It’s Halo! It was meant to come out last year with the launch of the Xbox Series X, but it was delayed a whole year. Finally we got it.

Halo is not the series I have the most experience in. I played part of 1, part of 3, I think all of 4 and part of 5. I have zero care for the story, basically. I have enjoyed my time with Halo, but I’d generally stop playing to play other stuff. So Infinite is a rare instance of me actually beating a Halo game.

So let’s check it out! And yes this is just a review of the campaign, I don’t play multiplayer shit. I’m sure the multiplayer here is great.

And also I will take a moment to complain about Game Pass. I actually got the 1$ Game Pass thing to play this and a few other games.

Developer: 343 Industries
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Release date: December 8th 2021
Platforms: PC, Xbone, Xbox X/S (PC version played)
Genre: FPS

Review

Starting with the story, I guess this takes place after Halo 5 or something, I’m not quite sure if it’s after that game’s final boss or if it’s something else. Master Chief is fighting Atriox (the brute leader of The Banished), but gets defeated and thrown into space. At some point, it’s unclear how long after that fight, MC is found in space by some random spaceship piloted by some dude, who is referred to as “Echo 216” until the very end of the game when the characters finally decide to tell their names to each other. MC drags Echo into a fight against the Banished, some group of aliens that broke off from the Covenant Empire I guess. They control the Ring, which I’m not sure if it’s the same Ring as the other games. Also in-between Atriox beating MC and MC being found by Echo, Atriox is said to have died, so he’s not the villain like you might expect from the intro. MC goes, first, to get a “weapon”.  The weapon, ends up being… “Weapon”. Weapon is a Cortana-like AI, that was meant to delete Cortana and then herself or something, but she’s still around because of reasons. We don’t learn her name until the very end of the game, and the most notable thing about her is that her facial animations are fucking shit and she does weird unnatural things with her lips all the time. So after getting Weapon, MC gets to the Ring, where he plans on rebuilding the UNSC from scratch by taking over FOBs and clearing out Banished bases. The plot itself from this point is just… fighting Banished, finding out things about Cortana (as some leftover data is still floating around of her, coming in as whispers in MC’s head), encountering the Harbinger who is… someone… who wants to… do things… and… yeah. I dunno, maybe Halo fans will get more of a kick from this plot than me. I did like a couple of the characters, but there weren’t many characters in this game anyways, MC and Echo are pretty cool and one of the Banished has his moments when he’s not coughing his lungs out. My thing with this story is that it doesn’t feel like, overall, much happens. It’s basically setup for a sequel (or maybe DLC), especially after the post-credit scene which give some hints of something big coming up. Basically, if you’re not a Halo fan (like me), this probably won’t do much for you. If you are, it might. I feel getting more scenes with the UNSC actually… existing… would be nice. As it is they’re just a few NPCs.

I guess quick note on graphics and performance. Graphically… it looks like every other Halo game. All good on that end, all the classic enemy designs look really awesome now with the extra details a modern platform allows. At first I was running this at 1440p but only 90-ish fps in the open world (compared to 150-190 in indoor areas). This was unacceptable, so I played around with settings a bit. Weirdly there was a setting for minimum FPS which only goes up to 120, so I put it at 120 and… somehow that works. I think this dynamically changes textures to keep up the framerate, so the texture quality is a bit weird sometimes, but rarely is it actually problematic. So after playing with settings, keeping them mostly maxed out or close to maxed, I’d get 120-130fps in the open world, and 150-190fps (a few instances of around 200) in closed levels. Open world could definitely have some optimization, but it did look good. The worst textures were probably on the gameplay model for Master Chief himself, which makes sense since you never see him, and when you do it’s far enough to not matter. This game does look mostly good, minus the weird facial animation for Weapon.

