This is an opinionated post! You’ve been warned!
Point I want to get Across: This isn’t “Halo”, this is a generic Movement Shooter with Halo cosmetics.
The longer response:
Look, y’all have heard it all. There’s nothing new in this post that will surprise anyone. But, I still feel obligated to share my opinion because, well, it’s a flight right? They want feedback? So I guess I’ll give my own 2 cents on the matter.
I love Halo. I was literally 3 years old when the first halo came to my home. My first time experiencing a halo game was sitting with my dad on the couch watching him beat his buddy’s -Yoink- in halo 2 and asking to join him. I grew up with 2, 3, reach, and finally 4 in my hands day after day. It was really the only game we had that was repayable for me, plus we hosted a LOT of halo 3 lan parties with my dad and his friends, so I was always tagged along with them for fun.
But, the key distinction I feel I need to make, is that Halo Infinite is NOT classically Halo. It is not Halo 3, Halo 2, or Halo Reach.
It is now a generic Movement Shooter that is very obviously being pandered to competitive audiences because 343 wants in on that cash stash of MEGA COMPETITIVE BUCKAROOS. Which, in all honesty, is alright.
But my first impressions on Infinite were that of a generic movement shooter game.
- Weapons all feel like they’ve lost their “power”. It doesn’t “feel good” to use any weapons(check out this for what I mean by feeling good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=216_5nu4aVQ)
- Weapons feel very generic feeling, and sounding. What’s with the terrible “crack” of literally every weapon? It sounds like someone took those bass boosted anime fight scenes and turned it up to 11 for every single shot. The triple tap of the BR sounds like -Yoink- compared to older halo games, as do basically all the plasma weapons.
- Plasma Grenades are underwhelming. They look like little dots compared to the frags, and feel like they’re just a sticky equivalent of a frag grenade. I always thought Plasma was longer timer compensated by larger / more destructive bangs.
- Grenades in general feel too clunky and large. Like you’re throwing a glitchy rock, not a well timed nade.
- Why do grenades Bounce like rubber balls??
- There’s infinite sprinting. Always be sprinting. Not really a “bad” thing, but it kinda turns halo away from being a strategic shooter to a movement one.
- You can sprint-slide around corners to make it even harder for people to shoot you. I hate sprint sliding. It’s going to be used 100% of the time in every match, and will become something that EVERYONE uses. It’s just the nature of movement shooters. Use what is to your advantage, make a new meta.
- The best (subjective) weapons are all the ones that are hitscan. I just suck at aiming forward, but in a movement shooter, non-hitscan weapons are treated as “skill based weaponry”, which means being able to hit with them should reward you with extra damage. Which they do! But it almost feels like you have a better shot of pulling out a hitscan on a 1v1 then trying your luck with the better, non-hitscan alternative. Especially in a game like Halo where jumping, sliding, moving*,* is considered a large norm.
- No vehicles to test, so idk about big team battle.
- There’s a literal radar ping system installed now so you can find all the weapons, cases, and goodies strewn through a map. Press Z and you get this wide area ping of information. Like what?
I get it. It’s a new era of games. Movement shooters are still a craze. Apex, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Destiny, Titanfall, they all have their movement shooter gimics that make them good. But Halo always had the opposite. It always went with “Once More, with feeling” and rode it hard. Halo felt good, played smooth, and rocked the socks off by being a top quality game with methodical gameplay and a solid sandbox.
But Infinite… just feels like another generic movement shooter game. One that will inevitably do well, as they all do, but it’s not going to be legendary. Sure, 343 is going to make millions on millions just from the battlepass, cosmetics, etc that people want.
If the goal of Infinite was to get people to stop playing MCC and have all your fans move to a new multiplayer platform so you could instill a huge multiplayer competitive scene™, then I’m not sure if infinite is going to feel good enough for that.
All that ridiculous ranting aside, as far as generic movement shooters™ go, Halo Infinite isn’t bad. It’s worthy of pulling people off the benches of Warzone, Apex, etc and getting them to play their new toy. But its not Classically Halo. It’s a new era, and it’s probably about time I accept that.