Campaign: a Disappointment

Games Halo Infinite
1

So first off beacause of the subpar multiplayer and lack of customization all my hopes were in the Campaign.

Warning Spoilers!!!

  • I can’t stand the weapon! she is the most anoying thing in the Halo universe. E216 is also not a favorite.
  • They expanded Chief’s personality in a way I really didn’t care for
  • Not only do we not get to play the “Cortana War” we get far too little information on it in the form of audio logs. Still not sure what happened between Cortana and atriox. H5 Cortana is just a rampant fragment that gets deleted easily with no Mention of her massive army. Giant planet destroying guardians are super OP and somehow just disappear I guess. Characters like palmer, Halsey, Blue team, and Osiris get no mention.
  • Everything they did with Cortana in this game is terrible and then they just replace her with a far worse version. H5 did it first: completely crapping on the fantastic H4 story. Cortana just all of the sudden reversed her positions she held in H5. They make a huge deal out of Cortana not wanting to be replaced then immediately replace her.
  • Time travel and multiverse are starting to be introduced and I hate that.
  • Campaign is really short without freeroam.

Things that I did like:
*freeroam, sandbox, collectibles, grapple
*graphics and time cycle
*Atriox, Harbinger, and the vaults of species libraries are interesting for future content but were barely in the game.
*Coop will be good on open map if it ever drops.

Overall the story was just handled poorly. 343 is continuously changing direction. They started perfectly with H4 then released the worst Halo: 5. Now they have created this new confusing starting point that doesn’t connect or fill in the gaps properly with previous additions. There is so much raw potential in the sandbox and game engine, but they are doing a poor job of bringing everything together.
I still have hope that they can massively improve things if they want although it will take a long time and they are heavily focused on selling armor pieces for $20 ATM.

14 Likes
2

I like the Weapon, but Echo 216’s pilot is hysterical, and I don’t mean that he’s funny.

What way?

They had to do that to save the series I guess, but they probably could’ve at least written more dialogue about it and had more flashbacks.

I didn’t like Halo 4’s story, but it’s sort of weird to have them keep skipping.

I haven’t finished the campaign, but what do you mean?

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Few things I hate worse than flashbacks. Like let’s experience the thing right now, please! They forced this issue onto themselves though by jumping 6 months and constantly talking about those past 6 months.

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It’s better than just having it skipped.

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But they do talk about those 6 months constantly. Doing flashbacks is only slightly better because then we just aren’t sitting through a dialogue/monologue.

The story basically feels a lot like hearing about a bunch of cool conflict that we could’ve instead just experienced. At least with something like ODST where we’re piecing together the past 8 hours or whatever, we are playing as those characters and experiencing it ourselves.

3 Likes
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That’s true, but I doubt they would’ve been able to do that.
As it is, a large portion of the game was apparently cut.

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Personally, I didn’t mind The Weapon, but I agree the story was not great. They left out a lot of those characters cause they were trying to kinda “undo” Halo 5 since everyone hated it so much, which I understand, but it would’ve been nice to do it in a way that made a little more sense. I’m also really concerned about the potential for time travel stuff, yeah. I will be livid if they add time travel to Halo. Probably won’t even buy the DLC if there’s time travel garbage in it.

I thought the campaign was very short too, and over the freeroam wasn’t really better cause it was so repetitive. Just the same thing, in the same environment, against the same enemies, over and over. Got very boring to me.

7 Likes
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I understand they were trying to get far away from Halo 5 but they definitely skipped too much.

MC has dialogue with Weapon that only serves to set up Weapon’s quirky personality. It isn’t very consistent with Chief’s previous stoic and reserved nature. Feels like an at&t commercial.

The end of the game and the fracture events hint at there being multiple universes and some level of time distortion. This worries me because those type of stories are rarely handled well and the 343 Halo story is already mucked up.

4 Likes
9

I’ve heard many people like Weapon so to each there own.

Personally, I love the Ubisoft style exploration freeroam. It’s currently my favorite part of the game.

Open world, grunt lines (not voices), new balanced weapons and equipement, new enemies classes, and improved enemy AI are what I actually like. The Endless could easily be a new faction of enemies that I would be excited to fight. Basically they have a good sandbox but I didn’t care for 1/2 of the story in said box.

1 Like
10

Really enjoyed the Campaign.

Love the Weapon. Her enthusiastic naivety!

Didn’t mind the Pilot. Was expecting the worst from the last couple of trailers… but he was only whiney for a brief time.

Chief’s personality was spot on. Just a little bit of leaked emotion. Much better than the cringey dialogue we had in Halo 5.

I think tying up the Cortana storyline this way was perfect. It was a battle the MC was never going to win. She was too powerful and too far gone. And this way we are spared a whole game of him begging Cortana to come back. She gained a little redemption in her sacrifice to save the galaxy and passing the torch to the new Cortana.