Halo Infinite is an FPS. So the gameplay is much as you’d expect. Point crosshair at what you want dead, and press the shoot button until the thing dies. Halo does have a nice variety of guns, from pretty normal ones like the Sidekick (pistol), the MA40 (machine gun), BR75 (burst rifle), S7 Sniper and Bulldog (Shotgun), but there’s also some less normal weapons like the Needler which shoots semi-homing explosive needles, energy weapons, a lobbing grenade launcher-like one, the energy sword which is always fun, and the gravity hammer. There’s actually a bunch of new weapons too, that have fun effects or are just really useful. My favorite gun in the game is really unassuming, the Mangler. It’s a pistol that shoots high-powered rounds that kill everything in at most 2-3 headshots if they don’t have shields. You do have a melee attack , it’s generally pretty strong but also risky. I’d say the shooting is the best part of the game, as the guns all feel good and hit satisfyingly. Otherwise movement is pretty simple. Master Chief is a bit on the slow side, and also he’s weak as shit, he dies from almost nothing. So fighting in Halo is less about speed and such, more about surviving, taking cover, and making sure your shots count. It’s really nice. But ALSO, it can be about just… finding a vehicle and wrecking everything… more on that problem later 😀

Master Chief has access to 4 abilities. They’re annoyingly all used with the same key, which was Q for me… And you switch between abilities with the numbers from 1 to 4. It’s very awkward. 1 is the grapple shot, it’s great. You can use it to climb shit, you can latch on to enemies as well. 2 is a sonar thing that reveals enemy positions within a range (separate from pressing Z to scan for non-enemy things… why not just combine both features into one button press?). 3 is a drop shield, you can place it to create cover that you can shoot through, extremely useful. 4 is the thrusters. It gives you a nice quick 2 meter dash… and that’s it. It’s useless. If there was a button for the thrusters, it would be great. There isn’t, you have to press 4 to switch to thrusters, then press Q. I just want to use the thrusters whenever, but I can’t. So might as well not use them and stay on the grapple. All of these abilities can be powered up, using Spartan Cores that you find through the open world. Less cooldown is a standard, more uses for some as well, and some have unique things to them. The grapple gets this badass dynamic kick attack you can do, it’s super fucking strong and cool as fuck. The thrusters may suck, but the last upgrade gives you a couple seconds of cloaking for some reason. So that’s something.

So the open world… I just talked a bit about open worlds in general in my Chorus review, and a lot of my comments remain. An open world needs to exist for a reason. And I’m kinda conflicted about this one. Namely, it feels like an afterthought, for a specific reason. At its core it’s a completely average boring open world with nothing in it. This one doesn’t even have random encounters like Chorus does, there’s just the occasional small group of enemies handing around that you have no reason to even think about, let alone shoot. Most of the open world segment is played using the map and placing waypoints for yourself to follow. There’s various things to find. Groups of UNSC soldiers needing help fighting a group of enemies, Spartan Cores, Forward Operating Bases (FOB), Banished Outputs for you to destroy, and High Value Targets (HVTs). So you grab the first FOB, get a few markers on your map to go to, and a yellow marker for the next story mission. Go do what you want at that point.

For what the different markers do… FOBs are your fast travel targets, and from those you can summon a vehicle and switch guns to whatever loadout you want. Basically, you’ll be fast traveling a lot if you want to not waste time, so FOBs are a priority. Outposts, HVTs and distress signals might SOUND like different things, but they aren’t. They’re all groups of enemies for you to kill, except Outposts also have a couple switches for you to flick and objects to explode. These give you Valor. Valor, when you have enough, levels up your FOBs, by adding different kinds of marines that may follow you, vehicles to spawn and weapons to switch to. HVTs also tend to give special weapons, basically powered up versions of normal weapons, that you can summon at the FOB. They sometimes have special effects the normal gun doesn’t. Weird thing though, you can’t get ammo from the normal versions of the guns for the special versions… so they kinda suck to use anyways. There’s a few other markers. I already explained Spartan Cores. There’s skulls, I have no idea what they do because I only had one on my map and didn’t find where it was pointing me to. There’s armor lockers, they give you cosmetics for the multiplayer, very ignorable for me. And those aren’t marked, but there’s audio logs all over the place for some lore. One thing that ends up becoming a bit dumb is the fact that you can summon vehicles at FOBs. So you summon yourself a Wasp, fly to your target, kill everything from afar with no challenge or danger and wonder why this is open world if they’re gonna make everything so easy. Of course you can’t do this at first, but once you can, the whole open world becomes a chore.

