Halo Infinite: Single-Player Review

Usually when a game company tells me that they are ‘returning to their roots’ with their next product, it usually means “Corporate told us to make an exact copy of what developers did 10-15 years ago, despite them having moved on from this company.” Almost always it’s a marketing ploy, usually accompanied by a product that shows a lack of understanding of what made those games great, or a product that shows that the team simply doesn’t want to create that product again. Back 4 Blood and Battlefield 2042 are some recent examples of this; games advertised  as literal or spiritual successors that fail to carry the same impact their predecessors did.

Halo Infinite in particular spooked me in this regard. After the release of Halo 4 and Halo 5 I was convinced that 343i was a band of trapped developers forced to continue a franchise they didn’t care about. But I don’t think I can harbour that opinion any more.

A Game Is Only As Fun As Its Sandbox…

This is a catchphrase of mine that I’m now officially coining…because it’s true. It doesn’t matter if the game has a rewarding loot pool or complex end-game activities, if the physics and possibilities of this universe are bland, who would want to stay? Bungie coined the “30 Seconds of Fun” loop with its original entries, and 343i highlights exactly what achieves it: a spectacular sandbox.

Physics, gunplay, modes of transportation, enemy variation; Halo Infinite nails every single one of these with great precision. Halo Infinite players, no matter where they are in the world, are being tested, though they may not realise it. 30 seconds of fun no longer applies solely to AI and combat engagements, but traversal as well. How a player decides to scale a mountain or structure, or cross vast differences is up to them. They can sport a vehicle and plan a route ahead of them based on the terrain, or they can use the grapple hook and thrusters; looking for places to land their hooks to sustain as much momentum as possible as they climb for the clouds or fling across valleys. The game is full of small challenges wherever the player is, always making sure that the character is engaged no matter where they are on the map. Then introduce combat. Landing precise shots on rank and file enemies to declutter the battlefield, aiming low to stumble aggressive enemies before they become overbearing, grabbing weapons and environmental hazards with your hands and hook as you go. Constant microdecision making takes place as mechanics overlap. Before long you’re dropping and switching weapons, repositioning, grabbing grenades, and using abilities more than in any other Halo. So the sandbox is good, let's break things down a bit more.

Weapons and Balancing

First up: difficulty. Halo Infinite has four difficulties, Recruit, Normal, Heroic, and Legendary; and they are all fantastic. In Halo Infinite, difficulty scaling affects how fast you die, and that’s it. Unlike in other Halo titles, changing the difficulty does not make other enemies more tanky, it just makes you more squishy. This means the only thing the player needs to improve as they attempt the different difficulties is their evasive tactics and the speed at which they’re lethal; getting rid of enemies faster than they can overburden the player. The entirety of Infinite’s arsenal is viable on any difficulty, as enemy vulnerability never changes. Because of this the moment-to-moment gameplay of Halo Infinite has variation seldom seen in its predecessors. With no limit on what weapons are viable on what difficulty, no player is punished for bringing their favourite weapon into battle, and no weapon is off the table when the fighting starts. A good analogy for combat in Halo Infinite is one used by DOOM’s current development team: real time chess. In Halo Infinite every enemy is like a piece, who will try to use the layout of the terrain and their kit in tandem to corner and defeat you. Now take this analogy a step further, further than even DOOM has, where select tiles on the board have power-ups and weapons that enhance the different pieces. Because in Halo Infinite, Chief isn’t the only one who wants to get his hands on the big guns; enemies will swap weapons, pick up weapons, and do whatever it takes to make sure you hit the dirt before they do. Chief’s two weapon slots, which in my opinion felt restrictive in past entries, finally serves a grander purpose. Which weapons you carry becomes a decision, each one you leave a risk. Abandoning a weapon means not only that you’ll have to come back to it if you need it, but that it can also be stolen by enemies. Unlike in DOOM where you have your entire arsenal on your back, and are fighting for ammo, Infinite takes the Breath of the Wild approach where every fight is a scramble for resources between two parties, where weapons are emptied, discarded, replaced, and replenished along the way until one side prevails. My biggest complaint with both the earlier Halo games and the newer DOOM games is their Rock Paper Scissor approach to gameplay, where unless you’re using “X” weapon against “Y” enemy you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Halo Infinite has this to some degree (specifics in “The Spoilers”), but the large majority of this issue is remedied by an elements system, where weapons of specific elements fulfill general roles, and it’s up to the player to make the more precise picks depending on which they like. Don’t worry, I’ll elaborate.

In Halo Infinite there are 5 weapon elements. Kinetic, Plasma, Hardlight, Power, and Shock. Plasma depletes shields, Kinetic destroys armour and does extra damage against unshielded enemies, Hardight does good damage against metals, vehicles, and overpenetrated, making it good for crowd control, Power is effective at both dealing heavy vehicle damage as well as eviscerating most enemies (and is therefore the least common), and Shock disables vehicles and stun-locks unshielded enemies. These are the basics of the different ammo types, but this does not mean that the weapons that use these ammo types are necessarily funneled into these roles. The Bulldog Close Quarter Shotgun will still tear the shield off of someone and chew them up after, and the Sentinel Beam (A Hardlight Weapon) will turn even shielded enemies to dust with sustained fire. The pulse carbine may be good for taking out shields, but its tracking rounds and good ventilation speed up combat by allowing the player to “point and forget”, volleying burts at enemies haphazardly and allowing the tracking pulses to do the rest. No longer does the game punish you for not using the hard counters it puts in place, but insteads gives you a basic outline of how a weapon’s ammo type performs, and lets the other factors of the weapons drive your decisions from there.

