Finally completed Halo Infinite Campaign - my 2 STARS (out of five) review

Games Halo Infinite
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Well I’m gonna try and keep this as brief as possible because 343 clearly hate listening to Halo fans and I’m just wasting my time but anyway I’ll start with the positives.

Graphics and overall art direction in this game are excellent, theres nothing I would change about the graphics whatsoever. Everything looks great although it does become highly repetitive after a few hours of play because nothing changes, no weather, all one biome, copy pasted hallways for the entire story section…

The sound on display is fantastic, very well mixed and really enhances the experience, aside from a small few sounds that dont fit such as some grunts sounding like Micky Mouse because their voice hasnt been pitched up enough. Or the fact that the Banshee doesn’t scream. But overall the sound is a major strong point in this game. The WASP is probably my favourite sound. And the voice actors also did an a unbelievable job with some mostly predictable and bad writing material, the talent of these voice actors is hard to describe, such amazing people to have added so much to a story where nothing really happens except a bunch of poorly written predictable dialogue…

Gunplay feels so good in this game for everything that isn’t a boss battle, it’s seriously an 11 out of 10 for the gunplay. The enemies are amazing fun to fight when they don’t have grindy health bars. Although a lot of enemies do tend to have grindy health towards the end. The hunters have far too much health and I just skip them when I can because the fights are just slightly too long to be fun. (I played on Heroic)

And the negatives. I’m sure I wont remember all of them but I noticed something new that bothered be around 5-10 times an hour consistently throughout the campaign. I was going for 100% but eventually gave up and wont replay this campaign unless it changes a lot.

First and most importantly - the game is not challenging. It’s a trip to the candy store with God Mode Chief packing unlimited access to marines, vehicles, weapons, and unlimited tactical equipment at his disposal with no cost to the player. There are magic ammo boxes everywhere too, making sure I never have to think or change weapons. I find this type of game very boring, nothing I do with these weapons is an achievement, head back and grab more ammo for my favourite guns after every fight if I want… This is certainly the most “different” Halo game I’ve ever played while supporting the franchise for 20 years I never expected to see this, never saw anyone asking for it, or any reason why Halo needed to become an RPG type game. There was nothing wrong with the traditional format of Halo games.

So vehicles… theyre pretty useless. God Mode Chief has an unlimited grappling hook which makes most vehicles redundant. Enemies attacking in vehicles are just bringing me free vehicles because its so easy to hijack with the grapple. And when I do drive, these vehicles arent fun. Theyre too grippy while also being too easy to flip over. And the terrain is so bady designed for vehicles. Kerbs and rocks and tree stumps everywhere ensure you’ll be hopping out again in a moment to grapple over the hills.

The story - or lack thereof. Man it just sucked. Predictable. And nothing happens, the location just feels copy/pasted and very repetitive. The characters don’t have any really memorable dialogue, lucky the voice actors did such an amazing job with the trash lines they got.

The upgrade system is a joke. Start me off nerfed and make me grind this repetitive map to un-nerf myself. I hate these type of games, thats why Halo has always been my favourite game because its supposed to be a cinematic action game. Big dampener on my experience. Was bored of the repetitive map and all the grindy boss fights by the time I was fully un-nerfed.

The lack of cinematic experience really hurts this game. Instead of being dropped into a series of exciting new events like space battles, human cities, a new biome, even just some freaking new weather… you get silly propaganda towers where grunts talk to humans like its all a joke. Instead of witnessing the struggles and horrors of the war, seeing wounded marines and their allies struggle against the Banished we get safe hubs with infinite supplies… a lot of this fits nowhere into Halos lore and it’s just lazy game development.

Speaking of lore being broken, MC weighs a tonne. I dunno what trees are made of on Halo rings. Dunno how much a grunt actually weighs. Dunno how soft or hard the forerunner metal structures are… But some things just should not be able to hurl a one tonne supersoldier through the air.

What else? The marines are stupid. At least 1 in 10 of them will get crushed by airdrops.