So the reason I feel the open world doesn’t matter is… it literally doesn’t end up mattering, in the end. So at some point it does the Final Fantasy 15 thing of taking you out of the open world and putting you on the linear path to the end, which is a few levels worth of shooting shit while going forward in a straight line. No FOBs, so you can’t summon vehicles or select guns (you’ll basically have to only use whatever is strewn through the levels/whatever enemies drop). And this means NO SPECIAL GUNS, so all these cool gun variants from HVTs? Not in my last 4 levels, son. In the whole final parts of the game, the only thing from the open world that carry over is the spartan core upgrades. That’s it. And, since Thrusters suck, you can skip a whole 9 of the cores very safely. I didn’t, but yeah, I should’ve. I don’t think the open world is awful, I’ve played worse, but it feels like they just did an open world concept for… kinda no reason. They could’ve taken it out, made linear but more designed levels and kinda had the same gameplay content. Travel time that doesn’t quite count as gameplay is… not something I like. This isn’t as bad as Chorus in that regard, but it can still take a bit to get to your objective markers.

PC Game Pass

So, like I said in the intro, I picked up the 1$ 3 month trial of Game Pass for PC. I did so through the Xbox app on Windows 10. This app… is fucking shit.

So I go to the Game Pass menu, which shows featured games and stuff. I see “Halo Infinite (Campaign)” right at the top of the “recently added” list. So I figure “if I click that, it will install the Campaign”. It gives me selections, namely it will install Infinite (which is the multiplayer component), and then there’s optional checkboxes, that are checked, for Campaign and HD Textures. I do both of those, then the app crashes. So I have to redo it. Several times. Eventually it does download. It then gives me 2 things: an error message saying the download failed, followed by one saying the download finished. So I launch the game, which just starts… downloading the game some more I guess. Not sure what it’s downloading at that point but I let it go. The download ends… and I can’t play the campaign, despite very obviously clicking the checkbox for it. I exit the game, go back into the app, and finally manage to select the campaign to download that… and that worked. It was a weirdly annoying process to download one game. Right now I’m downloading Forza Horizon 5, that seems to be going okay.

Another thing is that, for the last few days, the app has been telling me that Halo Infinite requires an update. I click the update thingy, nothing happens. It’s been like that for days. I have no idea why it’s doing this.

I’m sorry Microsoft, but Steam has been a thing for a long time now. We KNOW how clients are supposed to work. There isn’t a client I’ve used that is this bad. GOG, Steam, Epic, Origin, they’re all better than this.

Not to say anything about the value of 1$ for 3 months of Game Pass, that’s pretty impeccable and probably the best dollar you’ll ever spend in gaming, but the app needs some help.

Overall

This game was certainly worth the 1$ I paid for 3 months of Game Pass. That and whatever other games I end up playing for those 3 months worth of Game Pass.

All joking aside, Halo Infinite was pretty fun. The core of it, the shooting and fighting, is super solid and fun. Main of the guns are really fun to use, I’m pretty surprised that the Mangler ended up being my go-to gun. Not the funnest FPS you can play right now, but it’s still a quite good one. If you want the best, DOOM Eternal is still right there.

It does have issues though. The open world seems like a bit of an afterthought. It’s pretty empty, there’s not much to do beyond going to preset points to grab whatever the icon is, and in the end of the game the last few hours become entirely linear, making the open world feel like it kinda had no place in the game in the first place. I think the problem really is progression, there’s not much of that. Getting Valor increases the amount of things you can get at FOBs, specifically vehicles and guns (and special guns from HVTs), but once you go to final segments of several linear levels, there’s no more FOBs. So what was the point of all that stuff? The only thing is the Spartan Cores, which you probably want most of (I’d say you’re probably okay missing 9 of them since the Thrusters suck). And my other issue would be that the non-open areas have a big “copy-paste” feel to them, all of them seem to have very similar (and sometimes entirely identical) room layouts and designs. But, that said, the fighting is pretty fun, so I’m mostly okay with this. It could’ve just done with less “summon a Wasp to easy-mode everything on the map, and then ignoring the open world anyways”.

Game good, open world weird because… open world is always weird. More thought should have been put into this open world to make it… meaningful.

I’d recommend this game. Moreso if you’re on PC and have no yet gotten that 1$ Game Pass thing. Just do it. Check if there’s anything other than Halo you want to play and, once there’s enough, do it. It’s 3 months, you should be able to pretty easily finish everything you may want from there. I found several games that I previously missed and can check on there now, I will probably get a few reviews out of that.