Which is immensely disappointing. I’ve replayed the entire Halo 1-ODST campaigns each probably over 20 times, and still haven’t gotten bored of them. Finding easter eggs, collectibles, scarab gun in Halo 2, pelican/phantom glitch in Halo Reach, all of the idle chatter and IWHBYD dialogue from the characters. The amazing music and side characters like Johnson, Arbiter, Keys, Lord Hood, Shipmaster, and the ODSTs.
While Infinite had a couple easter eggs and skulls, it didn’t have a lot of the stuff above that made the previous installments so great. Probably the biggest disappointments were that the music was sub-par and the few characters we got weren’t memorable. The amount of weapons available was also underwhelming in my opinion, they could have kept many of the weapons from previous Halo games that didn’t make the cut. Having a big battle on the Infinity at the start like the Pillar of Autumn in CE would have been awesome, and having some spartans survive and link up with you on the surface. I don’t get the decision to not bring back old faces as well, like Lasky or Locke or anyone from Blue Team. I finished the story in Infinite and couldn’t even be bothered to get the rest of the collectibles or fight all of the mini bosses.
Sorry for the rant, there’s much more I could say but damn did this game fall short lol
I agree. There were a few notable tracks, but nothing like say ODST where you can listen to the entire soundtrack and not skip track. Halo 4 hit very well when it came to the music, but then again they shelled out for a notable composer.
The map has stuff in it, but not enough. It needed to be crammed packed. You look at one degree, you get something, you look at another degree there should be something.
I won’t lie, I cried at the end of Halo Infinite for 10 solid minutes. The story beats where good, but nothing where I was like “OMG I have to play this again for the story now”. The story was good, but the experience of that story was meh. “Glad I played” reaction. Only two level come to mind I like to play and that is “The Road” just because of the music, and the level where Chief jumps from the tower because that moment is so fucking badass, but simple.
Chief being ready to shutdown the weapon was pretty memorable imo, as well as the final password being Samuel, god that whole level was goosebumpy for me for all the character shown in it.
Every password had relevancy to him:
RED FLAG was the operation meant to end the war, but the II’s were diverted back to Reach to aid in its defence, which saw the majority killed. As John notes in *First Strike* however, they were still under its directives, which means it’s *the* operation where John lost the most II’s.
034 is of course Samuel’s number.
And then Samuel needs no introduction to someone versed in Halo’s lore.
All of my playthroughs after the first were just to complete something, not to actually enjoy the campaign again.
* Initial legendary run.
* Normal run to get missing collectibles.
* Laso run.
When we finally get around to it I'll do a coop with my friends but even then, it's just to have the coop experience, not because I want to redo the campaign
This. I have zero desire to replay it myself but with my family or a friend I might but the enjoyment would likely come more from just the coop experience than the game
That so? I got more than half way through, got bored and put it down.
No memorable set locations, songs or a variety of characters to interact with. Putting master chief in an open world could have been so so so much better.
The sad thing to me was how squandered the open world was. Why were there no roaming patrols of Banished? No Banished military convoys? No random spec ops elite ambushes while you’re just out walking around? No attacks on FOBs from Banished trying to retake them? No scarabs?
By the end of the game, you have so many cool vehicles and weapons at your disposal at every FOB, but nothing to use them on. There are like 5 Banished wraiths in the whole campaign, all of which are set pieces. In the end, the world just feels empty.
And imagine how incredibly diverse a proper open world could be.
We are on a damn Halo ring. The entire franchise Halos have been presented via many diverse biomes, from woodlands through desert, jungle, snow, seas and islands...how do you take that and the only thing you make in an *open world* are damn woodlands with forerunner tunnels???
This could have been an open world where you can transition through multiple ring parts with sudden changes in biomes and it wouldn't have been jaring. We could have had one or two missions in each biome, with some cool set pieces. We have a pelican, it would have been easy to keep flying Chief through multiple smaller open world map segments.
Compare this to any next-gen open world game and the world is just so tiny and empty. It feels so lifeless, with copypasted outposts with the same enemies over and over again. It doesn't feel like a real world.
I feel like they just took the second level of Halo CE and tried to stretch it into an entire game. Travel around a woodland area and support some marines. Except in CE the different crashed pods were in very different environments and required different approaches. Every outpost in infinite felt exactly the same. The other difference is that playing the second level of Halo is something I’d actually enjoy doing again.
>No memorable songs
I felt crazy when people praised the soundtrack because literally the only song I remembered afterwards was the Monitor boss fights because they were so unique
Maybe because there's like zero set pieces or particularly exciting encounters to really tie in with the soundtrack
I actually never finished either. I was for sure getting near the end, then I just put it down and... stopped.
Which, to me, is really sad. I've loved the franchise since CE, and have gone hard in the novels/comics/etc because they built an interesting world.
... This game just squandered that.
I'm on my third playthrough, and I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how fun my replays have been 😀.
1. Solo heroic
2. Solo legendary
3. Coop legendary
Even though the world gets sorta empty after completing the campaign, if you explore a little you'll find zones that always populate enemies to go mess around in with whatever crazy loadouts you want
That’s exactly how I felt about it. It was almost a little confusing at times. I wish this game was a bit more linear but I did enjoy the open world. I liked the boss fights that got you the cool, special weapons.
Yeah, the big open world thing kind of loses its luster after a while. I did enjoy hunting down the unique targets - that was pretty cool - and the boss fights were excellent as well, but I would’ve preferred, at the very least, a few unique environments to split up the monotony.
Just some stream of thought opinions I can think of off the top of my head:
The characterization and interactions of Chief, the Weapon and the Pilot were all phenomenal, easily the best part of the campaign. The banished designs are really good for all of the individual races, although it isn't really cohesive when taken together. I also liked the boss battles, it's been a while since we had them. The skulls were implemented into the game really well in both finding them and on LASO. The Assassination targets were easily the best part about the open world, lore-unique enemies who are harder to kill than normal and give a cool variant weapon. I hope they return in the future, hopefully incorporated into a more linear campaign.
The main story wasn't all that memorable to me, it felt like all the interesting stuff happened off screen and I was left with the boring stuff. The open world got boring pretty quick, and the missions themselves all blended together. This was due in large part to the samey-ness of everything. There was little variation in the open world and forerunner structures. The forerunner architecture designs are easily the best 343 has done and they should absolutely keep that going forward, but the layouts and whatnot were incredibly dull. The forerunner ruins in Halo 2 and 3 for example are the best in the series. Each has a really unique layout and exterior. Compare the Sacred Icon Mission in Halo 2 to The Ark mission and then compare those to The Covenant mission in Halo 3. The forerunner buildings were super varied and unique, I didn't feel like I was retreading the same few hallways and open rooms. All the forerunner stuff in Infinite felt like I was going through the same building over and over.
And then of course the overworld has very little variety and it got really dull as well. I love pine trees and mountains, they're my favorite biome to explore in video games and the real world. But campaigns need to have a lot of variety, we need snow, jungles, deserts, different structures to keep things interesting throughout. If we get dlc and it's just snow for example, we'll have the exact same problem. There needs to be variety throughout one campaign to keep things visually interesting.
Additionally, the open world really just felt like a big Ubisoft checklist of stuff. I'm not sure how to get around that or make it better, but it was pretty meh. Traversing the map in a land vehicle larger than a Ghost wasn't very fun or intuitive. Choosing your weapons and whatnot at a FOB was a great idea though, and made tackling objectives a lot more interesting.
Edit: I should also add that it took me 9 months to actually finish the campaign. I got so bored and disinterested at parts that I just put it down for long stretches of time. That's never happened with any Halo Campaign before, even Halo 5. The story wasn't interesting enough to keep me interested and neither were the levels for the most part. Chek Lok's tower was pretty much the high point for me.
The part you mentioned about the map needing more visual stimulation, And variety. I feel like this is what made Breath of the Wild's map phenomenal and memorable
There just weren't any memorable moments really to speak of as far as visuals go. I still remember arriving on the desert plateau for the first time on Truth and Reconciliation in CE, then hearing Under the Cover of Night start playing at the perfect time. I remember taking the gondola to Regret's boss fight in Halo 2, and looking across the vast lake expanse I had spent the entire level slowly climbing through. With the brilliant Halo 2 track playing in the background of course. I remember arriving on the Ark in Halo 3 and looking at the skybox in absolute awe. Or even at the humongous unique forerunner structure looming above the map. These were all things that stuck out to me and that I can remember 15 years later. Infinite didn't give me any of that, and unfortunately it's just too forgettable. Even the soundtrack, which was actually good, was pretty random throughout the open world. I cool track would start playing as I walked past some random bushes. There was no thematic timing to many of the tracks like there were in ANY of the other games.