Feel like exploring? No need, everything is marked on your map. Forgot your objective? Scan the area Batman no need to think about it. Forgot where that enemy dropped the rocket launcher? Scan the area Batman. Feel like skipping past all the enemies in a section? Grapple your way around them Batman, no need to engage. Vehicle on its way to attack you? Tap one button from a safe distance and its all yours. The game is so hand holdy it wants me to have 10 hands so it can hold all of them. People on discord tell me to restrict my own gameplay if I want a recognisable Halo experience…

Replay value - if you want the achievements I guess go for it. But I feel zero need to replay this game, it’s so repetitive it might aswell be 2 normal halo missions on repeat. And I feel like I’ve just played them both 30 times each while grinding for 100%. I’m good for more of that… Maybe some DLC will deliver a decent cinematic experience in future but for now the game is a very disappointed 2 out of 5.

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Have to say I agree don’t plan or feel the need to play till co op gets added.

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This is the brief version lol?

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Yeah I could be here for hours listing everything this game needs, like the Plasma Rifle, the Carbine, DMR, Halo Pistol, flying enemies, grapple hook enemies, flame grenades… why do Sentinels drop Banished weapons? Why is there a huge chunk of empty land on this 60gb map? Why is the grapple hook given at the very start of the game, vehicles are useless from the get go. Why are there 119 achievements when that’s so close to 117…

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You are asking the real questions!

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I agree with everything said. I still enjoyed it, but I def agree with you. Nothing rlly does happen in the game…I find out literally nothing new.

I never even once upgraded my shields during the entire play through on heroic. Wasn’t necessary.

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Bruh I called this out a long time ago… That being said if you put a couple skulls on it definitely gets to be a bit more challenging.

Common argument against most RPG/open world games. Does definitely take the mystery out of the world when everything is told to you.

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I don’t think the fight against Escheraum could have been done without at least the full grapple speed. Hunters are a pain without the overcloaked dash aswell. Full strength drop shield is almost essential if you want to fight aswell. Did you have the rest?

It was weird for the end it was more about juggling equipment frantically to stay alive almost as much as I was shooting things because most groups of enemies can overpower me before I can wear them down. The D-Pad combos being the only way to navigate since there is no cycle function made this clunky too… And the saddest part was that the some of the rooms with the prettiest ceilings had invisible walls so you couldn’t even grapple around up there.

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It’s definitely a make your own fun type of game. I do miss the curated feel of the original trilogy with the occasional big battle. All we can hope for is DLC that’s more in line.

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Strongly agree; the music and art design were great, the Audio/Video in general were on point. The design of the game itself, was mediocre, boring, too easy, and extremely repetitive. The easy mainly being due to unintelligent enemies; Legendary does not need more “enemies have more health and you have less” which only makes the game frustrating. It needs smarter enemies.

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Are we saying the bosses aren’t challenging? Because although I agree that the open world, and a lot of the linear levels aren’t terribly challenging, the boss fights are pretty difficult, especially on Legendary.

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I take it you didn’t play through on legendary then… I finished it last night on that difficulty. It was an absolute nightmare at points and I’m sitting on 99% completion btw(have to get a couple skulls from the start of the game on a replay still), meaning, I’ve done pretty much everything there is to do. The third wave of the final boss is all I have to say… They seriously need to tone the damn brute champions down.

They gave you the chance to play through with whatever kit you liked most, which was amazing. I played BR+pulse carbine for most of the game. One thing I always despised about previous titles was the forced weapon changes in the story and the lack of weapons or ammo for what you prefered.

On legendary, I think I managed to hijack maybe five ghosts the entire game. You die before you can even reach them usually, unless you shocked them first.

The story was actually more decent than I thought it was going to be. It’s like a love story, but one you learn about through little one liners here and there. Kind of similar to how the story is delivered in games like BOTW and soulsbourne games. It worked pretty well. If you played through on legendary, you would have seen the scene after the credits that takes place at like ~100k BCE. Kind of sets the tone for more to come. Plus, the game is going to have DLC that builds on the story further.

Except the annoying logs, which you’ll find yourself really annoyed with when you go to locate them all.

