Kirk McKeand
December 6, 2021 3:01 am ET
“If you knew how you were going to die, how would you live your life differently?” This is the question Master Chief’s estranged AI girlfriend asks at the beginning of Halo Infinite. Mechanically, it’s a question all first-person shooters ask: choose to go right and eat a grenade; reload and go left to avoid the grenade. All single-player shooters are this at their core, but Halo has always offered options much wider than left versus right.
After years of identical military FPS games, the old-school feel of Halo is refreshing in 2021. There’s intentionality to every aspect of the design. Take the floaty jump: it feels like you’re bouncing on the moon, but you’re able to do a full 360-degree rotation while suspended in the air, scanning the horizon for heads to pop. Its action is intentionally slowed down, allowing for a precision that isn’t possible in most shooters.
The two-weapon restriction is there for the same reason as Breath of the Wild’s weapon degradation, forcing to you adapt and survive as you chain together kills. Down a grunt with the last bullet in your clip and snatch their weapon from the floor to continue your assault. You might have favorite guns, but it won’t be long before you’re forced to toss them aside just to live. And what guns they are: railguns that fire rays of light, disintegrating bodies and ricocheting off hard surfaces; electric coil sniper rifles that fry heads and chain electricity through grouped up enemies; stubby shotguns with tiny bayonets attached; impossible lasers that tear through machinery and flesh – red hot death in neon pinks, greens and purples.
It doesn’t matter which weapon you’re using either – they’re all satisfying. That little pop you get when you down an alien, accompanied by the red hit marker; the splat and crunch as you burst a grunt’s carapace; the way enemies stumble when caught in the shockwave of an explosion, or how they drop to their knees when you shoot out a leg. FPS games are so popular because they’re immediate. It’s instant interactivity – you squeeze the trigger and affect the world. Halo Infinite’s world reacts more intensely than most.
It’s always been one of the draws of Halo, how a single trigger squeeze can shock and awe. Infinite’s developer 343 Industries cranks that up here, placing energy cells and explosive containers all over every battlefield. A single shot or grenade can set up a chain reaction that cascades through the enemy forces – and, sometimes, you – like a fireworks display at an exotic meat raffle.
Infinite transports that action to an open world. Most of its main missions follow the classic Halo formula – taking you inside installations or aboard enemy ships and down tight corridors – but there are some that take advantage of the new sandbox. You’re free to tackle objectives however you like out in that world, driving in a tank and lowering the gates for a frontal assault, or making your way over a nearby mountain to surprise them from the rear. These moments, at their best, remind me of an action-focused take on Metal Gear Solid V.
Between missions, there are also a range of high-priority targets for you to tackle. Taking over forward-operating bases (FOBs) unlocks a new fast travel point as well as the ability to call in vehicles from that location. You can also load up on unlocked weapons or recruit a marine to join you in combat. On top of FOBs, there are assassination targets, upgrade cores, propaganda towers and more. It might sound like the Far Cry-ification of Halo, but thankfully that’s not the case. 343 Industries was smart enough to scatter activities around sparingly, and every single side objective you tackle rewards an instant, tangible gameplay benefit. Whether it’s a new gun, a vehicle for the FOBs, or something else, you’re always unlocking toys to use out in the sandbox.
A new tool – the Grappleshot – makes getting around the open world a joy. There are other gadgets – an energy shield, thrusters and a scanner beacon – but it’s really difficult to put away the grapple, and not just because switching between tools is needlessly fiddly. Once fully upgraded, you can Spider-Man yourself around the world. Because of the aforementioned floatiness of the jumps, its cooldown often recharges before you land, allowing you to chain swings together. You can also influence the arc of your swing by pulling your weight in the opposite direction to swing wider. It feels like it should have been a part of Halo all along, opening up so many possibilities inside and outside of combat.