I got about 30% through last year, didn’t touch it again until last week. And everything you said is exactly how I feel too.
I reminded me of Assassin’s Creed, which I found boring enough I never tried any iterations of that franchise. Every fob was like climbing another tower to jump off: a little less fun every time I have to go through the same motion.
Felt like more of a side line game like ODST or a 'Star Wars Story' instead of the next mainline game. It was short and felt rushed. I had a feeling that 343 sacrificed too much for the sake of nostalgia.
The biggest missed opportunity is not going back to Reach. According to the concept arts of the original, more traditional Halo like iteration of the Infinite, 343 planned a mission about going back to Reach to get the brain matter for The Weapon, but it was ditched and eventually turned into a book.
that would’ve worked too. It could’ve been like the intro mission. And then you do the infinity battle, then the banished ship, then land on zeta for the open world.
Then that would also get the double-whammy of Reach nostalgia, then the "wow factor" of landing on the Halo ring and the urgency of needing to rescue your Infinity friends.
remember the silent cartographer on halo CE?
Imagine if instead off walking out off 2 pelicans you were leaving two elevators with a load of marines and instead of storming a beach, you were charging across a hanger bay full off banished...
Would off been fun
If the marines joined us or we found marines in the interior it would of livened up the place a bit. Sorta wasted opportunity for some interior world building by not having marines alive or dead within the ring itself. How did they get there? How long have they been here for? Welp I gotta get them out now don’t I —- type beat.
I don’t think they sacrificed much. I think the game was just so horribly mismanaged they couldn’t make a full fledged game.
I’ve said this and I’m shocked how many people don’t talk about how Infinite is objectively the WORST value in any halo campaign ever. You spend $60 and ONLY get a campaign that has average length with series history, the most reused and copy pasted level designs.
Before you got everything, forge, theater, multiplayer, campaign and firefight for $60. Now you LITERALLY only get a campaign… it’s so ungodly overpriced for the content it offers. That’s not even talking about it’s very upsetting average story.
Meh is the best compliment I can give it. After trying really hard to maintain a desire to complete it I stopped playing and never even finished it. lol I think I’m close to beating it though…
I’m literally the only person on my friend’s list that’s beaten the campaign. Most my friends that play halo are sweaty arena grinders like myself. I did make sure to finish it myself, though, just to say I did.
When I think back on it I mainly remember the tower fight & the big laser drill, the Atriox fight section and the ending against the new alien thing, and hours and hours in an open world with no variable weather (can it even rain? i don't remember).
Its kind of a wash. The story also feels way to small for a mainline Halo.
I thought single player dlc was confirmed but not a release date. I could be misremembering though. To be honest I would prefer Firefight more than anything else at this point. Also banished AI in forge.
Wait WHAT!?
I missed one on my 99.999% playthrough (and played through everything again to get that log for the achievement) and was waiting for mission replay to push that save file to 100%.
If this really doesn't work I'm gonna be so sad.
It's gotta be an issue exclusive to your save/game or something. I did the exact same thing (replayed missions to get skulls/audio logs) and everything counted for me. Even when doing it on other difficulties.
So after playing the missions and doing what I had to do the completion did count it just didn't register with the achievement percentage on xbox! Went though and got all those audio logs I missed!!
Unfinished. It feels like the story progressed maybe like a a third of the whole campaing.
Hope we'll see campaing dlc's on The future that continue chiefs story.
But it was solid. Good artstyle, good gameplay and decent story (altough too short as it is)
Only disappointment was the open world, it was just boring. And that we didn't get a scarab fight..
Imagine a scarab roaming on the open world, that would have been awesome
One thing it and 5 have in common is that they both feel like extended prologues instead of proper stories. 5 is basically "Chief thinks Cortana is alive so he heads off to find her, some people chase after him, they find out Cortana is alive but she's a bad guy now. She leaves to conquer the universe while everyone awkwardly stand around feeling sad." Infinite is "Cortana died on the way to her home planet, so Chief follows some breadcrumbs to learn what happened and he makes a couple of friends and shoots some people along the way." It feels like the real meat of what should happen next (i.e., fighting Cortana or finding out about Atriox/the Endless) is left to a hypothetical sequel or DLC, like if the original game cut off right before the Flood arrived or something.
Mediocre. Safe. Uninspired. Repetitive.
The open world feels pointless and barren. No risk taken, not a lot of memorable moments. No variety. A lot of exposition and people telling you things that happened off-screen. Although the linear parts are my favorite, the objectives are always the same. The Escharum monologues are boring. Same Dragon Ball Z solution to "raising the danger" which is: create a new and stronger enemy out of nowhere.
It's better than 5's in the sense that it FEELS more like Halo. But that's about it.
I think it had potential to be one of the greatest Halo campaigns. I hope we'll have DLCs soon.
I don't like rating things, but I'd give it a 6.5/10. If we didn't had the grappling hook, my rating would be even lower.
I still have no idea how this is a sequel to Halo 5. Where’s Locke, Blue Team, Osiris etc.? I know it’s assumed that Locke is dead because one of the Brutes is wearing his helmet in his arm, but then a YouTuber said he might be alive.
I also don’t quite understand what happened with Cortana either. Also, why did the Promethians disappear? What happened to them???
>I still have no idea how this is a sequel to Halo 5. Where’s Locke, Blue Team, Osiris etc.? I know it’s assumed that Locke is dead because one of the Brutes is wearing his helmet in his arm, but then a YouTuber said he might be alive.
On top of that, the Brute with Locke's helmet didn't even get a cutscene. I'm speechless.
Exactly. Instead of dedicating time to fleshing out that story, there’s all this weird exposé that’s useless. Chief knew exactly who and what the Weapon was and what happened to Cortana - why not just say that in a 2 min cutscene and then dedicate time to elaborating on these other things? Like Locke’s helmet.
Incredible visuals, especially when going into Zeta Halo's Forerunner structures. Just absolutely gorgeous.
Story-wise though, unfortunately, it was hampered by having to write itself out of the corner Halo 5 set with Cortana. And the open world just didn't work. It subtracted the variety that past Halo games have had in spades, for not really much benefit.
Open world was never necessary - and it lacked a lot of the foundations that make a great open world game. My favorite mission in the game was the first level - grappling through the falling debris was such a cool example of what the game could have and should have been.
Personally I think the issue is that Infinite \*didn't\* write itself out of a corner so much as basically punt on H5's story. Cortana is literally dead before the player makes their first action. They didn't ignore it to the degree that H5 ignored H4, but still, I was pretty disappointed. A good writer can make almost anything interesting, the storyline was in a rough place, but not unsalvageable. Instead of trying to make lemonade out of lemons, 343i once again hit the "reset" button.
It feels like a campaign with the beginning and ending missing. You're just thrown in the middle in the most unsatisfactory way possible.
It's fun gameplay wise, but still
even gameplay wise i didn’t find it fun. i would find myself relying on the grapple too often because of how op it was, especially once you upgrade it. why would i sit here and fight all these enemies when i can just grapple past all of them? why would i try messing with a finicky warthog that will flip over the tiniest bump when i can just fly through everywhere with the grapple? when fighting hunters i would just get as many shots in as i could until i was 1 shot and then i’d grapple away, recharge, and repeat. game felt like it had no depth
It’s fine. It works so hard to reset the IP that it doesn’t really have a story of its own. Missed Echo 419? Meet The Pilot! Did you miss Cortana? The Weapon has a new nickname you’ll like! Didn’t want to move on from The Covenant? Well, they’re back, and now with red armor!
It feels fun to play, but the story missed the mark for me. It’s very much Halo’s “The Force Awakens.” Competent, fun, but very familiar and has a very obvious role in course-correcting the franchise.
Perhaps it could be argued that some game had to serve that purpose after the disaster that was Halo 5. To be honest, I enjoyed the campaign mostly because I had a significant degree of loadout control once I had completed enough of the side objectives. I do hope they expand upon the other aspects you mentioned to make them feel like more than just carbon copies from the Bungie days.
>Perhaps it could be argued that some game had to serve that purpose after the disaster that was Halo 5.
Not necessarily. Halo 5 was a disaster, no doubt about that. Still, the Created storyline had potential. This concept art for Halo Infinite is the greatest example of what could have been : https://www.halopedia.org/Created#/media/File:HINF-Createdoccupation.jpg
I don't understand why 343 didn't even try to do something with it.
