A Comprehensive Halo: Infinite Review
Halo: Infinite is one of my longest-awaited games. Was it worth it?
The beaches are being stormed. We've touched down. The area is cleared of hostiles.
"Echo 419 inbound. Somebody order a Warthog?"
"Music to my ears, Foehammer!"
"You know our motto: We Deliver!"
With those words a Warthog drops onto the shores of the Silent Cartographer's beach. My friend Timothy and I are playing splitscreen. I drive while he mans the gun. Just like that we roll out. Up the beach. Through the bush. Gunning down Covenant in every direction. We're trying to beat the game on Legendary difficulty for the first time, but we still can't get over the environment. Hours pass as we try driving into the ocean, looking for secrets, going the wrong way around, doing the level backwards.
"Wouldn't it be AWESOME if for Halo 3 the entire game was this level? Like everything was Silent Cartographer?" Timothy says.
"They'll never do that," I say.
"They totally will. I bet you they will. This is like the best level ever in Halo."
For the last howevermany years since Halo: Infinite's official announcement, I've been in a state of perpetual perturbance. This game is the sequel to Halo 5. The number that comes after 5 is almost always 6. Ergo, Infinite should be called Halo 6: Infinite. The naming-marketing conventions employed by AAA developers these days serve only to dazzle and confuse audiences. Just give the damn game the name that makes the most sense.
I was mistaken. Having now finished Infinite, 'infinite' was the right name. This game isn't Halo 6. It's something different. Something much more important. Timothy was off by about fourteen years, but at the end of the decade, he was right, and I was wrong. This latest installment in the Xbox's only notable franchise begins with the simple premise:
"What if an entire game was Silent Cartographer?"
In other words, Infinite is an open world game, with ten or so mostly linear underground missions. I knew this going in but I wasn't sold on the premise. High potential, so many ways for it to go wrong. Halo lacks upgrade systems. There are no attachments for its weapons. The gameplay is, at its best, very simple: shields, shoot, grenades, melee, reload, two weapons, run and gun. How can 343 make that work for a 20+ hour long open world?
Consider the review that follows to be from the perspective of a man who grew up on Bungie's Halo. I've read a significant number of the novels. I've beaten every game, including spin-offs (even Spartan Assault). Although I do not like the narrative design of the last two 343 titles, I still think Halo 4 and 5 are excellent shooters for what they are, and I've played 5's multiplayer more than I have any other.
I desperately wanted to like this game going in. I wanted it to be how I imagined it, at its best. The question, therefore, is whether or not it lived up to my expectations, as an enormous fan of this series, as someone for whom Halo is the most important piece of popular culture.
I will evaluate Infinite on its own merits--and there are many--independent of the franchise as a whole, but at the end of the day there is context to everything I'm saying here. Narrative components in particular cannot be discussed in a vacuum.
Just keep that in mind.
To Infinity and Beyond
Let's start with the story, because this is where I think my insight will be most beneficial. Very minor spoilers follow.
Circa 2012 we were told Halo 4 would be the beginning of a new trilogy--the Reclaimer Trilogy, a sequel to the original Halo games, this one developed by 343 Industries. A deep dive into the backstory of the franchise which would flesh out all the parts of the world nobody cares about. After the diversions of Reach and ODST, the Master Chief and Cortana would be back. We would learn what happens when Cortana needs Chief and wakes him after decades, or perhaps even centuries, in cryosleep.
At some point in the decade since, this 'trilogy' became a 'saga.' I hadn't realized that until Infinite's credits were rolling. I thought this game would be a dramatic and compelling conclusion to what might tentatively be called a plot introduced in 4. Cortana would finally die (for real this time). There would be an epic Warthog run. "Blow Me Away" would play. The Flood would return. The Master Chief would finally, after twenty years of service, be put to rest, after blowing himself up to save the galaxy for the fifth or sixth time since 2001.
Let me clear away all confusion now and state definitively that this is not what Infinite is.