You can pull yourself towards enemies to land a fatal melee hit or a big ground pound. You can zip yourself away from danger or into a flanking spot. You can pull yourself into distant vehicles to hijack them. You can even whip weapons up from the ground or pull them out of the air. It sometimes feels like you’re cheating the game and heading out of bounds, but you never are. It’s a revelation.
Halo Infinite is a new dawn for the series. The clue is in the name. This isn’t a numbered sequel, but more of a soft reboot. In pure gameplay terms, that works. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the story.
It’s fine. Halo’s story has never been anything other than fine, and it doesn’t need to be. But it throws you into the action after the events of Halo Wars 2 – a strategy game I haven’t played – and expects you to have memorized the entire Halo Wiki. You figure it out eventually, but it’s weird for a soft reboot to assume so much knowledge.
Still, here’s the gist: Master Chief got beaten up by a big brute dude and thrown into space, but luckily some random guy finds him floating out there and fixes him up. Cortana, his AI helper who joined him through the original games, has gone rogue and everyone hates her now. Master Chief is really rather sad that his nude cyber wife bugged out. Now he needs to stop the successor of the guy who beat him up from accessing Cortana’s research – whatever it is she was doing. That means going to a new halo ring and shooting loads of aliens. Oh, and he also gets a new AI helper, but he just calls her “The Weapon” because he’s having trouble moving on. You’re welcome.
After the opening cutscene, the entire story is told from Chief’s perspective, with a “single shot” cinematic style. The camera pans out of Chief’s head, but it never strays too far before zooming back in and putting you in control again. It’s very stylish – especially the opening, in which Chief throws himself out of an airlock and parkours over space debris before boarding an enemy ship. He’s very cool for a man who’s been floating in space and soiling himself for an unspecified amount of time.
Fortunately, the series itself has done with floating in the void and pooping its space pants. Halo Infinite is a stunning game. Outside of the assumption of knowledge and fiddly gadget selection, there’s little to complain about here, but I’m going to nitpick anyway. I wish there was another enemy outside of the Banished faction – something akin to the Flood from the original game – so we could take part in some three-way battles out in the world. It would add a little more dynamism to the sandbox. I also would have liked to see more emergent stuff generally, outside of what happens when you affect the world with those trigger pulls. You do come across marines fighting Banished, but only in specific, marked locations, and the marines you do find are about as intelligent as a mollusk. At least we still have enemy drop pods, drop ships and vehicles to make the battlefields feel alive.
Enemy AI is as good as ever, too. Enemy chatter is packed full of personality and it’s rare to hear them repeat a combat bark. They also sometimes argue amongst themselves since the Banished are a ragtag collection of different species. In one fight, I overhear a brute telling a grunt to hold the position. “But what if he’s got grenades,” the grunt replies. There are hundreds of little interactions like this, and they’re all brilliant.
During its first gameplay reveal, Halo Infinite was heavily criticized by fans for its visuals, but they’ve either been improved immensely or that criticism was overblown. It’s not one of those games you’ll load up just to show off the graphics to your friends, but it’s genuinely pretty at times – especially when you catch the sun dipping behind the ring, surrounded by fluffy clouds. Terrestrial props – trees, grass, rocks – could have done with more work, but it’s hard to care about the rocks that it’s got when you’re firing off a needler and dealing pink neon death. Gameplay is king, after all.
A lot of soft reboots rely heavily on nostalgia to carry them through, but Halo Infinite is a perfect marriage between old and new. It captures that same thrill of stepping out onto the grass in the first Halo and seeing a grunt run towards you with plasma grenades in its hand, transplanting those miniature sandbox moments into a wider open-world template. Towards the end, it narrows down and threads you through a handful of linear missions that manage to avoid feeling like a Best Of album despite some familiarity. It even manages to hold onto the main theme long enough for it to have a real impact when the music finally kicks in. Halo is back. Infinite might have launched in a year where there’s a new Battlefield and Call of Duty, but it’s easily the best shooter of the year. If Halo had continued the way it was going, it likely would have died. With Halo Infinite, 343 decided to live life differently, and I can see a bright future ahead.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