World and Exploration

One of the larger concerns I and others had going into this game was the way 343i planned on approaching level design. Halo Infinite was supposed to be comparable to Halo: Combat Evolved in terms of its open ended level design, but if you’ve ever played that game you’d know that the only level in that game where objectives can be completed in any order is the mission titled after the game’s setting, “Halo.” How 343i would take the structure of a single level and turn it into a whole game was something that, in a reality in which Ubisoft ruined the open world genre almost a decade ago,  made me worry about this game’s staying power. And I’ll admit, when I finally got to the open world, and was debriefed on all the usual map-marker lingo like enemy bases to retake, a map with fog of war to clear I began to lose hope, and fast. The early campaigns of the original trilogy have proven against the test of time for many reasons, which begged the question: what would Halo Infinite do that the other games didn’t?What makes its sandbox and world stand out among not only the previous Halo games, but the other generic open world games that it seemed to emulate? While there are many possible answers to this question, I think that they all tend to boil down to one word: tools. I think you know where this is going.

I spoke of one type of tool already, firearms, but there are other types as well. Environmental hazards, equipment, vehicles; these all add to the existing “Tool Pool” if you will, and it is these, and their interactions with the environment, that help this game distinguish its identity. In truth, the world itself isn’t anything to praise alone. It has one biome, a mountainous coniferous forest, and this does not change for the entire duration of the game. There is no manipulation of this environment, it will be the same from start to finish and there is no dynamic weather, it will never rain or snow. The wildlife that exists on Zeta Halo is equatable to the wildlife seen in Destiny 2, meaning I wouldn’t blame you if it took 4 years to realise they even existed. UNSC Squads that are said to be in trouble will indefinitely hold position and only start to falter when you’re close enough to come save the day. The only time the game can truly surprise you is with patrolling enemies and allies not listed on the map that will engage one another if they get close, but Far Cry has done this since its second installment. Other than that, the world is a static playground that you can’t change but exist in. That being said though, existing in the world of Halo Infinite is not bad, and it’s thanks to that “Tool Pool” I mentioned earlier. While the environment may not be dynamic, you as a player have enough options to interact with the static environment in different ways. The grappling hook (which I know has already been talked about at length, so I’ll keep this short.) allows for easy traversal both vertically and otherwise, allowing players to sling-shot themselves up mountains or across valleys, grabbing to trees and swinging like Tarzan or Spider-Man or other copyright protected properties I hope I don’t get pressed for mentioning. Vehicles can be fantastic, with the Mongoose, Warthog, Razorback, Ghost, Banshee, and Wasp being able to cover vast distances with smooth controls and feedback, allowing you to cruise around the open world and pretend you’re playing a motocross game for a bit. The UNSC marines, while still not all that intelligent, are the most lethal they’ve ever been, and honestly may be some of the best supporting AI I’ve seen in an FPS game. Gone are the days of watching a grunt and marine exchange fire like they are part of a turn based RPG, completely disconnected from the universe you’re playing in. Outfit your squad with good weapon at a Forward Operating Base and you’ll soon start to notice that with a whole platoon of marines using Snipers, Battle Rifles, and Rocket Launchers, that you’ll be competing against them for kills as together you absolutely obliterate squads of enemies and high value targets that litter the map. This is especially true on Legendary, Halo Infinite’s hardest difficulty, when you and your allies suppress and eliminate each other's targets, making sure the enemy doesn’t have the ability to single out you or any of your squadmates. You may be following map markers, clearing outposts and such like in many “open” world games previously released, but the methods in which you do so will be so different that outposts never feel like a required part of the story, but rather like the next testing ground for your abilities, weapons, or whatever stupid plot you can scheme on the way there. To put it bluntly: the outposts in this game are less “stealth until there’s a bearable amount of enemies left and then open fire” and  more like “Try to fling yourself into the air with the grappling hook, spike down a fusion coil like it’s a volleyball, empty your grenades, switch to your rocket launcher, and see if you can clear anyone who remains before you even hit the ground.” The structure of the world and objectives could use innovation, but at the end of the day these truly are just simple boxes that you tick, it’s the method in which you go about ticking them that is not only the bulk of the game but the most varied.

Staying Power

Hopefully I’ve conveyed to you how fun and full of potential the core gameplay loop is, because it’s the main reason why this next point I’m gonna make stings for fans of the game thus far. I stated before that the previous Halo games are venerated  People want to revisit those games, so much so that they are not only remastered and bundled time and time again, but are updated even at the time of writing this; with the campaigns of these games having long been integrated into their evolving progression systems.

 And it is because of this fact that it pains me to say that Halo Infinite’s campaign does not have this staying power, and worse it’s not because it doesn’t deserve it, but because it has been denied it. At the time of writing this, the campaign does not have any sort of load save system or chapter select, meaning that once the campaign is completed, a new save will have to be initiated to progress through the game, and there is only one save slot. There is no co-op in the campaign, nor is there any firefight. There is no shared PvE in this game whatsoever as of this writing (unless you count arena bots as “environment”), which is a shame for a franchise whose legacy was carved out thanks to it. It says a lot when a series goes from including your friends in cutscenes in the very first game, to launching without co-op whatsoever in its most recent.