IF YOU HAVEN’T YET FINISHED THE CAMPAIGN, DO NOT READ FURTHER.
I just finished the campaign last night and overall I liked it a lot. I was skeptical about the more open world before playing, but after a little while it did make sense. I’m glad to see that instead of going full on Ubisoft with the game, 343 managed to make the campaign feel sort of like Silent Cartographer in a large scale. I also liked the mysterious atmosphere, a lot of which is thanks to the great ost.
The storytelling itself was mainly focused on characters, especially Chief and the new AI (Weapon). The only character that really disappointed me was the Blade master (or Sword master. Can’t remember). I wish he was more present and had a more complete story arc.
The best and most entertaining character here was definitely Weapon, imo. I liked her almost child-like innocence. They really did a great job making the character seem like new to everything yet still proficient. Characters like her are kinda risky as they can easily be overdone and come off as inauthentic. But Weapon was definitely really well done and my favorite character in the campaign.
I am hoping for more focus on the story itself and world building in the future though. This campaign established the new characters really well already.
There were a couple of things that really bugged me though. Namely the overuse of delivering power seeds from point A to point B and repetitive boss fights (I acknowledge the absence of co op and mission select. But we knew in advance those would be missing at launch and will come later so I won’t go further into those).
The power seed delivery felt like an unnecessary waste of time and a cheap way to lengthen certain campaign sections. Those instances should’ve been reduced to 2 max imo. And although I mainly enjoyed the boss fights, I felt like 343 could’ve done much more with them. In Infinite’s case, the difficulty of the boss fights mainly came from the enemy being hyper-aggressive. I hope that there will be more variation in the future. Otherwise it will get really repetitive.
Overall I enjoyed the campaign. It’s definitely best to play in several sessions though because of the open world structure. But still it’s the best campaign 343 has made imo. In the future, however, I think 343 should definitely make more story-focused and a bit more linear missions.
If I were to give a rating, it would be 8/10. Could’ve been a 9 without those issues I listed. I think Infinite laid a good foundation though. Hopefully 343 will utilize that right with future campaigns.