Game Play

Love the engine, the open world, the grapple thingy. The art is beautiful, and I’m really happy I have a 4k TV to view it on.

It really does still feel like Halo, which was a big concern of mine after having seen some recorded game play early this year. Running around and shooting enemies feels the same. I like the new suit abilities like the grapple for maneuvering around difficult places. I haven’t gotten stuck on foot anywhere. The other one I use a lot is the sensor. Being able to see cloaked enemies was a life saver. I also like that I can upgrade the suit abilities.

The vehicles are a bit tougher to drive for some reason, especially off-road. I wonder if it’s just a result of having more well-defined terrain. They changed something in how the Scorpion (the tank) is controlled. I couldn’t strafe with it without inevitably driving backward or just getting stuck, but such maneuvers were easy with previous games (except for #1). The Ghost is my go-to. I cleared out so many areas with it. Little is as satisfying as hijacking a Banshee out of the air using the grapple.

The ability to go anywhere on the map is amazing. Climbing, as in many other games, is awkward jumping, but the grapple resolves this easily. I upgraded to get a rapid charge on the grapple, which meant that I was able to scale vertical cliffs no matter the height. And being able to fly over the open world is absolutely freeing. The world is a bit bigger than Breath of the Wild, but not anywhere near the huge expanse of Horizon: Zero Dawn. Maybe they could have made use of a bit more of the giant ring on which the game takes place.

Enemies are rendered as far as they’re big enough to be seen. My strategy is usually to take out snipers and as many forces as I can from a distance, and you can do this from a huge distance in this game! The crosshairs flash with an “X” to indicate a hit, and it’s red on a kill. There are also associated sounds, so you don’t even need to see that you’ve killed an enemy.

The enemies are harder mostly. This game really rewards headshots; landing shots on armor does almost no damage. I can clear out a room full of Grunts and Jackals fairly quickly with single shots to the head, so I think I’m a decent casual player (I suck at online multiplayer). But the Brutes with gravity hammers really pissed me off by refusing to die. Hunters are always a pain, and more so in this game (Why do those giant guns have rapid fire?!). I do like the incorporation of the “Hunter twins” concept from universe lore where after you kill one, the other becomes enraged and that much harder to kill. The final battle sucked. (Read: I sucked at it.) I lost count of how many times I died. In the end, I had to resort to a strategy of run and grapple to get enough distance, only to have the gap closed by a single leap by Hammer Bro. He then hits me and kills me with one hit even though I have full shield. And I played on Normal! I can’t imagine how this could be possible on Legendary. Someone will do probably do it, but I doubt I’ll even try.

NOTE The next section has spoilers.

The Plot (or lack thereof)

I got a lot of nostalgia recalling quotes and moments from the other games via “echoes” from Cortana. That was really nice and made me feel emotions. I heard someone say the other day that they only Halo game they played was Halo 3. That’s like only watching Return of the Jedi. There are major plot points that you’re missing out on. While the echoes were nice reminders, they’re definitely insufficient to convey the story up to that point. If you haven’t played the other games, you’re not going to understand the significance of many of these moments.

I was really hoping for something where John would sacrifice himself to take out Cortana (which kind of happened in the “lore” bit, which I’ll get to), closing out the Master Chief chapter, then Locke and team (from Halo 5) could finish out the game and perhaps continue the series. (Imagine one of the most iconic game series transferring the protagonist role to a black man!) Instead, the second trilogy doesn’t feel like a trilogy. It feels like a mush of Halo-themed incoherence, and Locke is relegated to being “just another Spartan.”

Halo 4 - John’s still alive. He didn’t die when the Ark (the giant machine that’s continually building the halo installations) is destroyed. We find out a lot of history: the flood, the Forerunners, why they built the halos. Cortana is old and becoming increasingly glitchy (common with AIs - lifespan is about seven years, and she’s eight at this point). John is basically Neo from The Matrix (the statistical eventuality who becomes the savior) and has to undergo some additional transformation by the Librarian’s ghost to be immune to digitalization (there’s a good Forerunner backstory in here that serves as the driving force for the events of the game). Cortana dies. We’re all sad.

