieve The Weapon, an AI whose sole mission was to lockdown and destroy Cortana. I will not spoil any of the story for you all though.
The ability upgrade system along with no fall damage makes you feel how you think the Chief should feel, a tank with legs that can fall from space and still kick ass!
That doesn’t mean the campaign doesn’t have its issues. I played it through on my Xbox Series X and in some instances I encountered frame rate drops in cut scenes and soft crashes where the game froze for a few seconds. Nothing major to take me out of the experience though. You also cannot replay story missions. This means that there are some skulls locked if they are not found first time around. 343 are adding this feature at a later time.
343 Industries Associate Creative Director, Paul Crocker, told Stevivor; “It’s part of what is coming later. The main reason is because, being a more open game and a nonlinear game, it became incredibly challenging. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s just that it’s not finished.” And “We made the decision to make a better game, to improve the quality of the game so we could then add the features — just like co-op. And that is that is disappointing for us as the people who made it, but it was, also, the better option for us to make a better game and add that later”. Link to full interview here. You may want to hold off on restarting that file just yet!
Is the multiplayer good?… I love it, but depending on who you ask they will say no. However as a Halo game, the fundamentals are there. The gun play is solid Halo. Sprint only offers you a small increase in speed. Not nearly as much as it has since the introduction in Halo Reach. Being a more competitive focused game, sprint is now more of a risk Vs get out alive play. Sprinting was not always welcome in Halo multiplayer at the top levels, so I feel this a great balance to the mechanic as a whole.
A lot of gripes I am seeing online are with the daily/weekly challenge system and cosmetic unlocks. While I personally do not mind these, (the multiplayer is completely free after all) a lot of people do not seem happy. I can understand why though. The need to complete challenges to progress your season pass, with not all those challenges being an easy feat, leads to games where you are more going for these challenges rather than playing the objective. You do now get XP from playing games through a recent update from 343 which is a good start in the right direction.
I personally feel a more Destiny type XP model could help the system overall. Remove the fact that the finishing game XP is a challenge and have that hidden or more of an experience bar like we see in the MCC, tied to how well you do in the game. This, along with daily game modes offering higher XP for a certain amount of games. I think this would help immensely with how the season pass feels.
Removed what I had in this portion as there was a recent update to the game. SWAT has returned under the new name, Tactical Slayer. We also have free for all and team slayer in their own playlist options now too. This is great to see and only pumps up my feelings on the game.
My overall thoughts, I love it! It is up there now with the original trilogy and ODST for me as one of the great Halo experiences and a must play!
All thoughts and opinions are my own based on my own experiences of the game.
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