Halo Infinite is the latest installment of the popular Halo franchise from Microsoft and 343 Studios. I’d be lying if I said I’ve kept up with the Halo series after all these years, but my last Halo game was way back in the Xbox 360 era with Halo: Reach (2010). That’s also because the Xbox 360 was the last Microsoft console I owned before switching over to the PlayStation. Anyways, it’s 2022 now. I still don’t own a current-gen Xbox, but I do own a PC, and thanks to a sick deal on 3-months of PC Game Pass, I’m able to check out Halo Infinite’s campaign mode for virtually free.
I’ve actually been playing Halo Infinite since before its release, but mainly the free multiplayer mode, so this was a nice way to get reacquainted with Halo and its control scheme and gameplay quirks. Anyways, Halo Infinite’s campaign is everything I remember Halo to be, which is fantastically nostalgic, and more with some new additions.
Starting off with what I love about it, the story is very much Halo. I’ve actually forgotten just how good and in-depth the story is in Halo, especially when compared to other games such as Destiny in which you have almost zero ideas of what’s going on. Halo Infinite does a great job of pulling you along for the ride and for the most part, I don’t really think you need to play any of the previous games to enjoy this. I will say that after playing this, I do want to go back and play what I missed, just to fill in some gaps in the story that I don’t know about.
I’m not going to spoil the story for you so just go and play it. If you’re a fan of Halo, you’ll most likely enjoy it too.
Let’s talk about the gameplay now. The core of Halo is still Halo. It’s still a solid first-person shooter, Master Chief is still a tank of a soldier, and the gunplay is still as solid as ever. All the familiar weapons are still there and I don’t think anything new was introduced. Equipment items also make a comeback with the Grappleshot, Dropwall, Threat Sensor, and Thruster. While there is more equipment in multiplayer, these are the only ones you can use in the campaign.
As is with most of the Halo games, you can choose a variety of difficulty settings, with Legendary being the most difficult. I honestly tried to play the game on this setting and could only last past about the second boss in the main campaign. After which, it just became ridiculously hard and unenjoyable being killed over and over again. I can understand if the difficulty setting made the enemies smarter, but that’s not really the case. Instead, it just turns the bosses into bullet sponges where your normal weapons do barely any damage. I’m honestly not a fan of this kind of artificially making games harder by making the time it takes to kill bosses longer. Anyways, to enjoy the rest of the game, I dropped down to an easier difficulty setting and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there.
Aside from the gunplay, let’s also talk about the open world. It’s actually a refreshing change and does make exploring the world pretty enjoyable. It also really shows you the scope of how big a Halo ringworld can be despite this only being a small subsection of it. I however do not like some of the artificial invisible walls placed in some areas and it would have been nice if they let you actually explore all of it.
Another aspect of the game I’m not too fond of is that you can not run missions over again, which I assume is due to the open-world nature of the game. That means if you miss some collectibles in a mission that you can’t go back to, you won’t be able to get them unless you start the game all over again. That happened to me where I missed picking up one of the Skulls at the very last mission, so now in order for me to get it, I’d have to play through most of the entire game all over again. So if you’re the type to try and 100% a game, make sure you grab all collectibles before completing a mission.
After completing the campaign, I would say that there’s very little reason after to really play through it again unless you’re achievement hunting and trying to unlock the all, which would require several playthroughs unless you did a lot of the collecting on Legendary mode in your first playthrough. While the campaign is fun, there’s not much more to do once you discover everything. The rest of the achievements outside of the campaign are in multiplayer mode and this mode I can guarantee you’ll be playing a lot of.
All-in-all, Halo Infinite I’d say is a great way to get back into the Halo universe if you’ve been away for a while or a great starting point to those who haven’t played any Halo in the past. I would recommend after completing this, to revisit some of the previous games just to get deeper into the storyline.
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