A small part of me has never believed in Halo since Bungie left. I skipped Halo 4 upon release, I didn’t have a console that played Halo 5, and a playthrough of 4 after the Master Chief Collection‘s release on PC hasn’t convinced me that I made the wrong choice. Now we have Halo Infinite, which takes Halo‘s already relatively loose gameplay framework and spreads it across an entire map for the players to engage with all the enemies, vehicles, and weapons as they see fit in between regular levels. I’ll admit I was extremely quizzical about this change from the onset, especially after seeing the grappling hook when it was revealed (I believe I said something similar to “Sure, you may as well make Halo into Titanfall.”) so I was very interested to see if they stuck the landing.
There’s been so much said about Halo Infinite‘s multiplayer already that I’m not going to spend much time on it, especially because the 343 Industries has taken so many shots at updating it that anything I say probably won’t be relevant two months from now. What I will say is that I currently really dislike the randomized vehicle spawns in big team battle as well as basically everything to do with cosmetics. These are all things you’ve heard before if you’ve read anything about Halo Infinite since its surprise release/”beta” in November, and I’ll be repeating enough points of my own in the next dozen paragraphs. Rather than beating the dead horse I’ll just say I’m expecting if nothing else they’ll make armor colors, which are currently locked to one kind of armor, able to be equipped to any type of armor. Whether these changes take ten weeks or ten months, I think that’s inevitable since anything else is just ridiculous.
That being said, I keep coming back to Halo Infinite‘s multiplayer, despite all the flaws, because of the gameplay, and that is what holds the entirety of the campaign together as well. As well it should, since in many cases an open world game lives and dies on the ease of moving around the map and the how fun it is to do things when you get there. That “Grappleshot” that I made fun of earlier handles like a dream, albeit a dream that could stand to be a little longer since those pesky walls are sometimes just out of reach. Once you get the unlocks for faster cooldown you can practically “Spider-Man” around the map, elevation permitting, and there’s some neat maneuvers that you can do with it that aren’t Titanfall 2-tier in terms of complexity but still presents a bit of a learning curve. This combined with gunplay that feels like a modern revision of Halo 3 makes even the most mundane fights of Halo Infinite less of a drag than they might have with a less robust movement system.
Make no mistake, it certainly is mundane. My Spider-Man reference in the previous paragraph holds true in more ways than one, as Halo Infinite‘s open world reminds me more of Spider-Man 2 from 2004 than any of the modern Far Crys. Just like that former god of the super hero game genre you’ve got a great movement system and a fun combat system but very little that you DO in the world actually feels relevant and is really only done for the fun of it. Stopping crimes as Spider-Man or saving marines as Master Chief can be fun because it’s what the character does, but once the novelty wears off you realize you’re not really getting anything out of it. Hell, that’s not fair to Spider-Man 2 since at least you were getting experience points for your trouble, where as Chief’s armor upgrades are based on secrets hidden on the map. Meanwhile in Halo Infinite if you clear out an enemy base they just repopulate it after you leave, saving marines doesn’t seem to actually add anything to the UNSC presence on the ring, and breaking enemy propaganda towers only stops you from hearing a squeaky grunt’s voice around the map. This means your only real drive is completionism, which in and of itself isn’t a problem but unlike something like the Batman Arkham series where side missions lead to boss fights or Easter eggs, Infinite‘s side content really feels like it’s just there to fill up space on the map, and that’s disappointing.
There are rewards, of course, but the “valor” earned for completing optional tasks is just used to unlock weapons and vehicles that you can spawn at fast travel points. This really only gets relevant toward the end of the game when you unlock the Wasp (the human air vehicle) because other than that there’s never really any reason to not just scavenge for weapons and ammo like you’ve done in every other Halo game before. Getting a free airplane whenever you want is obviously useful for racking up those last few challenges before you finish the game, but other than that I rarely felt the need to spawn in anything else because ammo for your basic weapon of choice is really only lacking during story missions.
For my money the story missions are where Infinite really drops the ball because there isn’t anything especially exciting or memorable that happens during them. That isn’t to say that that every Halo mission that’s come before has been an unforgettable joy, but in the Halo games that I’ve played they tend to have at least one mission or even one part of one mission that sticks with you and is worth experiencing more than once. “The Ark” and “The Covenant” from Halo 3, for example, or whatever the least controversial “good” missions are in the Halo franchise that you want to highlight on your own list. There is nothing in Halo Infinite‘s story missions that inspires anything grandiose or has much of any real impact, such as the first appearance of the Flood in Halo 1 or boarding the Scarab in Halo 2, and instead Infinite conjures memories of the weakest parts of Halo 1 or Halo 2 where you wander through alien buildings for tens of minutes until an AI tells you the next part of the plot. Any moments of brilliance in the game come from the players own desire to innovate or push the game’s limits, making Infinite yet another victim of “if we give players enough open space they’ll make their own fun” where the developers contributed so little of their own vision that the game can’t stand on its own without player input.