I wouldn’t mind the story being fleshed out with DLC. Maybe utilising other playable Spartans. We don’t know how easy she was to capture - or what role other key players had.

Time travel? Just because they skipped a couple of days?

Campaign just needed an epic Warthog run… a big combat centre piece (like a scarab fight)… and probably at least one biome addition (eg. mission into the snow or underwater).

2 Likes
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I actually liked the campaign myself and that includes the Weapon.

Echo-216 was annoying at first but he was…alright later. I expected to not like him but he was fine in the end.

I loved how the Chief was portrayed. Still the bred and augmented supersoldier who just keeps going to the next mission, the next fight, with very little emotion or thought beyond that with the tiny bits getting glimpsed of during particular moments, especially with the Weapon.

I’ll be honest and say that my opinions are a bit skewed here, but I just hated the Halo 5 campaign that much. There’s literally nothing that I can recall liking about Halo 5 so the decision to dump most if not all of it is completely fine for me even if it enforces the image that 343 has about not committing to their story elements. That said though, I do hope that we do see some more about the Created and maybe even fight elements of them whether it be in the single player campaign or even a multiplayer campaign if that’s in the cards.

As for Cortana’s end…honestly, I was fine with it. Considering that Atriox has a bit of a reputation of defying and usurping higher powers and being absolutely ruthless - and awesome - due to his upbringing and treatment under the Covenant, it makes a good sense for me that he would be the one to effectively take down Cortana - especially when we learned about what she had done to him and his people - and it wasn’t so much by his efforts alone as it was him interceding in the UNSC’s plan to disable Cortana and just stepping in once he took them out of the picture.

At the moment the only thing really holding back his significance to some Halo players is that they’ve never played Halo Wars 2 so there are some out there who are saying “Random Brute takes down Chief and Cortana”.

While we’ve heard very little about the Endless, what we do know about them (a race that survived the Halo death pulse and wanted to be sealed forever by the Forerunners with the dropping of Offensive Bias’s name) does make me interested to see what happens. I am hoping that they don’t go crazy with the time traveling that was being hinted at and just keep it very simple, very complication-free, and not use it as a trap door that 343 end up using when they decide to bail on another story and erase/rework it all.

Story-wise, I really liked the campaign and it showed a lot of promise. Most of my complaints with it are gameplay-wise. No co-op when this is one Halo campaign that would benefit the most from it, no main mission selection, and the open world bits were pretty shallow and dull at times. Once you had your joyrides with Marines carrying whatever power weapon you decide to give them in the Razorback and steamroll everything in sight, it starts to get a bit lackluster. I liked doing Marine rescues, Banished base captures, but after a while I was really missing the more scripted events where I can take part in bigger UNSC vs Banished skirmishes.

And, quite frankly, the open world and main story missions don’t seem really connected. Like anything you do in the open world doesn’t have any kind of bearing on the main story missions other than upgraded your equipment. However, I did actually enjoy the boss fights and felt they were a good challenge that I felt proud in defeating on Legendary. A far cry from the previous boss fights we’ve had in Halo’s run, even if its a bar that has been rather low to begin with, heh.

Overall, I did like the campaign and it shows promise, I just hope that 343 can do better with it when the updates/DLC come in. For now, the campaign for me is sitting at the bottom of the list between Halo 4 and 5 in terms of likability - way better than 5’s but not enough substance to put it above or equal to 4. Maybe that’ll change.

1 Like
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I like the exploration, but the map doesn’t have much variety, there isn’t much to do and the features needed to be more expanded.

I don’t feel that way about the boss fights.
They’re so difficult that you have to use tactics that rely on the faults in the AI and powerful weapons.

It’s not like boss fights where you have to learn patterns and come up with new moves.
Those are the fights that give a good sense of accomplishment.

In Infinite, I just feel relieved when the bosses are defeated…

2 Likes
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I had immediately taken a liking to the concept of being able to take on named, high-ranking individuals that wasn’t just the Big Bad in Halo so I was happy to actually enjoy the fights and I dove right into them on Legendary difficulty.

Tremonius, Tovarus, and Hyperius I did pretty much obliterate with powerful weapons (Skewer for Tremonius, Grapplejacking Hyperius’s Chopper and killing him and Tovarus with it) but Chak 'Lok, Bassus, Jega, and Escharum were fights I enjoyed and completed them with the suitable equipment such as using the Threat Sensor to expose Chak 'Lok and strip his shields with the Pulse Rifle or tossing fusion coils at him before finishing with headshots. Bassus was the first real crazy one with me desperately swinging around like Spiderman to avoid his blows while daring to take shots in between to keep his shields down and plink away at his health. Jega in particular was a blast for me, using my Thrusters to avoid his sword swings while unloading with the Bulldog for a kind of Shotgun vs Sword duel and for Escharum I enjoyed using my full equipment arsenal to conquer him.