Halo 5 - Cortana’s still alive. She didn’t die but was able to reassemble and heal herself in the Forerunner network. Realizing she can help other AIs, she calls out to all of them offering immortality by healing their corrupted code. When the humans refuse to let the AIs go, she gets mad, and we see the start of a war of independence. She still has a soft spot for John, though, who goes AWOL to find her, so the UNSC calls in Locke and team to find him. Cortana captures John to keep him “safe,” and John realizes something about the Forerunner “repairs” has done something to Cortana. Locke rescues John, and Cortana escapes with some insane Forerunner tech, but it seems John might still be able to resolve something with her. Side note: the Covenant has broken up and the Elites (Sangheili) are now rebuilding their pre-Covenant, independent society, but there seems to be some level of truce between them and the humans after the events of Halo 3.

Halo (6): Infinite - Cortana went full crazy and attacked everyone (including Earth) with her awesome Forerunner tech. There’s no mention of the other AIs. She destroyed the Brutes’ home planet, so they’re pissed at her. Halsey made a copy of Cortana with the sole purpose of deleteing the original, and John was assigned to deploy the copy. The copy was supposed to be deleted after the mission, but wasn’t. What remains of the Covenant (including the Sangheili? so much for independence, I guess) is now the Banished, led by the Brutes. The Banished manage to kill John (and a lot of other Spartans) and leave him floating in the void of space outside a ring. They team up with and eventually delete Cortana. But they didn’t quite kill John. (Game starts here.) He’s found by some random guy and powered back up. He sets out to find Cortana Copy, finds her, then proceeds with his mission without telling Copy anything about what’s going on. We (the audience) are in the dark as well. There’s a new Forerunner lady that John kills at the end, but she acts only as a final boss.

Did you see the plot in #6? It all happens before the game even starts! The game is just cleanup of the Banished (and Forerunner lady). There’s no story that unfolds while you play it, like in all the other games. Instead you just learn about stuff that already happened; stuff that John already knows (but Cortana Copy doesn’t). In the previous games, we learn about events as John does, which makes sense because we’re playing as John. In this game, we’re learning about events as Copy does, but we’re still playing as John. The perspective of the narrative is broken.

To me, this game (plot-wise) feels like Halo’s The Rise of Skywalker. It’s disconnected from the storyline and tries to fill in the gaps by producing an air of mystery to be revealed by using lore (by means of echoes from Cortana). I generally love games that use lore to reveal a mysterious past. The Metroid Prime series does this beautifully. But the way Halo: Infinite uses this literary mechanism just doesn’t work.

I also don’t understand the Forerunner lady’s role. She has no impact to the plot whatsoever (like Indiana Jones).

And where were the Forerunner enemies?!

There are major story arcs from the end of Halo 5 that remain unresolved simply because they’re completely ignored. We could have been fighting against hoards of Forerunner enemies, controlled by Cortana and her new society of immortal AIs, Brutes and other Banished, and Sangheili independents. One of the hallmarks of the previous games was that there were multiple sides fighting. The Covenant vs the humans vs the Flood. The Covenant remants vs the Sangheili vs the humans vs the Forerunners. In this game, we just have two sides: the Banished and, well, John. The plot resolution we could have had is the birth of a new race of AIs, maybe (or not) at peace with humans.

I just don’t get it. They built up so much potential with 4 and 5, then just tossed it aside and did something else, covering up the “transition” with some backstory. That’s what feels like The Rise of Skywalker to me. They might as well have had Palpatine himself show up out of nowhere to wreak some Force chaos on the Master Chief.

Summary

In the end, I think the developers, testers, designers, and artists all did an amazing job of creating a beautiful and very playable (and replayable) game.

But the writers definitely phoned this one in.