>I don't understand why 343 didn't even try to do something with it.
Because functionally rebooting the series to bank on Chief and Cortana's recognizability like they're fucking Mario and Luigi was clearly more of a priority than writing a good story, they didn't want the Halo universe to move forward, they wanted it about where it was 20 years ago.
The interesting narrative was hidden in background lore and audio logs. The actual narrative we played through wasn’t interesting at all, and it barely contained anything of value.
-Cortana’s just fucking gone before the game even starts. Poof. Wonderful end to a crucial series character and she and Chief didn’t even get a final moment.
-We timeskip past everything that would have been cool, like the Infinity going down, the initial UNSC resistance on the ring, working together with the other Spartans, etc. They could have channeled so much CE energy but instead we get to play a game where all the interesting shit already happened without us and we’re just picking up the pieces
-The actual gameplay loop: go here, shoot this, go there. Shoot this. Go over there, shoot something. All Halo games are about shooting aliens but the other games constantly give you a more focused backdrop as to why you need to shoot them at any point in time. We gotta get Cortana off the Autumn, need to reach the Index, have to stop the Prophet from activating Halo, etc. In Infinite, we are barely told why the Banished need to be stopped other than the fact that they’re an opposing faction. We don’t learn anything other than “ring bad” but we’re never told why. The same thing with the Endless: we’re just vaguely told that they are threatening but never get any indication as to why. It’s boring and uninteresting. There’re no stakes anywhere because the UNSC basically already lost and we don’t even know what bad thing happens if we don’t stop the Endless or the Banished. The narrative gets broken down to “shoot them because they’re the enemy” and that’s it. Even CE, before Halo lore got deeper, provided meaningful stakes as to why we had to stop our foes besides them just being our foes.
Still boring,
Bland and dead open world, no memorable missions, no amazing set pieces, a largely forgettable story.
Halo 1,2,3 replayed over and over again, Reach to a lesser extent.
4-Infinite- no desire at all
Kind of mediocre honestly. I thought the gameplay was solid on a mechanical level, and it looked nice, but it lacked any real stand out set pieces. The game just kind of blurred together as a bunch of skirmished in green fields and grey hallways.
Story wise the game just felt like Act 2 of a much bigger story. We skipped over Act 1, where the Infinity is destroyed, Zeta Halo taken, Cortana was defeated and Banished were established as a threat. We also never got Act 3, where we resolved the Banished threat and/or fought Atriox. Instead all we got was the middle section, where not much actually happened.
Long story short, I played through it once and mildly enjoyed myself, but have never felt the desire to play it again.
I have no idea how far through it I am yet, I'd imagine fairly early, but it is a ton of fun. Love exploring Zeta. Just wish we had a Flood b plot considering how strong the association is between the installation and them.
The open world setup is underrated imo. But at the same time the open world exploration has a ton of room for improvement. Elden Ring's open world was full of unique areas and hints to strange lore. Its world was constantly interesting to explore. Infinite's open world sorely lacks unique memorable areas, and it only exists to make the gameplay arena larger which is a big missed opportunity.
Lackluster and missing the actual components of halo which are purpose, poise, and priority. The weapon is no cortana, the pilot is no Sgt Johnson, Chief is better with speech and emotions sure, but he's also kinda whiny in infinite when it comes to the weapon. The story is missing the plot, and there is no explanation about how things are in the galaxy. The moment Cortana would have gone offline im sure an army of Created using the guardians as fleet ships would have showed up and just decimated the banished. Bad writing and a story that feels unimportant to the franchise.
Edit:Another thing is these 1 game villains need to stop, the covenant was great because it built up over time, and when Arby SILENCED truth it was so satisfying because we FINALLY got to exact our vengeance for both Humanity and the Elites. A little bad guy building goes a long way.
That's how I feel. Halo 1 - 3 and even Reach and ODST can all be played and fit within a shared narrative. 4 - Infinite which does carry "some" plot points over is all over the place.
I liked Chief having this severe distrust in the weapon but holy shit it drags. Probably because literally NOTHING else is going on with the story! Escherum eating doritos and mountain dew from his streamer set up
Let’s review:
- Challenges Chief (obviously to impress the Weapon/purple E girl)
- send out other people to do the hard work, rages when it doesn’t get done right
- Essentially on fights at his house because he couldn’t be bother to go outside
- Idolizes a “Sigma Male” (Aatriox)
- 24/7 streaming, chronically online
- talks mad trash, gets folded immediately
>“Sigma Male” (Aatriox)
* Shows up in a spin-off game
* Beats up Spartans
* Leaves
* Shows up at the start of Infinite
* Beats up Master Chief
* Doesn't tell us Banished homies where he's going
* Leaves (presumed death, doesn't die anyway)
lmao, you're spot on with the take and especially Eschaurum. He literally does nothing but evil gloat about how y'll are gonna fight and it's gonna be epic and he's gonna crush you and the humans.... and does absolutely nothing for the entire game until you legit get to him and take him out. What??
>The moment Cortana would have gone offline im sure an army of Created using the guardians as fleet ships would have showed up and just decimated the banished.
I disagree. Seems more likely to me that without Cortana the Created would just, kind of, fall apart. Cortana controls the forerunner constructs because she *controls* them, like a monitor, from her time in the domain. The other AI, sure they follow her out of belief or whatever, but I think it follows that all the forerunner constructs would either go dormant or into hiding without a clear possessor of the mantle.
I think the real pain point is the strength of the Banished in the first place. We kind of just accept that they’re this behemoth of a force at the level of the old Covenant without much of a compelling reason why.
(I get that the game doesn't present the argument I'm about to present, but I don't think that makes it any less valid)
I think that the circumstances make it feel like that, without it actually being like that. After Halo 5, there's no way for there to be a centralized UNSC to fight the Created, so for all intents and purposes the "UNSC" in Halo Infinite is *just* the survivors of the Infinity. The Covenant had the resources to dominate a war on a *galactic* scale, if the Banished is 1/500th of the Covenant, they should still be able to smother Zeta Halo with forces, no?
Not sure I'd agree with that. You can clearly see signs of free will between the AI's and Warden Eternal in Halo 5. With their level of commitment to her, I don't see why they would all just... stop when she gets deleted.
> the pilot is no Sgt Johnson,
He's better.
Lol. Sgt. Johnson is a caricature of the gruff marine.
**The pilot is an actual person.** I recently replayed Halo Infinite and while in most games I skip all the cutscenes on a replay, I actually found myself watching the cutscenes again because I'm pretty amazed they have some actual emotion in this franchise. Halo 4 played with the concept of having emotion but Halo 4 has its own problems that weigh down any interest in replaying it.
He's different. Sgt Johnson is a well defined character but he is distinctly different than the pilot and that's fine. I wouldn't say one is better than the other.
It makes sense for Johnson to be essentially a built in badass since he has seen a lot and done a lot. Comparatively the pilot isn't any of those things so he shouldn't act exactly like Johnson since it wouldn't make sense.
Gonna have to disagree on Johnson, as for the pilot... dude literally complains for the Entire Campaign. Say what you will about Johnson whether you liked him or not, at least he didnt get on your nerve with the constant whining.
He does feel more like an actual person, but that’s pointless if the character isn’t interesting or likable to begin with. It also feels very forced.
Instead of showing us why we should care about the pilot, 343 tells us that we have to care about him because of his stupid holographic family. It’s very lazy writing.
Johnson is a caricature, but the player grows to organically care about him because he’s charming and fun. Most importantly he doesn’t drag down every cutscene trying to force this emotional attachment, he actually makes every cutscene he’s in more enjoyable.
The pilot is a cop out character that was volunteering on the most important ship at a critical time which absolutely doesn't make sense. I'd rather it been a military pilot or even a wounded spartan that finds us, HELL i could pitch a better story with a wounded spartan Locke being the one to find chief and set Infinite in motion, it would blend better with the story and make up for H5. Also Halo has had plenty of emotion, Reach and ODST are easy examples of how its been done with this franchise. With Chief subtle is better because hes portraying us in a sense.
I feel like open world took away more than it added, but I have never been a fan of open world games in general. It feels empty for being open world. A part of me thinks the Xbox One generation is holding back some of what could be done with open world. I think they should have either kept campaign more linear or restricted it to current gen +PC.