If there was a boss fight that I was disappointed in it was the Harbinger one cause that was reduced to the waves of enemies being the actual boss rather than the boss itself. And that Brute Chieftain…

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I don’t understand how you did that.

In my game, Chak 'Lok constantly rushed me by jumping across the room to use his sword and shooting at me for any distance beyond a few meters.
The only reason I defeated him was that I had an Energy Sword, circled him while hitting as fast as I could and grappled him before he jumped away.
I ended up killing him with an empty Energy Sword (it took that many uses of the Energy Sword).

I tried everything before doing that, but nothing worked.

  • Throwing fusion coils (I ended up killing myself with those because he’d always be right by me as soon as I threw them, even though I grappled away to get distance between us).
  • Grappling him (the stun wouldn’t activate).
  • Using precision and plasma weapons (his shields still wouldn’t go down fast).
  • Throwing grenades (it just made him do the angry Elite animation, I think).
  • Jumping on the middle area (he just quickly switched to his ranged weapon).
  • etc.

I think something must be wrong with the campaign difficulty for me, because Bassus was probably the easiest boss I’ve fought so far.
I just jumped on that middle area, grappled to him and hit him a few times with the Rushdown Hammer.

The first boss that I had to grapple like Spider-Man away from was Tremonius since he had that rapid-fire Hydra and the Jackals with him.

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All the bosses I pretty much managed to beat in a few tries. Chak 'Lok was like…three tries? Bassus I somehow almost nearly managed to defeat him first try and then the cockiness born from it got me killed 2-3 more times until I got my rhythm down with grappleshotting between the two ramps and grenading/shooting him. Jega took me two, maybe three, as did Tremonius (when I got my first taste as to how much damage he could do) and Hyperius/Trovarus.

Escharum was around three as well. Honestly the one boss that caused my most deaths was the Brute Chieftain in the Harbinger fight because of the Elites/Skimmers with their Shock/Stalker Rifles and wanting to mop them up quickly before the Chieftain came upon me which didn’t go well for a good amount of times. Definitely had a couple deaths that involved Grappling a weapon from the floor instead of the floor itself and getting hammered.

So for my experience I quite enjoyed the boss fights and hope they do a decent job for any more that may appear.

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That happened to me once or twice.

I wish I could say the same.
I’ve probably died about 20+ times to several bosses, minibosses and powerful enemies.

1 Like
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After playing through this campaign, I never wanted to touch it again! It is riddled with issues galore!!! From the lack of fan favorites like Blue Team, the Arbiter, Buck, and Lasky to repetitive environments and lack of biome variety (as much as I hate H3, I have to admit now that even it is more diverse than Infinite as far as biomes are concerned), as well as the completely horrible story that just fails to fix H5’s mistakes, this game really has been a complete disappointment, and coupled with its horrible multiplayer, customization, and especially predatory monetization even rivaling or, worse, surpassing that of a Gameloft mobile racing game like Asphalt 9, Halo Infinite by far now stands as the worst Halo game to me. 343 has taken so many steps backwards with this one, especially by overcorrecting from Halo 5, and that has made me lose ALL respect for them.

Given the disgustingly massive overhype this game has had overall, I can assure you this game has left a permanent abhorrent taste in my mouth, and I had to play Serious Sam 4 just to cure me of that. As for H5, I will still forever enjoy it because it was my first Halo game and it was THE game that introduced me to who eventually became my real favorite character: Fred-104!!

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the Grappleshot, collectibles, and gameplay (which I still prefer Halo 5’s faster gameplay), but everything else aside from graphics is just so lackluster - mediocre at best and insanely abysmal at worst. Even I can write better fanfiction than this, and I’ve been doing it for years now.

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Yeah I always thought the point of that Halo 4 quote was that you could never replace Cortana. Because the important part is their shared journey and story; not whether they tick the right boxes on an app.

By all means, if losing Cortana sets him up as Doomguy killing off the Brutes; I am game. But if the purpose is to replace Cortana and they want to continue the whole love story drama with the Weapon…that’s a tough sell.

I’ve noticed even people who like the Weapon say “oh she’s like a Daughter to Chief” and even that “she’s a totally distinct character”. That first one was from IGN by the way. But, no it’s very clear that they want to replace her, have her take on Cortanas name and is “Her if we’d never met”. The Weapon really is being offered up as a clean version of the character and frankly the cowards way out because they didn’t want to have Chief sheltering Cortana after everything she did. But yeah, I don’t think people see her as Cortana despite this being all but stated and that’s going to be a problem.

I think they want to have their cake and eat it.

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I do like the exploration aspect of it, yeah, I just really wish it weren’t so copy/paste and repetitive. More unique side missions with more story-related elements and dialogue would have been nice, and even just some areas with a different aesthetic would’ve gone a long way.

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Sorry, but…even without searching any additional audio log, this becomes quite clear. Haven’t you seen those large holograms? :thinking: