General Overview
As a whole, the flight was a roaring success in the sense that it gave the community a look into what Halo Infinite’s core mechanics will be like once it launches later this year. While there are some glaring issues such as frame rate issues, really high minimum PC specs, long loading times, and the general bugs that appear within any pre-alpha / alpha level game, the game ran well for those who wanted to get a first look at the game. Some of my personal favorite aspects of the game were in the details such as partial environmental destruction on Bazaar, grenades exploding when hit with precision weapons, the grapple shot pulling weapons and equipment off the ground, and the sound design for the weapons in the game. These things are all things that add to the overall feel of the game and provides a rich sandbox experience that left me with a positive impression of the multiplayer despite some personal qualms I have as a competitive player.
Gameplay
in a nutshell, the gameplay feels more like classic Halo rather than Halo 4 and Halo 5 without removing some of the best elements such as sprint from Halo 4 and the clamber from Halo 5. In multiplayer you feel like a super soldier who is able to take on hundreds of squishy enemies as a one-man army or a squad of four people. Your AI companion giving a bit of banter as you play while hearing the chatter of other Spartans gives you a feeling of teamwork and breathes life into the immersion that you experience when focusing intensely on the game. Speaking of teamwork, there’s a couple new features to the series such as dropping weapons and the call out system which is fantastic for players who typically don’t use mics for whatever reason that still wish to communicate with their team as well. That being said, this aspect could use some tweaking such as double tapping the button to mark a location as “enemy here” on top of just marking an enemy to indicate where they are. This could also be expanded to mark weapons and pickups on the map for the team and marking enemies holding power weapons like “enemy holding SPNKr” or “Tango taking pot shots with the sniper” which would expand the tactical use of this feature.
Classic features are back in force too such as the shield and health information being displayed at the top of the HUD, utilizing the display that was present in Halo 5 with the shields on top and the health on the bottom and both charge up when out of combat. Thankfully you can sprint and recover at the same time and the issue of the visuals being interrupted while healing that was present in previous trailers are gone. The radar now spins to indicate the cardinal directions and marks enemies fairly well, but it can be confusing to interpret icons on the radar because enemies above or below you have the same icon from previous games for them being in front of you while there’s a little bit of a “haze” that appears on the dot when they’re on the same level as you. Combine this with the increase from 15m to 20m for the radar, this can be very confusing to veteran players. I would suggest having a clearer indicator for people being above or below you by using arrows or a color indicator like in Halo Reach where instead of bright red, it was more of a brick red.
As I mentioned before, sprint back in this game and just as controversial as ever when it comes to Halo. It’s clear that 343 tried to find a balance between having it present for the newer players while being a bit slower to prevent the elongation of maps that happened in Halo 5 due to the speed of sprint. Personally, I think that sprint in this game is virtually useless as a feature with its only function being to allow players to slide. Slide itself appears to be “crouching without losing movement speed” temporarily with very limited use in game and there could be some use for it when it comes to evading, but sprint is nowhere near where it should be. In game, sprint is roughly 5 to 10 percent faster than normal walking, but it comes at the cost of reduced turning speed and a slight delay to weapon readying (I’m not going to go into the head bob thing because it’s clearly a bug) which is critical to 1v1 or 1vMultiple engagements. This tradeoff is devastating in competitive play which will likely result in sprint only being used to slide in some spots or for the initial push for power weapons. I would personally recommend making sprint a 15 to 20 precent increase to movement speed at most which would prevent the elongation issue that occurred with Halo 5 or maybe having slide speed change based off slopes like slower slides uphill but faster sliding down hill.
Lastly, while I can understand the reason behind it, it’s sad to see the spartan abilities from Halo 5 go away as the thrusters provided so much more to engagements in Halo 5 by giving more options for platforming and raising the skill ceiling for firefights. The ground pound was very satisfying to use on unsuspecting enemies and the shoulder charge forced players to be more aware of their surroundings as these features provided a high risk, high reward style of gameplay in competitive play. Maybe one day these features could come back, or they could be introduced for specific game modes later.
Gunplay
Gunplay in Halo Infinite feels like the old while mixing it up with some of the new. Classic weapons such as the AR and the BR still feel like they belong in the arsenal of new weapons while providing some advantages and disadvantages based off the situation in which they’re used. That being said, gunplay is where I have the most complaints as a combination of bugs and odd design choices provide a turbulent experience at best.
To begin with, the default load out of the AR and the Sidekick is not a bad combination as the AR provides a good spray and pray experience that pays off well when used in team fire while the Sidekick feels like a combination of the pistol from Halo 2 in firing speed with the handling that was present in Halo 5’s magnum. That being said, this creates a very imbalanced experience as most engagements on maps default to a sidekick vs sidekick or sidekick vs Commando / BR engagement with the sidekick coming out on top for most close to semi-close encounters. The AR is practically useless compared to the sidekick as the bloom with the AR nearly forces players to move in at shotgun range or pray the person firing at them with the sidekick misses. It’s not that the sidekick is over powered, it’s actually really under powered in the grand scale of things, but it’s that the map design encourages the use of the sidekick more often than the other weapons and pushes it towards being a somewhat overpowering weapon.
My main issue lies with the BR and Commando. The BR is, in short, a power weapon in this game. With 4 full bursts to a kill, incredibly tight recoil, and no bloom, this weapon is downright broken for any and all medium to long range engagements. It’s not an understatement to state that entire matches will be decided by the BR if it’s present. The Commando on the other hand is underwhelming. It’s virtually an AR with a headshot multiplier when there’s no shields and is very difficult to control when dealing with longer range engagements as it rocks a 3x scope which is a bit too much considering how heavy the bloom and recoil are. Personally these weapons are the ones that need the most tuning before the next flight.