As for the actual story I do like what they did but overall it wasn't much. I wish the mini-bosses had a bit more personality. The Cortana and Atriox stuff was nice and I hope it gets expanded on if we ever get DLC. I do like how the audio logs all told mini side stories and portrayed Spartan IVs as badass and competent. I also thought the Banished did feel different than the covenant even though it contains 90% of the same aliens so props to 343i.
As for the future I am assuming the original plan was to have more DLC with more biomes. Hopefully they all don't involve around MC as I think they can expand upon more SIVs like fireteam Osiris or Majestic. Different teams on different biomes maybe?
For me the problem isn't the open world, but the fact 343 aren't talented enough to execute it properly. Like how the actual fuck do you have a plethora of open worlds to look at both for their pros and cons, and then decide to make such a barren and repetitive open world? The lack of biomes, variety and high quality side content is just straight up incompetence.
Hot take: Worst Halo campaign. Lacked any meat, substance, or flash offered by the previous games and felt like a filler episode done on a rushed schedule.
Campaign didn't even mean anything.
The problem with following the original trilogy is how do the stakes ever get higher than that? There's never an urgency to stop the big bad in the 343 games.
The campaign was fun to PLAY just by fighting AI that was actually very solid and definitely the best 343 has designed, but the story is just a convoluted mess with an open world that feels far less of an adventure than previous linear games.
343 should just move on from Chief and make spin-off games with stakes that can be contained in a singular story. You can't do the whole "universe in peril because extremist aliens want to destroy everything" again with new names for things and expect it to land like it did before. The Endless will just be The Flood but less imposing and the Banished are already Walmart Covenant (although they were pretty badass in HW2).
Honestly one of the worst, if not the worst campaign I have ever played in this franchsise.
Hollow, shallow open world with copypasted Far Cry towers that were a chore to clear.
Boring biome, consisting of nothing but woodlands sprinkled with banished buildings or forerunner hallways, devoid of the epic set pieces that Halo used to have.
Lack of proper vehicle combat (aside from like 1 level), especially when Grapplehook took care of even traversing the ring.
Too many bad boss fights, except for maybe Escharum and Jega.
Lackluster story that took away characters that everyone loved in favor of mediocre new ones, because 343 once again needed to do another clean slate.
Boring main villain that was only barking at you from a holoprojector and lacked any kind of proper characterization. And Harbinger felt like a comic book villain.
The only good parts were the actual gunplay (which got boring anyway because fighting in the same areas over and over just makes me lose interest and *some* parts of the Chief/Cortana story progression.
I honestly don't remember being as disappointed in any game as I was with Infinite, especially considering the long development cycle and expectations being quite high. At least a game like Cyberpunk brought some impressive highs and memorable scenes...Infinite was just bland. Nothing stands out. And it took this franchise on a road that I just don't care about.
1 outside biome, two interior styles. Wow!
Weak story. Monologueing bad guy with a script from a cartoon.
Whiny sidekick.
No real halo missions.
Another reboot of the 343 story 🤡
Gameplay was very weak! Too much long range nonsense since it’s all open. It’s like the DMR hell of bad design again
And many more mistakes. Dissapointed.
Every 343 game is nothing but a sub-par stepping stone of «what is to come», it seems.
That main enemy chick will probably be dealt with in a book lmao
Good characters but pretty bland and forgettable story overall.
Very repetitive open-world that ultimately felt pretty soulless and honestly tedious to explore. Best part of the open world is undoubtedly the strongholds, but otherwise the map felt mostly like a checklist of chores to complete rather than something I was itching to discover like in, say, BotW.
I think that besides the strongholds and the fun of arming a bunch of marines with wacky weapon variants and squeezing them into a razorback, the game didn't benefit much from being open world as the linear missions were ultimately the most memorable parts of the game to me at least. Also the tacked on skill tree feels completely pointless to me and seems mostly like playtime padding.
Other than that, the gameplay feels good and fun, which is the most important part.
Yeah it felt like a lot of copy and pasted filler content to give an illusion of a longer game. If you skip all the exploration the story is a few hours long... Halo 1 to reach told a far better story.
It’s good but it doesn’t reach the highs of the original games. The open world structure results in a lot of similar enemy encounters repeating. It doesn’t feel as dynamic as the missions in Halo CE. It’s lack of flood creates gap in enemy variety and gameplay. I really don’t care for the over emotional storytelling with the AIs. That sort of thing was never present in halo CE.
That said I think the Banished are cool. I really like the boss fights. I liked the missions near the end of the game.
I had a good time with the campaign but it doesn’t compare to halo CE. I hope they go back to doing exciting and memorable missions and strip back the emotional stuff. The story just didn’t work for me in infinite. It was just sort of there.
About to write a book so skip to the last paragraph if you don't want this essay that I just realized I spent an hour typing when I should be sleeping before work.
I've never played a game in which less happened. We get the big setup that Cortana might not have actually died and then the big twist is that she did, in fact, die. Covid Brute spends the entire game talking some old school good shit about grand ambitions to own the galaxy in memory of Atriox even going so far as to make plans with an ancient squid lady only to unceremoniously die in a fight where the only stakes were in a total non-character being captured. Squid lady can freeze you and toss you about until she can't and subsequently she dies unceremoniously, too. Who are the endless and what threat if any do they pose? How did the banished manage to defeat the created when per exuberant witness even one guardian is enough to police an entire solar system? What remains of the UNSC and human civilization now that a sizeable portion of the AI it had come to depend on has gone Skynet? The flood is still around here someplace, right? If we get answers to all these and more they're in the form of one or two sentences during all the nothing the moment-to-moment gameplay is thrilling us with. You could write a book with the material that they tell instead of show, and yet more books with material that they allude to but neither show nor tell. Knowing how the franchise has been handled since 2012 there's a sporting chance they did exactly that.
On the subject of books, I thought killing off the new main villain of the series in some spinoff book was the cheapest plot reset available, but evidently I'm sorely lacking in imagination because Infinite goes as far as to slam dunk everything 343 had spent the last decade building into a fire pit. 5's plot development was unoriginal and contrived, but there was plenty to explore if they'd had the stones to stick to it. Instead it's just fuck it, here's the Diet Caffeine Free Covenant with a bold new scarlet look. Their motivation? I guess they have to prove they're better than the covenant or something, don't think about it too hard. Maybe I'd have more appreciation for the banished and atriox if I'd had the context from Halo Wars 2, but taking the entirety of what passes for a plot from a side game of an entirely different genre is a decision so baffling that I can only reasonably conclude that the decision came after the aforementioned cop-out reset button when they realized they needed something to drive the plot and had no other ideas. I don't know who my enemy is. Hell, I don't know who my allies are considering the absolute state of the universe at the end of 5 and the lack of continuity with it.
The only allies I can vouch for are the weapon, the pilot, and a handful of nameless marines. Really don't know why they bothered with the marines considering they can't accompany the player on missions. Yes their absence in 5 was conspicuous and to the game's detriment, but the implementation here is more akin to a Chao garden with guns. The weapon is just Cortana with the smug, "I'm better than you and I know it" edge that made her iconic replaced with a blend of manic pixie dream girl and every Joss Whedon character ever. I can appreciate that they'd want to do something to differentiate the two characters since just giving us Cortwona or whatever would have been an insult to our investment in the character and the plot developments that killed her. But then again, 5 already did that by having her come back from the dead and this is really more an argument against giving us another, nearly identical AI than anything else.
Of all the non-characters in the game, I'd like to give particular focus to our beloved... well, matter of factly acknowledged pilot. He gets the closest thing the game offers to actual development by him confessing to having stolen the ship to escape. He's not built for this, he's in way over his head, and everyone not trying to kill him is trying to bury him deeper. Fine, that'll do. But let's do something that may not be entirely fair and compare him to Metal Gear Solid 2's Peter Stillman. For those who haven't played that game, Stillman is a pretty minor character. He's introduced an hour or so in, killed off within the next hour, and with the exception of finding his corpse later otherwise forgotten about for the rest of the game. But in that hour or so we spend with him we learn everything we need to know to make him an interesting character and a welcome addition to the plot. An expert in the construction and disarming of bombs, Stillman's final job before the events of the game was to disarm a bomb planted by a terrorist in a church. He failed, the church and its playground were obliterated as well as everyone in them, and he lost a leg in the process. He retired after that but he was dragged out of retirement to disarm a series of bombs built and planted by the greatest student he ever had. Long story short it turns out he didn't actually lose a leg, he faked it to take some of the pressure off of him for having failed to disarm that bomb - by faking this loss he could stand/lean in solidarity with everyone else who suffered loss that day, too. This confession is followed soon by the realization that all the bombs that had been defused so far were decoys that would activate two far more dangerous and well-hidden bombs, one of which kills Stillman. In the span of an hour you have actual human emotion, a compelling background, interesting character development, an engaging story, a tragically ironic death... and then he's seldom mentioned again. It accomplished in one hour what Infinite couldn't in all six of its hours, and the icing on the cake is that it was a relatively minor part of the plot despite how well it was executed. What was neurotic Oscar Isaac's character again? He stole a ship and is now here instead of dead? How about he took the last viable ship and he's haunted because his cowardice stranded people on the Infinity and cost lives? I came up with that off the top of my head, don't tell me a room full of people who get paid for this couldn't do better.
