I finished the game yesterday, and I wanted to share my opinion so that 343 get my feedback. Beware, spoilers below if you haven’t finished it. Read at your own risk.
I have mixed opinions about the Campaign. I’m glad that the focus is finally back with the Master Chief, and the grapple is a lot of fun, but the open world killed it for me. Saving marines is fun at first, you really get to feel like you’re humanity’s savior, the one and only, but after 2 hours it gets old and between that and liberating outposts across the map it becomes tedious and overwhelming. I’ve played way too many Ubisoft games to enjoy it anymore and I’m just so fed up with that.
The open world map is also boring. We were promised various “biomes” but in the end we’re left with pine trees and walls of hexagons, over and over again. There’s no variety. Setting your game in an open world diminishes the scope and scale of the conflict and the story in my opinion. In the previous campaigns, with the linear levels we were taken through many locations across the galaxy, such as spaceships, differents planets, and various locations within the rings themselves that offered a lot of variety (Snow filled mountains, beaches and jungles, deserts, forerunner ruins, underwater temples, etc…), but now we’re left to say, “wait, all of the game just happened of that tiny portion of map ?”. Where the previous games felt like epic battles set across the universe with the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance, this one felt like a skirmish. Very anticlimactic.
Aside from a few nostalgic moments, the story is disappointing. We are dropped on this ring, and everyone tells you that it’s “different” from the other rings and sooo “mysteriiiouus”, but beside all this grand talk is nothing. Where is the flood ? Where is that threat that is supposedly more terrifying and lethal than the flood ? In what way is this ring different than the others ? And what happened to The Arbiter, to Halsey, Blue Team, Captain Lasky and Spartan Locke ? You won’t get any answers. The game also ends with a cliffhangers, which sucks.
The new A.I called “The weapon” is funny, naive and likable, but she’s no Cortana. I’ll never forgive 343 for what they did to her in Halo 5. I wish Cortana would have “reincarnated” herself through “The Weapon” A.I and get back with the Master Chief to make amends and help him right her wrongs, or she should have just stayed dead since Halo 4 and never become evil in the first place, it was the perfect send off for her and her goodbye to the Master Chief made me tear up. But they ruined it in Halo 5 and tarnished her legacy. Oh Well, at least she realized that what she did was wrong by the end of Infinite…I’ll miss her.
The campaign is pretty short if you don’t do all the filler side content and not really exciting. Talking about filler, most of the campaign feels like it. It consists mainly of destroying AA guns, then going underground, getting back to the surface, activating some towers across the map, getting back underground, getting back to the surface, rinse and repeat. The same pattern is used from beginning to end.
There’s a lot of iconic weapons missing. Where are the Plasma Rifles ? The Carbines ? The Needle Rifles ? The Fuel Rods ? The DMRs ?
In the end, I loved the game, but it wasn’t great. It was ok. It could have been so much more and instead of feeling like the next chapter in the saga it feels like a side-content story. Once you finish it you will be left on your hunger and will have a sour taste in your mouth.
We waited 6 Years for this ? Are we meant to wait another 6 Years for the next chapter ?
I sincerely hope that the open world formula is not the future of Halo.