All in all, I gave it a solid 9/10. Point off for the undertuned bosses and mobs on legendary and the terrible save system for boss fights. Nothing worse than when you get some bad checkpoint mid boss fight where you then spawn in and the boss is charging you from 10ft away and you have to frantically zip away with no ammo because you were in the middle of trying to loot some.

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Why wouldn’t a Sentinel Armiger be able to utilize and adapt different weapons?

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This is all you actually needed to say even though there is a huge list of things wrong with the campaign. When everything is handed to us it takes that sense of value and throws it right out the window.

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It’s difficult, not challenging.
The greviances with the difficulty doesn’t come from clever encounters which are challenging due to enemy tactics, group composition and placement, but rather that their health is high, deals a ton of damage and has an insane range and accuracy. It becomes a grind when you find a repeatable process the enemy doesn’t adapt to.
Compare that to having a sort of standard health, damage and range, then change group composition through encounters, unlock new tactics and so forth as you increase difficulty which would require more from the player than the same thing over and over.

It’s annoying and frustrating, that’s basically it.
Not to mention, the free roam sections are a breeze once you get a decent weapon to hand out to marines.
The last half of the game, in the free roam part I spent most of the time in a Razorback doing as much as possible with five Sniper Marines.

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We aren’t saying anything. I am saying the bosses are a grind. Challenging sure in a way. But doesn’t feel like Halo, feels like a lazy RPG.

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It’s hard to reply to you on mobile because it no longer shows me your text. Legendary is pointless there’s no achievement, just an achievement for LASO which is apparently a walk in the park.

The whole point of Halo is that you can only carry 2 weapons and when the ammo runs out you need to scavange. Thats a massive part of Halo’s gameplay. You aren’t supposed to be able to choose a loadout and play the whole game with it. Halo Infinite is a trip to the candy store. It’s like playing with cheats on.

Halo isn’t supposed to be a -Yoink!- love story. It’s supposed to be a war between humanity and aliens. Personally I dont give a flying $%#+ about love stories. I like Sci-fi and violent video games. That’s why I bought a lot of Halo games, they used to give me what I wanted.

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Because their weapons are supposed to be built in to their body. What type of dumb sentinals are downgrading from their sentinal beams to primitive weapons? They don’t appear to be carrying the weapons either, they just appear to be dropping banished weapons magically.

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Yes there is, I’m looking at it… It’s called: “A True Test of Legends”

The only people that it’s a walk in the park for are people exploiting the hidden tank cannon weapon thing. It’s still going to be hard without it, the infinite ammo would help though.

Some people want to be able to do things like an all pistol challenge or an all AR challenge. By being able to pick what you want, most of the time, you open far more doors of possibilities for replayability. Get on youtube and look at all the crazy builds people beat games like Dark Souls with. Why? Because they give you the option if you want it.

The Chief+Cortana thing has kind of always been an unspoken love story throughout most of the franchise.

Well you can dwell in the past with your teen angst then. 20 years of Halo later, most of us are in the 30+ age bracket. Grow up, you can have both and still have a great game.

Same can be said of scripted Dark Souls bosses, yet look how popular that whole genre of games is… Bosses have like 3-7 moves in their movesets, some have phases where things change a little and that’s it.

Lots of game devs have tested out making mobs/bosses more humanlike and fights less predictable, it doesn’t pan out well. People need some form of rigidity to enemies to “master” fighting them, by learning from repeated mistakes through incremental progress. Attempt 5: Got boss to 70%, attempt 10: Got boss to 40%, etc etc. In the case of some of the mobs like sniper jackals, you just get quicker and more accurate at counter sniping before they kill you.

Until you play on legendary and you get instajibbed by skewers. That’s my biggest gripe about that difficulty is that the vehicles become almost useless outside of cheesing from a mile away with pea shooter ghost/wasp rounds.

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I respect your opinion, but I disagree. I thought the campaign was phenomenal, and I love that they went back to Halo’s roots. Weapon sandbox is a bit limited and I miss fuel rod cannon grunts, but I’ve done a legendary play through and a LASO. I had loads of fun.