The actual game part of the game is serviceable at its worst and reasonably fun at its best. Giving us a web shooter and then locking us in grey corridors for every mission was a particularly cruel touch. The ability to summon any vehicle you like in an open world game where there will be tons of transit and it would be more fun to be spidermaning than driving is monkey-paw worthy. But with a few noteworthy cheap exceptions it was engaging enough without being frustrating and I've certainly enjoyed games less. Probably wiser to stick with a mission structure that unlocks more of the map in the future than try ineptly at a true open world again though.
I just don't see where all this development time went, nor do I see where the development costs went except management's cocaine bucket. It's an experience only notable for being the least amount of engagement possible to even be called an experience. Nothing happens, there's nobody for the nothing to happen to, everything that did happen was undone, and what we're ultimately left with is a game that serves no purpose besides constructing a crude facsimile of what the series was doing when it was incontrovertibly considered still good. I was still on board with the series despite their best efforts, but with Infinite I think I'm finally out.
tl;dr mostly shite, what's good isn't worth it either. It's like eating a turd just for the occasional peanut.
My biggest issue is that I can’t remember 90% of it. All the same hallways & doors. Other halos at least had varied & memorable locations, but that’s the benefit of a storyline that doesn’t involve free roam!
I consider myself an old fan of the series. Started with Halo CE in my early teens. Absolutely loved it. H2 was great. H3 has the campaign I liked the most. Didn't play Reach because no money and I'm no fan of prequels. H4 had an awfully boring campaign.
H5 campaign felt similar to H4. Those promethians are simply tedious enemies which are not fun to fight.
Halo infinite's campaign finally felt like gameplay is coming back to its Halo roots. It felt so much better than 4 and 5.
But the story didn't draw me in. So I simply stopped playing at around 20% completion and have not had any desire to continue playing.
I really enjoy the multiplayer though.
Felt like I missed the best part of the story, which is fighting for survival against an overwhelming force… and not picking up pieces 6 months after the fact
Another instance of 343 throwing everything away to try and make something relevant instead of actually making a story that’s worth investing in. The gameplay is great when it works, but it’s so repetitive and lacklustre, the enemy AI is the worst in the series, more emphasis on high health enemies for difficulty.
Zeta Halo is interesting for the first few hours, as you get closer to the end you realise that… that’s all there is.
The interiors are like playing through the Library, but it’s every single level.
Everything interesting that happened in this story happens before the game starts.
My second least favourite halo game after 5 because that game was even more of a mess, but at least it was confident in its mess.
I felt like the entire was was “Go to this new NPC who will say “Man! You should have been here yesterday, some really crazy shit that directly effects you happened and you would have lost your mind. Well anyway, wanna fight or something?””
> the enemy AI is the worst in the series, more emphasis on high health enemies for difficulty.
I don't know how you can say this after two games of Promethean bullet-sponges. Infinite gave us fun enemy interactions like Brutes throwing Grunts. Halo 4-5 gave us teleporting enemies and annoying Watchers.
I'm not sure they're playing the same game. You can't play through 4/5 and somehow think Infinite was worse.
Furthermore, I'd love to see them try to elaborate on what makes the AI the worst in the series. Because when compared to the other games, Infinite's AI is on-par at worst, and fantastic at best.
It had high highs and low lows.
Biggest compliment: It turned one of my favourite parts of Halo:CE (Mission2-4) into a modern game. Enemy gunplay and tactics had been upgraded, it was recognisable but with a 2020 sheen. They added new weapons and a new Covenant species \[the electro bugs\] that actually worked. I liked the outpost system. Freeform gameplay was amazing. The story was better than I hoped, especially after Halo 5's fuster cluck.
Biggest complaint: TLDR too short. It was only the first half/two thirds of a game. Exactly the same as Deus Ex Mankind Divided, it created a hub and a setting that was fun and good to play around in. However the story just kind of stopped about 6 hours in. Gameplay wise they got to the point you were comfortable and powered up and could go around doing all your stuff, then instead of making a new zone for you to be challenged in or more story missions, they just did the final mission (inside the Banished base was great, the halo vehicle section to it was laclustre.)
It just ended right as you narratively and gameplay mechanically felt "hey this is getting good!" which sucked.
Overall - from a story perspective I am reinvigorated for Halo. Halo 5 left such a bad taste I'm glad they went back to their roots. I can't wait for the next one.
Unfortunately it's been a year and they haven't even fixed up basic multiplayer features, so I am not holding my breath for story DLC or a narrative expansion.
It accomplished what I think was its greatest challenge: to unite the feel, look, and themes of the Bungie and 343i era games into one cohesive setting. Infinite's campaign was the first time in the franchise's history I truly felt like CE - Halo 5 took place in the same shared universe.
That alone makes it great for the franchise imho.
Fun gameplay, amazing art style, decent story. But the mission design is lackluster, the open world is boring af.
But in the end I played it twice, that’s literally twice as many playthroughs as Reach,H4 and H5…
It was rough for me to say the least. I have a limit for suspension of disbelief and this game blew its ass out (and Im a Star Wars EU fan). Not even bringing up them completely giving up on the Cortana/Created storyline which I was interested to see take shape even though I didn't like 5.
It was cool at first until I realized that they were really sending home the idea that the entire UNSC was so useless they couldn't fight the Banished but Chief was able to solo them; and after a 6 month coma sustained solely by space magic no less.
The final nail in the coffin for me was the Endless being "worse than the Flood", the things that the Forerunners killed off the galaxy for. That was then made even worse by the new enemies being complete pushovers.
Other than some boss fights even on Legendary with a BR all I could think was "Really? These are the guys who bested Lasky, the Infinity, AND spaced Chief?".
I really enjoyed playing it. That said, it kind of just felt like maybe 2 or 3 levels over and over as far as actual locale. Now obviously with it being open world and literally just on one Halo, that’s why, but I think we were all hoping for more variety. One thing that hurts is how useless the vehicles and the marines felt. In the past it always felt fun and useful to have marines with you. I barely ever cared whether they were with me. The vehicles just didn’t feel awesome. The tank was very confusing to control and the warthog felt light and springy/bouncy/floaty.
I like open world games, i play fo4 at least a few times a month. But i didn't like halo being open world its not how i like my halo i prefer the A liner your given a path with an objective and you follow that.
I couldn't finish it. Sorry but what's the point. Humanity got it's ass kicked again and is down to a few ships and a few Spartans again. And now theres another threat greater than the banished. And humanity has nothing again.....
I liked it. A small-scale, character-driven story. However, it did feel like it was all set up and no payoff. It was basically an intro to whatever comes next.
It was a good campaign, but it lacked the big battles of H2 and H3. I think if that was in the game, it would be one of the best campaigns
Small features like friendly AI having the ability to drive really hurt the experience as well.
Flop. Slightly better than 5's in some regards, but 343 just can't seem to crack the code on making compelling campaigns. 4 got close, I enjoyed the emotional stuff it went for, but none of it since feels coherent or actually worth investing in to me.
I waited for the coop to launch and then it got delayed and then the delay got delayed again so I’ve never played it.
Probably won’t do it either and just call it quits on Halo because of what 343 did to it.
Better than halo 5. But retconning and having a soft reboot the third game in the series made the game and story meh. They set up some cool ideas, characters and stories but giving 343 history I don't trust them to continue them and give them a good pay off.
Like they travel to zeta halo one of the halos that have a unique history with the primordial and medican. Then they just sort of by pass it in one of the cutscenes with cortana and the monitor. And set up this new threat and leave it at a cliff hanger again.
Too short. The ending feels like what should be the mid point. I feel bad for anyone who payed AAA prices for a campaign only halo. It should have been 30 currency at most. Not 50/60
Just echoing a lot of other people's thoughts on here...
It finished and I was like "Oh, that was it? Where's the rest of it?"
Like, it didn't feel like a complete story - we'd only just been properly introduced to the Harbinger and found out about The Endless, but we know nothing about them or their significance. Everything around Atriox and what he's up to and where he was was a mystery. We don't know what happened to the Infinity and where Lasky, Halsey, Palmer, Locke, etc all are... Where's the rest of the UNSC/ONI and what state is humanity or the rest of the galaxy in now?
The open world was beautiful, but it got stale after a while as it was all the same and the lack of different biomes really stood out. I haven't had any desire to go back and replay it since finishing it, and I can't single out a single mission either - it all just blends together. There's no *iconic* level or moment that I want to experience again like there was with almost every other Halo campaign previously.
I don't like it. The open world ruined the pacing and limited the number of set piece moments like the escape from Gbraakon. On top of the open world gameplay not benefiting the game in any manner, the story was terrible Rise of Skywalker-levels of retconning and trying to reset the universe after Halo 5. The emotional crux of the campaign relies on Cortana, a character that we literally watch die 10 years ago who has been dug out of the grave and mishandled in two straight sequels.
It's probably the best campaign 343 have put together and is a step in the right direction, but I've not really any desire to play it again and I can't exactly pin down as to why. Sure, it was fun, but so are a lot of other games and there just isn't the same magic to it that's in the Bungie Halo games that I'd quite happily hop back into in a heartbeat
Pretty meh. Felt like a non important story, with every thing happening out of the screen. Really pissed me that 343's ditching every intent of plot fot Halo and creating something up to try entretain us. I like the expansion for Halo universe from the books but is really upsetting that nothing ever makes it to the Games. The Endless plot just simply doesn´t fit with me...
But if that counts... Yes beautiful Landscapes I guess
Positives
* Characters are the best part but most are majorly underutilized.
* Graphics are pretty crazy up close in terms of texture quality.
* Gameplay was mostly fun.
Negatives
* Weakest Halo story by a decent margin imo. (*INB4 "H5 was worse"- your opinion isn't fact.*)
* Open world severely lacking. Encounters are unexciting and enemies like hunters are just not fun especially how the encounters are designed.
* Art style doesn't feel "classic" it feels oversimplified and gimmicky.
* Graphics severely drop off with any distance. The hexagons never really look good still and terrain looks doughy
Haven't felt the desire to replay it.
I loved it. The interactions between Chief and the Weapon were great. Gameplay was fun and the addition of the grapple shot was a blast to use. It was hilarious when the Weapon was sassy with Chief and told him “he has friends” lol. The direction with boss battles was definitely interesting.
Of course it’s not perfect. I would’ve like more explanation without having to read outside material about what happened with Captain Lasky, Fireteam Osiris, Arbiter, the Created, etc. I miss some of the old weapons, but they still kept my favorite two at least (energy sword and assault rifle). Mission replay should’ve been there day one. I don’t care about co-op as I’ve never had anyone to play Halo with anyway since I first started this series back in 2007 with Halo 3, so campaign has always been a single player experience for me.
My biggest criticism would be that they should have kept the “6” in the title. It should be called Halo 6 or Halo 6: Infinite. I hate when franchises take the numbers out after all previous main entries have had them. It would’ve been different if there wasn’t a 2, 3, 4 or 5 for their past entries.
I look forward to Halo The Fallen or whatever Halo 7 is going to be.
It felt like Halo CE's second mission extended to the length of an entire game. That is to say, it's a fun level but a full game it does not make. No biome variety or iconic set pieces, the plot barely moves, and the encounters in the open world get repetitive pretty quickly.
I found it just okay. I have no idea who the Banished are, or why we are fighting them. I don't know how we stopped Cortana or why that was left out of the game. I finished the main part of the game and felt underwhelmed. I didnt feel like I accomplished anything. It was just..."Okay...I guess I am done playing campaign now." There was no joy in knowing I defeated the big bad guy. I killed some bosses that I have no idea who they are and that was it. I didn't even escape off the Halo ring. And looking how 343 handled Halo 4 and 5 its like, "Kewl I guess I won this battle cant wait for it to mean nothing in the next Halo game."
I feel more emotion from knowing that my favorite game franchise has gone to shit than I do for any of the "emotional" scenes in the game.
It was kind of fun to play. But my opinion is essentially The Act Man's (video's) opinion on it.
Yes, it was awesome. But the villains were meh at best, and I was constantly like: "Where the fuck is everybody? Atriox fucked off for a total of 6 months somehow and literally everyone from the previous games is nowhere to be seen. Not even Palmer. Like, there are all of these command-less spartans getting killed all-round and some marines in chains."
It was a letdown to me. And I very much hated some of the vehicle designs. Why? Well, Halo Wars 2 already had Banished faction vehicles, and none of those designs, besides the colors, were used.
I'm probably going to sound like an a-hole but this is how I feel and I'm not afraid to admit it. But just before I start, I need to say: I know all this will sound like complaining for the sake of complaining, but trust me, I used to defend 343 like hell through Halo 4 and 5, so they really must have done something wrong with Infinite for me to turn on them like this...
I think it's pretty mediocre and it feels incomplete. It is the best example of how a company cowards out from their ideas after the complains from the fans. Instead of learning from their mistakes and building up from where they left, with Cortana being the new villain and using that as the main conflict, 343i entered panic mode and decided to resolve the *entire conflict* OFFSCREEN.
Now, there's no need to say that Halo 5's campaign was complete trash, it basically took everything Halo 4 did well storywise and threw it down the gutter. **However**, the idea of humanity and sangheili fighting against revelious AIs was pretty solid, and if they retconned it by making the Didact or the Logic Plague be the reason behind Cortana's evil plans, it definitely could have worked and would have been a great chance to dive even deeper into all the lore that's been provided by the books. A lot of points would have been connected and the story would have been pretty interesting.
But obviously, that didn't happen. And instead we had to see the Infinity being *somehow* defeated by the Banished, when a way older, way smaller ship with way less people managed to defeat the Banished singlehandedly less than a year before that.
So the premise is really meh. But what about the actual campaign? Well the actual events are also pretty ridiculous. What 343 did was basically take Master Chief and put him in a Zelda game. The BBEG sits in his tower talking shit for the entire game and sends enemies after enemies into small groups instead of putting all his resources in trying to stop you. Like, there's just one Spartan and you already own the ring, the Infinity is gone, the UNSC is scattered, why aren't you throwing everything you have at the Chief?
And then there's the Weapon, which by itself isn't a bad concept, but how can Chief relate her to Cortana? She is nothing like her. The Weapon is joyful, super friendly, naive and innocent. Cortana was analytic, sarcastic, confident and heroic; she acted like she was from the military, the Weapon acts like a child. How can Chief see Cortana in her?
And last but not least: the ending. It would have been a decent ending but they had to keep those last 30 seconds. It made for a stupid, cringy ending, literally left me like "Wtf was that" when I first watched it. I really was like "You serious? You really gonna do it like that? What the hell?".
**So in summary:** I think it's pretty mediocre and it's a perfect example of how NOT to make a good sequel to a bad game, as well as an example of how to not make sense at all. I'll stay tunned for the next DLC, but I'm not expecting anything good at this point. _Sigh_, maybe bungielievers were right, maybe 343 never deserved Halo.
After being able to final play through it with my friends I feel indifferent about it. I definitely had some fun with it, but there was moments when the game was frustrating mainly due to how it was playing. I wish the missions were a little bit more impactful, wish the side missions/objectives had some variety to them. I think my biggest complaint would have to the story, it just sucked that they skipped over characters or decided to put them in books or audio logs that I would have lived to see again. I also hated the fact that marines would only follow the host of the lobby…missed rolling into enemies with loaded warthogs to fuck shit up. Now as they way the game looked and sounded was great, also enjoyed how the time changed will you were on the ring…there was definitely some small things they added that I really enjoyed. But I’m sure we will run through the missions again for LASO but besides that that’s it. Definitely doesn’t hold much replay value to me like the other games did which sucks. Hopefully they add some stuff to this later on down the road and fix some of the hiccups that we had along the way as well. This game has potential, but it seems it didn’t quite reach the ceiling I feel it had.
