My thoughts on the campaign and why I am disappointed with it.
The overview is split into game aspects ordered by descending score.
Sound (10/10)
From guns to music to voiceover this is the best halo has ever been! The music is a fascinating combination of new and old themes and it blends with the game perfectly.
The number of lines for enemy and marines chatter is very impressive and makes those characters feel alive.
Sandbox & Gameplay (9.5/10)
Infinite has the best gameplay in the entire series by far! Weapon selection is superb with every gun being fun to use and having its unique purpose, guns that don’t work well in MP work absolutely spectacular in the campaign.
Ammo refills let you play with the guns you prefer longer, weapon variants let you have even more variety and fun and the sense of progression.
The new additions to the sandbox like equipment and fusion coils alter the gameplay significantly, give you more freedom and let you wreak absolute havoc on the enemies.
There are also more different types and variations of enemies including many more bosses than you typically see in a halo game. Those bosses are super fun (at least on heroic) and require you to analyze surroundings
and use the sandbox well to beat them. This is a huge step up from bosses in any prior halo game.
The not-so-good thing about the gameplay (thus 9.5) is the enemy AI that doesn’t seem to be updated since previous games at all.
It still works well in linear missions, but it doesn’t know how to behave in the open world.
The engagement range is very small - enemies won’t try to come to you from a long-distance even if you shoot at them. They don’t know how to handle two-story buildings and will stay below you while you shoot you.
Vehicles will often stay in the distance and won’t come close to you.
Graphics (8/10)
The game is a huge improvement from the last year’s demo but it doesn’t reach the heights of its initial showing in 2018. All-in-all this feels like an Xbox one game. Nothing next-gen,
nothing mind-blowing. But it does look nice by today’s standards.
There are also some graphical issues like visible pop in on seriesX, low texture filtering, light shimmering on metallic objects, shadows on small objects don’t render far enough into the distance,
Master Chief’s hands and weapons look wobbly in open-world missions.
Story (7.5/10)
The story parts related to current events are really good, but the tie-ins to halo 5 are really bad to the point where I would prefer them to drop that part completely rather
than exploring what is supposed to be an epic galactic scale event with a series of small cutscenes and audio logs.
The cutscene presentation is also a huge step down from halo 5. Most of them are just talking heads with almost no action.
Open World (6/10)
After the campaign overview trailer I had my concerns that the game might end up like a Ubisoft open world. But after all those reviews that compared it to Zelda BOTW, I had higher hopes for Infinite.
Unfortunately, Inifinite is basically a Far Cry game just with fewer things to do and smaller maps. Everything that is there is high-value targets, captured marines, fortified outposts, collectibles, and stupid propaganda towers.
The excellent gameplay elevates the open-world content a bit, but there are only so many times you can free the marines until it becomes boring.
The fact that the map has 1 biome and that the enemy outposts are built from exactly the same few buildings and that you have to do the same set of things in them doesn’t help.
I’m not a Zelda fan, but even I can appreciate that the things and characters you encounter in its world are interesting and unique.
In Infinite you don’t meet new characters, you don’t have interesting side stories - you only get more combat and repeated setting.
Also, it’s a shame that trees are static objects and you can’t drive a tank through the forest.
I like the verticality of the map though.
Level design (5/10)
This applies to story missions and is not related to graphics which I already covered.
Considering the issues I had with open-world I had a slight hope that the developer’s focus went towards the story missions and they will be the place to have more variety and cool set-pieces like the two first missions had.
Sadly, this wasn’t the case.
The rest of the game shows little variation from those two missions. The content is reused to death. You will walk through the same rooms over and over across different missions, sometimes even through the same room several times in a row.
That reminded me a lot of halo combat evolved which is notorious for its copy-pasted level design and people getting lost trying to figure out where to go next.
This was so bad back then that they did put arrows on the walls in Anniversary edition to give you an indication of where to go next.
Guess what, the arrows are back (though you don’t really need them since you have ai scan).
The content of the missions is also very basic - go there push a button watch a small cutscene, rinse and repeat. The rule of three is abused in this game.
Thank god the gameplay and the bosses are cool, though they do reuse some bosses as well.
Because of that level design, all the missions blended together and I wouldn’t be able to tell what were the missions even though I’ve played the campaign just yesterday.
Summary:
The gameplay and the atmosphere carry the game’s shallow open world and uninspired mission design.
Normally, I replay Halo campaigns multiple times, but with Infinite it feels like I’ve played through everything it has to offer too many times already.
This is a first with a halo game for me. Feels more like Halo Finite.