This game is more of a sequel to Halo Wars 2 than Halo 5: Guardians, and it hardly has anything at all to do with Halo 4. In effect, the narrative is a side-story concerned foremost with wrapping up the absolute catastrophe that was 5's plot and memory holing what little the audience remembers of 4 as quietly as possible.
Fans of the franchise no doubt are aware that Joe Staten, the cinematic designer primarily responsible for the excellent writing and storytelling of the first two games, has, for the first time since ODST, returned. He's billed as Creative Director in the credits; in actual fact he only came onboard last year. This was a good sign anyway. It was going to take someone of Staten's caliber to dig 343i out of the hole they'd put themselves in.
Halo: Infinite does not have a good story. The plot is confusing to the point of unintelligibility. We begin in media res. Blue Team is gone for some reason. The UNSC Infinity has just been, somewhat ironically, destroyed. Evil Cortana from 5 has been defeated off-screen. Atriox, the Brute big bad of Halo Wars 2, almost kills Master Chief in a cutscene, and then we learn later that apparently he died off-screen. The secondary antagonist after Chieftain Tartarus 2.0, an ape named Escharum, is some lady with a Predator face who can levitate somehow. There's a new Halo ring that's been partially destroyed in the same way that Installation 04 was in Combat Evolved, but apparently isn't Installation 04. Why is it damaged? How did that happen?
Only about half of this makes any sense. Following 5, this was par for the course. It must be understood first and foremost that, beyond ruining all of the characters, chief among the countless demerits of 4 was that it was going to be impossible to follow-up. Future games were left with nothing. This was why 5's story was so terrible. The writers had nothing to work with.
Infinite's writers similarly had nothing to work with. Sitting down to invent a new narrative, Staten was buried by a thousand tons of useless leaden baggage. There was no hope for this game's plot. That's why you shouldn't be offended that the story isn't all that.
But what it does get right is the character writing. For the first time in literally 14 years, the Master Chief feels like himself again. He's laconic. He asks far fewer stupid questions. He's Spartan. He's cool. He's cynical and sarcastic. The attempt of the previous two games to expand his character and give him some real motivation continues to be misled, as my above-linked article on 4's story will demonstrate, but what's there does work. I understand him. I can empathize with his internal conflict over Cortana. I can discern his motivation when interacting with Echo 216.
That's the other thing to note about the narrative. There are only three characters: Echo 216, your Pelican pilot (henceforth "Brohammer"); The Weapon, your new AI partner who sounds just like Cortana (henceforth "Pseudo-Cortana"); and the Master Chief himself. This reflects an enormous amount of constraint on the writers' parts. This focus allows each character to develop a more unique voice, thereby creating a cast that the player can learn to like.
I don't have much to say about Brohammer beyond that he works for what he is in this story. Pseudo-Cortana is a different matter. This fake Cortana feels more like real Cortana than real Cortana has in over a decade. For the first time in so many years, 343 got the character right. They found her voice. This is, no doubt, due to Staten's presence. I cannot stress more strongly how satisfying it is to hear Jen Taylor actually sound like this character again, and to play a game in which her dynamic with the Chief is at least partially right.
There are differences, of course. Pseudo-Cortana is more child-like, more naïve, has a slightly different personality. But the fact remains. They got Cortana right.
I don't want to spend any more time than I have to analyzing Infinite's story. It isn't great. It's often confusing. It's about as good as it could have been, considering the variables. But despite all its myriad flaws, I can play this game with the dialogue on without cringing. With all of 4 and 5's narrative problems weighed, the gravest among them is how poorly the characters are written. There is so much 'ping-ponging' in the dialogue. There's way too much exposition. The attempts at wit are weak, to say the least, and Cortana in particular is simply wrong. It isn't the rampancy, it's the writing--something is rotten.
Infinite is not Halo 2. There are no one-liners so epic that the player sprouts an erection from sheer awesomeness overload.
But the characters are, on the whole, good. The writing is, on the whole, serviceable. It's never so bad that it can't be endured. The improvement this shows over the last two 343 games demands recognition. I like it when Chief and Pseudo-Cortana quip back and forth. I don't feel the need to stick my fingers in my ears and scream in agony. I feel like, as a fan of the original games, I'm back home again.
So understand that Infinite is not some final entry to the franchise. Despite its six-year development cycle, it concludes nothing except a sideplot that none of us knew existed until now anyway. What it accomplishes in effect, and what the story is solely concerned with, is undoing the last two games. This game's campaign is a reset button. Without resorting to retroactive continuity, Staten has fixed the mess left by 343 and, going forward, things can actually get good. At the end of the day, we're back where we should have been following Halo 3: the Chief and Cortana are together again and they're ready to go kick some alien ass.
Once you accept that fact, I think you'll enjoy this game's narrative a whole lot more. And while I have no idea where Staten & Co. intend to take the story next, I guarantee it'll be high art compared to these first three Forerunner Saga games. The train went off the rails; righting it wasn't easy, but now we're back on track.
Installation 07
Halo as a franchise is a mostly linear science fiction shooter. The designers don't hold your hand on each level; you can take your time, explore, and go about objectives at your own place. But there are still levels. The game is still linear. There is no sandbox. There is no open world. Various titles have played around with active abilities and powerups, most notably Reach, but at the core of the mechanics are movement, ammunition management, and monitoring energy shields, in addition to regularly interspersed vehicle sections. That's mostly it.
Halo: Infinite is different. Halo: Infinite is an open world game. After two introductory missions, the Master Chief is dropped feet first onto a Far Cry-reminiscent sandbox. Liberate FOBs to establish camps from which ammunition and vehicles can be requisitioned. Locate and assassinate bosses to earn unique weapons. Collect MJOLNIR armor cores to upgrade Chief's shields and active abilities. Clear out Banished outposts to restore UNSC control to Zeta Halo.
How you approach each objective is up to you. Call down a Scorpion tank to clear out a FOB. Use a sniper to pick off Brutes and Elites from a nearby ridge before closing in on an outpost. Assault a boss' camp with a Banshee, or grab a shotgun and walk in through the front door. It makes no difference to the designers.
There's no stealth bullshit. Getting around is easy. Fast travel is unrestrictive. There's just gameplay. Play however you want. If you prefer, ignore everything and focus only on the main story. That's fine, too.
This is what it would look like if Silent Cartographer were an entire game unto itself. It's just as awesome as Timothy said it would be.
For the first time in the series, the player has four active abilities to choose from. They're always available: no need to swap them out. They are Grapple, Scan, Dropwall, and Thrusters. These abilities are foundational to understanding why Infinite succeeds so spectacularly on the microscopic level of the individual ludeme.
Grapple turns the Master Chief into Spiderman. Once upgraded its cooldown is one second or less. You can use it to scale any wall and access nearly anywhere on the map. You can also use it to pull explosive barrels into your arms, to pull yourself to enemies and vehicles, and to grab weapons off the ground. Once you've learned how to use Grapple, Infinite truly becomes an FPS sandbox. It is endlessly enjoyable to navigate bases, climb mountains, and assault squads of Banished troops. The number of options available at any given moment is stupendous.
The other abilities are almost as play-defining. Dropwall is far better here than in multiplayer. Use it for cover whenever your shields are about to pop and you're stuck out in the open. Thrusters are what will allow you to evade Brute and Jackal snipers--and there are a lot of them in this game--and put Hunters to sleep for good. Scanner is less useful, but when an Elite deploys his active camo, you'll be glad to have it.
Using all four abilities in concert gives Infinite a feeling reminiscent of Id's new Doom games. Combat becomes a dance. Constant swapping between powers takes practice, but once you find the coordination to do it, no other shooter is as enjoyable. Not only will you find yourself capable of overcoming any challenge the game places before you, but you'll feel genuinely awesome while you're doing it.