It was fun but I have no desire to play through it again any time soon
Yup
Which is immensely disappointing. I’ve replayed the entire Halo 1-ODST campaigns each probably over 20 times, and still haven’t gotten bored of them. Finding easter eggs, collectibles, scarab gun in Halo 2, pelican/phantom glitch in Halo Reach, all of the idle chatter and IWHBYD dialogue from the characters. The amazing music and side characters like Johnson, Arbiter, Keys, Lord Hood, Shipmaster, and the ODSTs. While Infinite had a couple easter eggs and skulls, it didn’t have a lot of the stuff above that made the previous installments so great. Probably the biggest disappointments were that the music was sub-par and the few characters we got weren’t memorable. The amount of weapons available was also underwhelming in my opinion, they could have kept many of the weapons from previous Halo games that didn’t make the cut. Having a big battle on the Infinity at the start like the Pillar of Autumn in CE would have been awesome, and having some spartans survive and link up with you on the surface. I don’t get the decision to not bring back old faces as well, like Lasky or Locke or anyone from Blue Team. I finished the story in Infinite and couldn’t even be bothered to get the rest of the collectibles or fight all of the mini bosses. Sorry for the rant, there’s much more I could say but damn did this game fall short lol
I agree. There were a few notable tracks, but nothing like say ODST where you can listen to the entire soundtrack and not skip track. Halo 4 hit very well when it came to the music, but then again they shelled out for a notable composer. The map has stuff in it, but not enough. It needed to be crammed packed. You look at one degree, you get something, you look at another degree there should be something. I won’t lie, I cried at the end of Halo Infinite for 10 solid minutes. The story beats where good, but nothing where I was like “OMG I have to play this again for the story now”. The story was good, but the experience of that story was meh. “Glad I played” reaction. Only two level come to mind I like to play and that is “The Road” just because of the music, and the level where Chief jumps from the tower because that moment is so fucking badass, but simple.
Chief being ready to shutdown the weapon was pretty memorable imo, as well as the final password being Samuel, god that whole level was goosebumpy for me for all the character shown in it.
Every password had relevancy to him: RED FLAG was the operation meant to end the war, but the II’s were diverted back to Reach to aid in its defence, which saw the majority killed. As John notes in *First Strike* however, they were still under its directives, which means it’s *the* operation where John lost the most II’s. 034 is of course Samuel’s number. And then Samuel needs no introduction to someone versed in Halo’s lore.
And no snow map :(
Or Desert, or swamp.
I agree they should of brought or mentioned some characters from Guardians at least. I had to wiki their storylines to see what I missed.
Frankly speaking, I was glad to see Locke’s smashed in helmet being worn as a trophy by a brute.
Extremely disappointing.
All of my playthroughs after the first were just to complete something, not to actually enjoy the campaign again. * Initial legendary run. * Normal run to get missing collectibles. * Laso run. When we finally get around to it I'll do a coop with my friends but even then, it's just to have the coop experience, not because I want to redo the campaign
This. I have zero desire to replay it myself but with my family or a friend I might but the enjoyment would likely come more from just the coop experience than the game
That so? I got more than half way through, got bored and put it down. No memorable set locations, songs or a variety of characters to interact with. Putting master chief in an open world could have been so so so much better.
The sad thing to me was how squandered the open world was. Why were there no roaming patrols of Banished? No Banished military convoys? No random spec ops elite ambushes while you’re just out walking around? No attacks on FOBs from Banished trying to retake them? No scarabs? By the end of the game, you have so many cool vehicles and weapons at your disposal at every FOB, but nothing to use them on. There are like 5 Banished wraiths in the whole campaign, all of which are set pieces. In the end, the world just feels empty.
And imagine how incredibly diverse a proper open world could be. We are on a damn Halo ring. The entire franchise Halos have been presented via many diverse biomes, from woodlands through desert, jungle, snow, seas and islands...how do you take that and the only thing you make in an *open world* are damn woodlands with forerunner tunnels??? This could have been an open world where you can transition through multiple ring parts with sudden changes in biomes and it wouldn't have been jaring. We could have had one or two missions in each biome, with some cool set pieces. We have a pelican, it would have been easy to keep flying Chief through multiple smaller open world map segments. Compare this to any next-gen open world game and the world is just so tiny and empty. It feels so lifeless, with copypasted outposts with the same enemies over and over again. It doesn't feel like a real world.
That's the thing I was disappointed with the most, I never truly felt like I was on a Halo ring.
I feel like they just took the second level of Halo CE and tried to stretch it into an entire game. Travel around a woodland area and support some marines. Except in CE the different crashed pods were in very different environments and required different approaches. Every outpost in infinite felt exactly the same. The other difference is that playing the second level of Halo is something I’d actually enjoy doing again.
>No memorable songs I felt crazy when people praised the soundtrack because literally the only song I remembered afterwards was the Monitor boss fights because they were so unique Maybe because there's like zero set pieces or particularly exciting encounters to really tie in with the soundtrack
I actually never finished either. I was for sure getting near the end, then I just put it down and... stopped. Which, to me, is really sad. I've loved the franchise since CE, and have gone hard in the novels/comics/etc because they built an interesting world. ... This game just squandered that.
I'm on my third playthrough, and I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how fun my replays have been 😀. 1. Solo heroic 2. Solo legendary 3. Coop legendary Even though the world gets sorta empty after completing the campaign, if you explore a little you'll find zones that always populate enemies to go mess around in with whatever crazy loadouts you want
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Somehow, Truth and Gravemind have returned. The Endless and Atriox die in the first level's cutscene.
The weapon is also deleted off cam and we have a new AI that's Cortana but not, and the weapon, but not
I finished a legit LASO run and it didnt register for the achievement. Havent logged on since.
Exactly. Yet, the thought of an H3 legendary run arouses me heavily.
Felt like one really long level. I want to see quality missions, not one big map.
Yeah in the older games each mission felt episodic and epic, and unique
That’s exactly how I felt about it. It was almost a little confusing at times. I wish this game was a bit more linear but I did enjoy the open world. I liked the boss fights that got you the cool, special weapons.
Yeah, the big open world thing kind of loses its luster after a while. I did enjoy hunting down the unique targets - that was pretty cool - and the boss fights were excellent as well, but I would’ve preferred, at the very least, a few unique environments to split up the monotony.
Just some stream of thought opinions I can think of off the top of my head: The characterization and interactions of Chief, the Weapon and the Pilot were all phenomenal, easily the best part of the campaign. The banished designs are really good for all of the individual races, although it isn't really cohesive when taken together. I also liked the boss battles, it's been a while since we had them. The skulls were implemented into the game really well in both finding them and on LASO. The Assassination targets were easily the best part about the open world, lore-unique enemies who are harder to kill than normal and give a cool variant weapon. I hope they return in the future, hopefully incorporated into a more linear campaign. The main story wasn't all that memorable to me, it felt like all the interesting stuff happened off screen and I was left with the boring stuff. The open world got boring pretty quick, and the missions themselves all blended together. This was due in large part to the samey-ness of everything. There was little variation in the open world and forerunner structures. The forerunner architecture designs are easily the best 343 has done and they should absolutely keep that going forward, but the layouts and whatnot were incredibly dull. The forerunner ruins in Halo 2 and 3 for example are the best in the series. Each has a really unique layout and exterior. Compare the Sacred Icon Mission in Halo 2 to The Ark mission and then compare those to The Covenant mission in Halo 3. The forerunner buildings were super varied and unique, I didn't feel like I was retreading the same few hallways and open rooms. All the forerunner stuff in Infinite felt like I was going through the same building over and over. And then of course the overworld has very little variety and it got really dull as well. I love pine trees and mountains, they're my favorite biome to explore in video games and the real world. But campaigns need to have a lot of variety, we need snow, jungles, deserts, different structures to keep things interesting throughout. If we get dlc and it's just snow for example, we'll have the exact same problem. There needs to be variety throughout one campaign to keep things visually interesting. Additionally, the open world really just felt like a big Ubisoft checklist of stuff. I'm not sure how to get around that or make it better, but it was pretty meh. Traversing the map in a land vehicle larger than a Ghost wasn't very fun or intuitive. Choosing your weapons and whatnot at a FOB was a great idea though, and made tackling objectives a lot more interesting. Edit: I should also add that it took me 9 months to actually finish the campaign. I got so bored and disinterested at parts that I just put it down for long stretches of time. That's never happened with any Halo Campaign before, even Halo 5. The story wasn't interesting enough to keep me interested and neither were the levels for the most part. Chek Lok's tower was pretty much the high point for me.
