What always made Bungie’s Halo special to me as a shooter (and what left 343’s halo in the dust for me) was the whole "combat evolved " aspect of the gameplay as it applied to the enemy’s behavior in the campaign. Halo CE had an enemy AI design that makes it stand out against other shooters even to this day, including the more recent additions to the Halo franchise. You had enemies that took unique approaches to attacking the player, as well as unique reactions to the player’s attacks. An elite would charge you if you stuck it with a plasma grenade, and after it died, all of the grunts become much more defensive if not fall into a complete retreat. The jackals were often positioned in ways that required the player to get creative in how to break them up and make them vulnerable. The elites jumped and jived around to dodge your advances. In almost every case in Halo CE, if you died, it wasn’t because the enemy’s weapons were doing a ridiculous amount of damage to you, it was because the AI outplayed you. You can see this in an emphasized way when looking back and forth between Halo CE and any of the 343 releases.
More often than not, Halo 4’s gameplay in the campaign consisted of moments where the clear best and most viable option was to sit back and pick off the enemy with precision weapons, providing almost no incentive to actually use the game’s full sandbox of weapons. In Halo CE, if you were given a weapon, it was because that weapon provided a unique but completely viable solution to your combat situation. Halo 4 did not feel this way. The covenant were most often boring targets placed on high ground points you had to pick them out of with ranged weapons, and the prometheans were even worse, appearing almost completely random in their behavior instead of tactical and responsive. They just randomly crawled on walls and shot at you, or randomly teleported and shot at you, where the enemies in Halo CE feel like they are actively trying to find better ways to kill you. Halo 5 was the worst in this department. Every encounter that didn’t involve vehicles in the game was just you and your spartan team slowly picking off enemies from a distance while slowly pushing your way up a hill to get to the next door. Then you walk through that door and find yet another uphill battle fought from a distance. I compare that to the unique tactical situations ranging from in the enemy’s face combat, to stealth/sniping and everything in between that existed in Halo CE, and I cannot see it as anything other than a regression of single player quality.
What happened to that dynamic gameplay? Why did it go away after Halo: Reach? Because people claim it doesn’t sell. Well, it sells to me, and I know I am not alone here. I miss having moments like the 343 Guilty Spark mission from Halo CE. You explore through the first half of that level with rare moments of combat because the enemies you have learned to fight throughout the game are now seeming disoriented and afraid. The elite commanders are all gone and you can’t find any of their bodies, but you see the bodies of grunts and jackals everywhere. The few moments of covenant combat encounters feature grunts and jackals that already seem to be running from something. Then you get to the reveal cut scene where you discover the unfortunate fate of your fellow humans. Then BAM, you are suddenly surrounded by the flood. They come in troves, pouring out of doors and hallways, and in a game where you have been taught to fight against tactical enemies, you suddenly find yourself back peddling, picking up anything that shoots bullets as you are bombarded with a swarm of relentless space zombies. It was such a dynamic moment in the game, and that moment as well as many others that are similar in the Bungie releases’ gameplay is what I come back to Halo for. I don’t expect 343 to perfectly recreate moments like that. After all, you can only play your favorite game for the first time once, but I expect them to at least try to keep up with the elements that made Halo special, to really embody the Combat Evolved title that the founding game carried and delivered on. I want them to make a HALO game, not just a Halo flavored shooter.
So with all of that said, I can now make some comments on Halo Infinite’s gameplay demo. There were some things that made me give a skeptical eyebrow raise, but there were also some things that made me smile. First thing is that this demo is supposed to take place several hours into the game, but the gameplay seems almost too easy, but then again, this could simply be due to the player using an easier difficulty so they can freely showcase some of the new mechanics. So I am willing to look the other way. There were a few strange things when it came to the enemies. I was noticing that in some of the encounters (not all of them), the enemies seemed to be randomly positioned. However the visuals of that level slightly imply a narrative purpose to this. It almost seems similar to the mission Halo from Halo CE, where the covenant were scattered about in small search parties trying to find human survivors. So I will keep an open mind.
I was glad to see a return of a more traditional take on the elites, returning them to the elegant combatants they were before, and it provided a satisfying contrast to the brutes in the demo. Then there are the brutes themselves. In this gameplay demo of Halo Infinite, when I saw the brutes drop out of the drop pods, I was thinking “okay, brutes.”. When the player killed the first one and the second one charged after him, I thought, “okay, cool, brutes” as they heavily resemble the bullet sponges of Halo 2. But when the second brute charged, the player made the very odd decision to shoot at it’s legs, and then the brute stumbled and slowed to a near stop in his charge, allowing the player to then shoot more of the brute’s armor off before moving to deliver a killing blow, and BOY, did I smile at that. It is small, but it generates a large difference in the gameplay. I smiled because that little thing was new, but because it was very Halo. I smiled at the screaming flying suicide grunt because it was new, but it was very Halo. I smiled at the brief tactical descriptions of guns that came with the pickup prompts because it implies that every weapon has a purpose in the gameplay. I liked watching the player get his hands dirty with close ranged combat and the use of the grappling hook feature.
So in conclusion, I am excited about this. While there were elements that did make me skeptical, there were high quality gameplay potential teases peeking around every corner of that demo. What made Halo so special in the first place as piece of entertainment and as a game were the unique immersive narrative, the unprecedented use of music, the astonishingly generated atmosphere of hope, the mysterious world, the lovable characters, and the cool sandbox of guns, enemies, vehicles, and environments. All of which are present in this demo. But what made Halo special as a shooter, the thing that sets it apart from other scifi shooters is it’s ability to genuinely EVOLVE FPS COMBAT, just like it promised with the first game’s title, and this demo made me happy. Because while it did not make it certain in what we saw, it provided a lot of good reasons to look forward to that kind of single player style in the campaign, and that simply puts a smile on my face, to see halo try to evolve combat once again.