In designing this sandbox, 343 has evaded a number of lethal pitfalls that have oft overtaken other open world shooters. First and foremost is the remarkable fact that, although Infinite is full of bosses, the enemies never feel like bullet sponges. Even the mightiest Brute Chieftain can be taken down in a single burst from the BR once his helmet is off and his shields are down. I once took the time to roll a Scorpion all the way through the woods on my way to a Grunt boss, only to be overcome with laughter when he died after a single blast from my main cannon.
This is not a bad thing. Bullet sponges are terrible. By keeping enemy health reasonable, an overall sense that the player is taking his actions in a diegetic world coalesces. The designers aren't afraid to let you kill a badass Elite Ultra from a mile away with a Sniper Rifle in one hit, because enemies who aren't alerted yet to your presence don't keep their energy shields up. Why would they be?
Halo has always done an excellent job in making the Covenant feel real through their AI: the way Elites enrage when their shields go down, the way Grunts flee when their commander is killed, and the way Brutes go berserk once their armor is gone. Infinite continues this tradition in the best possible way. The Banished never feel like NPCs in a video game.
The open world in Infinite is perhaps my favorite since the original Red Dead Redemption, or maybe Far Cry 3. For once the mechanical freedom offered to the player makes sense. The systems reinforce, rather than contradict, this lack of linearity, and there's the added benefit that it all makes sense in the context of the story: the Chief is a lone resistance operative, more or less. It's up to him how he liberates Zeta Halo from Brute control.
That isn't to say it's perfect. There are three or four major zones on the map and they all look exactly the same--that is to say, like the generic woodsy-ish environment of the second mission in Combat Evolved. I would have preferred dramatic changes in the open world: from the Earth-like forests of Halo and the dark hills of Truth and Reconciliation to the snowy peaks of Assault on the Control Room and the swamps of The Flood. Those four biomes would have offered a huge amount of added variety and lended a better sense to the game that this, like the original, was all taking place on a single Halo ring.
There's also limited incentive to engage Banished patrols outside objectives. The only upgrade system is via armor cores, as mentioned earlier, which are collectables: there is no XP. Chief receives nothing for splattering an Elite Major outside of the appropriate designated areas. Infinite doesn't need an experience system, but some sort of lasting reward for clearing out mobs on the map would have been appreciate.
As for the upgrade system itself, it's lacking in complexity. There are significantly more cores on the map than there are abilities to slot them in, and the slots themselves are linear. The progression doesn't branch. Every upgrade is the same for every player; the only choice is when to choose which one. The open world elements would have been improved if there was more variety in this regard; at least one more ability to improve (I think Sprint would have been a good choice, since its baseline is so slow, or perhaps passive upgrades to ammo capacity) and different options to choose from when utilizing cores.
Unsurprisingly Infinite retains Halo's classic two-weapon system. Ammo capacity is limited, so you'll have to swap your weapons out constantly on the fly. The shooting feels more run-and-gun than any prior title in the series. Picking up new weapons is vital.
I think they may have gone too far with limiting ammunition capacity. As much as I prefer Bungie's Halo games overall, 343 has always done an excellent job--relatively--with weapon balance, but here in the campaign the balance is off. I played on Heroic difficulty and found that the Rocket Launcher and Sniper Rifle were both next to useless. The ammo capacity was low and the damage far too pitiful to compensate.
On the other hand, the new Shock Rifle and the updated Brute Mauler, effectively now a heavy pistol instead of a shotgun, quickly turned out to be the two most useful weapons in the game. They're effective against every enemy, have long range, do heavy damage, and are also plentiful--Brutes carry them in every encounter.
In summary, power weapons aren't very competitive in Infinite's campaign, not when you can only carry two or three spare magazines at a time. I rarely used FOB weapon requisitioning at all in my playthrough, except to grab an energy sword when I knew I was going in to assassinate a hard target.