This might sound like I’m asking for the game to have something like Call of Duty-style scripted sequences, and I’m really not. You don’t need scripted sequences for a game to be interesting, you can just have a compelling framework for missions that set a tone or objective that makes it memorable. The sniping level in Halo 1, “The Truth and Reconciliation,” is such an example that was so successful in creating an interesting/memorable level that one or more Halo games have at least tried to slant replicate it, and all it does is say “hey it’s night time let’s go sniping and save our Captain.” In many ways Halo Infinite‘s ironically limited scope prevents these sorts of varied objectives and locations, since it shows you the entire map from the outset and that’s what we have to work with throughout the game. There’s no dramatic vehicle sections because there’s nowhere with enough space for such a thing, no alien ships to infiltrate because you can see essentially the whole skyline from the beginning, and no sneaky cliff side excursions because the cliffs are only there to grapple or fly over. In fact the main reason that most of game’s missions take place indoors is because those are the only places they can hide content from you, given the game’s design.
That’s not to say that there aren’t, in theory, interesting things going on in the war against Halo Infinite‘s primary enemy, the Banished, it’s just that the game loves hinting at it without ever actually showing you any of it. This is where I’m going to go into a long rant about the story and how the outside forces that have made Halo Infinite the game it is today completely undermines every part of the storytelling for me. Your mileage may vary, of course, in how you interpret the aspects of the game that I’m about to go into, but if you want to avoid any spoilers for the first two missions of the game and one or two of the game’s collectible audio logs, as well as comments about more things that AREN’T in the game, then feel free to scroll until you see a red phantom.
Halo Infinite has been called a “ten year game” and that can mean a lot of different things. Inevitably it means there will be story DLC, as that’s what most games do these days to kill time while a sequel is being made, and there’s a lot to work with when thinking up DLC for the Halo Universe. Unfortunately there’s also the specter of content that’s been left out for the sake of making DLC later, and there’s SO MUCH that’s missing in Halo Infinite‘s campaign that I can’t help but feel like every time something is hinted at it’s just there to lay groundwork for DLC. This is obviously inherently cynical, but the opening didn’t help reassure me as we’re immediately presented with “Cortana and Atriox are dead” and I spent the next ten hours wondering how much they were going to make us pay to kill Atriox as Blue Team or whoever in three years.
Let’s talk about Star Wars for a minute. Empire Strikes Back ended with the Rebels on the back foot, Luke having to face a startling realization about his own heritage, and Han Solo was in the hands of the enemy; it was the absolute lowest of the low while still having a spark of hope and determination for the future. Now pretend for a minute that Return of the Jedi started not when the movie did, but instead six months after the destruction of the second Death Star and Luke wakes up from a coma. The Emperor and Vader are dead, but a new Sith that apparently was Vader’s mentor has now taken over the Empire and Luke has to fight him, all while getting holo messages from Leia and Han about how they’re all off having exciting adventures without him. No payoff to Luke’s relationship with Darth Vader, very little if any exposure to characters that we’ve gotten to know over the previous movies, instead it’s just Luke in a forest with R2-D2 and C-3PO against an unlimited army of stormtroopers and a Sith with fish teeth that calls him up every hour to talk about how weak the Rebellion is.
That all sounds like a reasonable setting for a comic book or a short story, but not a mainline entry in the series after the grim ending that came before. But Halo Infinite is nearly identical in setting and scope, with any villain you may have been excited to and/or had the character motivation to fight being swept aside for someone new, along with no returning characters outside of The Weapon being a not-Cortana and the occasional audio log that promises the secret missions that Blue Team and Locke are on will have a super exciting pay-off once you pay for it in a few years. I don’t like to keep harping on “paying for things in the future” but Halo Infinite‘s complete absence of content in terms of the characters, story, and anything more vehicle intensive than one incredibly narrow canyon scene is a gaping hole that you can actually feel when you’re playing, and it’s hard to not be cynical when the game’s stated mission is to be around for ten years.
I’ve seen the arguments in favor of more story DLC, with people that loved the campaign being “excited to see more” and accepting that things were probably cut, such as vehicle heavy levels, that will be sold to us later. I can appreciate their enthusiasm, but for my money DLC should expand on a game’s complete story, not make you pay to fill in what was left out. This is a Halo game that ignores all of the characters and most of the framework that has been laid out over the last twenty years in exchange for a bigger world map that gives you plenty of freedom but fails to make that freedom actually feel worthwhile.
The absence of meaning or weight that permeates Infinite’s missions and story also seeps into the game’s presentation, where reasonable sound design, music, and voice acting fails to cover the sense that something else is missing. When a phantom just appears out of nowhere without even pretending it was cloaked, only for it to disappear in a flash of light with no debris when it’s destroyed, or when a grenade explosion isn’t quite as big as one would think it should be, I find myself hard pressed to say that Infinite’s presentation is the full package. However the good definitely overshadows the bad in this category, much like how the gameplay overshadows all of the multiplayer and campaign’s downsides, and visually the game looks good even on low settings so you’ll have something nice to look at assuming your computer can run it.
I’ve been talking in circles for a while, which I normally try to avoid, so I’ll just close with something positive. I’m probably going to stick with Halo Infinite for a while, especially if they keep making small improvements to it, but even after they add a mission select option (currently you can’t replay missions without starting a new game every time) I don’t think I’ll return to the base campaign outside of perhaps messing around in co-op. Maybe the DLC will “set a fire in my heart,” as not-Atriox would say, but even if it does I won’t be able to shake the melancholy when I think about what might have been in the base game versus what we got.