The Banished outposts and boss missions are all stimulating and engaging, but the rest of the open world content leaves something to be desired. Pseudo-Cortana's narration is repetitive and, by 15 hours in, she was literally re-using the same lines whenever I rescued another marine squad. Her vapid praise quickly turned grating. This small flaw exemplifies a larger issue with the open world as a whole, which is that it simply isn't big enough. Infinite is too finite. It's begging for more content. A bigger map. More diverse missions. Once every side objective has been completed, there's nothing left on the map but random patrols. There's nothing else to do but swing around.
And there's the rub. So often when I play AAA games, six or seven hours in and I am simply ready to be done. I haven't managed to complete an Ubisoft open world since 2018. Infinite, on the other hand, was positively addictive. I couldn't shut it off until everywhere on the map was cleared.
I don't recall specifically how many story missions there are. The lines are often blurry between mission and open world, which is a positive for a game like this. In general the obvious story progression takes place underground, in linear environments reminiscent of any other Halo game, where at the end will come a boss fight.
As someone with a life-long vendetta against bosses in shooters, I'm happy to report that I like Infinite's bosses. They're simple and unpretentious. They test your ability to use all four equipment slots and tend not to last long. Between one and five tries will be all that's required to figure the pattern out, and that's just about right. Any more than that would be too frustrating.
All else aside, Infinite has excellent level design. The story missions are linear, perhaps, but they aren't corridor shooter QTE fests. The arenas are large. Success is determined by ability usage, shield management, ammo control, and weapon selection. Two paths in and out of each room often exist. The additional mobility added by the presence of Grapple forced 343 to carefully consider its levels, and they rose to the challenge.
I Think We're Just Getting Started
You could be forgiven for receiving the impression that I liked Halo: Infinite. Well, I did. A lot. It's the best AA game I've played since 2018. It's the best game in the "Forerunner Saga" by a mile, both in narrative and systems design. It brings Halo in a new direction, and with Staten at the helm I have no doubt that the series will continue to excel over the coming years.
But I have one enormous contention left unspoken: it's way too short.
It wasn't a lie when 343 said Infinite was the biggest Halo game to date. It is. It has no filler and still beats 5 in length by a factor of three. But it also took six years to develop. Until now Halo's main entries have had three year development cycles, sometimes less: 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2021.
That's my only frustration with this game. We've waited so long, and what we've received is a fantastic open world Far Cry-With-Energy-Shields shooter--and not really anything else. After Infinite I can't wait for the next game in this series, but that's just the problem: that wait is going to be six years. I really can't wait that long!
I enjoyed this game and I think it's taken the story in the right direction, but there's no sense of climax, no catharsis, no real joy except a guarantee that things will be better for the franchise going forward. If Infinite had come out in 2018 I would have accepted that. But with a late 2021 release? It's a hard sell. Even though I like every constituent part on display, I still feel strangely let down.
I hope I'm wrong. I wasn't sure I wanted the series to continue as recently as last week, but now I'm certain it has plenty of room left to grow. I want more of what Infinite has. It's a great game. I highly recommend it. But it's hard to not feel disappointed when the wait was so long and I'm done in a mere 15 hours, when the conclusion is the reveal that this is merely a stopgap game between the old Halo and the new. Was it worth the wait? Could anything be?
Probably not. But that's the reality of game development these days. I just hope they get the next one out before I die of old age. Maybe that's all gamers should ever hope for.
I finished Halo: Infinite on Heroic difficulty in two sittings, with a total time of exactly 15 hours. I played entirely on mouse and keyboard on a copy purchased from Steam. I had to turn all graphics settings down to Low to reach a reliable 60fps on my PC; complaints of performance problems are valid and serious, but you can go anywhere else on the internet to hear about those. I may or may not write up my thoughts on the multiplayer at some point, if I find the motivation. Preliminary opinions are that I prefer 5's multiplayer for New Halo and 3's for Old Halo. I haven't enjoyed Infinite's as much as either so far.
By the way, if you're looking for an updated Halo campaign tier list, I now rank them 1 > 2 > 3 = Infinite > Reach > ODST > 4 > 5, or 2 > 1 > Reach > 3 > ODST > Infinite > 5 > 4 for story.