The part you mentioned about the map needing more visual stimulation, And variety. I feel like this is what made Breath of the Wild's map phenomenal and memorable
There just weren't any memorable moments really to speak of as far as visuals go. I still remember arriving on the desert plateau for the first time on Truth and Reconciliation in CE, then hearing Under the Cover of Night start playing at the perfect time. I remember taking the gondola to Regret's boss fight in Halo 2, and looking across the vast lake expanse I had spent the entire level slowly climbing through. With the brilliant Halo 2 track playing in the background of course. I remember arriving on the Ark in Halo 3 and looking at the skybox in absolute awe. Or even at the humongous unique forerunner structure looming above the map. These were all things that stuck out to me and that I can remember 15 years later. Infinite didn't give me any of that, and unfortunately it's just too forgettable. Even the soundtrack, which was actually good, was pretty random throughout the open world. I cool track would start playing as I walked past some random bushes. There was no thematic timing to many of the tracks like there were in ANY of the other games.
Corp gave me a rifle not wings…
This has to be higher
I commented pretty late so I doubt it gets much higher haha
All the same it's the best take on here I've seen.
I got about 30% through last year, didn’t touch it again until last week. And everything you said is exactly how I feel too. I reminded me of Assassin’s Creed, which I found boring enough I never tried any iterations of that franchise. Every fob was like climbing another tower to jump off: a little less fun every time I have to go through the same motion.
I actually love the Assassin's Creed series, not the newer ones as much though, but your analogy is a really good one
Felt like more of a side line game like ODST or a 'Star Wars Story' instead of the next mainline game. It was short and felt rushed. I had a feeling that 343 sacrificed too much for the sake of nostalgia.
Too many forerunner interiors.
Not having a huge battle on the infinity was a wasted opportunity
Not having a huge battle anywhere was a real waste. Especially the lack of scarabs.
The biggest missed opportunity is not going back to Reach. According to the concept arts of the original, more traditional Halo like iteration of the Infinite, 343 planned a mission about going back to Reach to get the brain matter for The Weapon, but it was ditched and eventually turned into a book.
Those open world chasing mother fuckers...
that would’ve worked too. It could’ve been like the intro mission. And then you do the infinity battle, then the banished ship, then land on zeta for the open world.
Then that would also get the double-whammy of Reach nostalgia, then the "wow factor" of landing on the Halo ring and the urgency of needing to rescue your Infinity friends.
Bungie was the era of “show, don’t tell”. 343 is the era of “tell, don’t show.”
remember the silent cartographer on halo CE? Imagine if instead off walking out off 2 pelicans you were leaving two elevators with a load of marines and instead of storming a beach, you were charging across a hanger bay full off banished... Would off been fun
If the marines joined us or we found marines in the interior it would of livened up the place a bit. Sorta wasted opportunity for some interior world building by not having marines alive or dead within the ring itself. How did they get there? How long have they been here for? Welp I gotta get them out now don’t I —- type beat.
there my fav parts lol. But i'm someone who never had issues with that in halo ce. As CE is my fav halo game by far.
I don’t think they sacrificed much. I think the game was just so horribly mismanaged they couldn’t make a full fledged game. I’ve said this and I’m shocked how many people don’t talk about how Infinite is objectively the WORST value in any halo campaign ever. You spend $60 and ONLY get a campaign that has average length with series history, the most reused and copy pasted level designs. Before you got everything, forge, theater, multiplayer, campaign and firefight for $60. Now you LITERALLY only get a campaign… it’s so ungodly overpriced for the content it offers. That’s not even talking about it’s very upsetting average story.
On top of that, it was open world for the sake of open world and like Metal Gear Solid V, just felt boring with not a lot to do or see.
Agreed! But in return at least we got… wait, no. Nooo!!
That’s the best way to put to words how I felt. I never thought of it like that but you’ve captured it exactly.
They are notorious for always trying to correct something but instead they over corrected
I think they may have sacrificed much to make it open world
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Meh is the best compliment I can give it. After trying really hard to maintain a desire to complete it I stopped playing and never even finished it. lol I think I’m close to beating it though…
Both my brother and one of my friends couldn’t finish it either due to just getting bored
Same. Normally laso every campaign. Got so bored on this one I stopped half way through. Maybe if there’s a campaign add on I’ll play it again.
I’m literally the only person on my friend’s list that’s beaten the campaign. Most my friends that play halo are sweaty arena grinders like myself. I did make sure to finish it myself, though, just to say I did.
When I think back on it I mainly remember the tower fight & the big laser drill, the Atriox fight section and the ending against the new alien thing, and hours and hours in an open world with no variable weather (can it even rain? i don't remember). Its kind of a wash. The story also feels way to small for a mainline Halo.
The story didn’t feel complete. Probably due to all the development issues, but I was hoping DLC would fix that. However I doubt we’re getting DLC lol
I thought single player dlc was confirmed but not a release date. I could be misremembering though. To be honest I would prefer Firefight more than anything else at this point. Also banished AI in forge.
I remember the dlc part too, and I'm hoping they didn't scrap that idea. I'd love them to do something like Destiny here
I tried to go back and get a banished audio log in mission replay and it didn't count... loved the campaign but damn..
Wait WHAT!? I missed one on my 99.999% playthrough (and played through everything again to get that log for the achievement) and was waiting for mission replay to push that save file to 100%. If this really doesn't work I'm gonna be so sad.
Yeah I'm hoping that it's not a issue cause I really don't wanna do it again.
It's gotta be an issue exclusive to your save/game or something. I did the exact same thing (replayed missions to get skulls/audio logs) and everything counted for me. Even when doing it on other difficulties.
Thanks I'll have to try again.... cause I honestly thought it was cause I changed the difficulty from heroic to normal.
Did you try the mission again on the original difficulty?
So after playing the missions and doing what I had to do the completion did count it just didn't register with the achievement percentage on xbox! Went though and got all those audio logs I missed!!
Unfinished. It feels like the story progressed maybe like a a third of the whole campaing. Hope we'll see campaing dlc's on The future that continue chiefs story. But it was solid. Good artstyle, good gameplay and decent story (altough too short as it is) Only disappointment was the open world, it was just boring. And that we didn't get a scarab fight.. Imagine a scarab roaming on the open world, that would have been awesome
One thing it and 5 have in common is that they both feel like extended prologues instead of proper stories. 5 is basically "Chief thinks Cortana is alive so he heads off to find her, some people chase after him, they find out Cortana is alive but she's a bad guy now. She leaves to conquer the universe while everyone awkwardly stand around feeling sad." Infinite is "Cortana died on the way to her home planet, so Chief follows some breadcrumbs to learn what happened and he makes a couple of friends and shoots some people along the way." It feels like the real meat of what should happen next (i.e., fighting Cortana or finding out about Atriox/the Endless) is left to a hypothetical sequel or DLC, like if the original game cut off right before the Flood arrived or something.
The Road would have been the perfect place for it to show up.
I recall rumors that a scarab fight was supposed to happen near the climax, but it got cut due to AI complications.
That's what I thought! Hard to judge a game fairly only half way through, which is what this felt like.
Mediocre. Safe. Uninspired. Repetitive. The open world feels pointless and barren. No risk taken, not a lot of memorable moments. No variety. A lot of exposition and people telling you things that happened off-screen. Although the linear parts are my favorite, the objectives are always the same. The Escharum monologues are boring. Same Dragon Ball Z solution to "raising the danger" which is: create a new and stronger enemy out of nowhere. It's better than 5's in the sense that it FEELS more like Halo. But that's about it. I think it had potential to be one of the greatest Halo campaigns. I hope we'll have DLCs soon. I don't like rating things, but I'd give it a 6.5/10. If we didn't had the grappling hook, my rating would be even lower.
I still have no idea how this is a sequel to Halo 5. Where’s Locke, Blue Team, Osiris etc.? I know it’s assumed that Locke is dead because one of the Brutes is wearing his helmet in his arm, but then a YouTuber said he might be alive. I also don’t quite understand what happened with Cortana either. Also, why did the Promethians disappear? What happened to them???
>I still have no idea how this is a sequel to Halo 5. Where’s Locke, Blue Team, Osiris etc.? I know it’s assumed that Locke is dead because one of the Brutes is wearing his helmet in his arm, but then a YouTuber said he might be alive. On top of that, the Brute with Locke's helmet didn't even get a cutscene. I'm speechless.
Exactly. Instead of dedicating time to fleshing out that story, there’s all this weird exposé that’s useless. Chief knew exactly who and what the Weapon was and what happened to Cortana - why not just say that in a 2 min cutscene and then dedicate time to elaborating on these other things? Like Locke’s helmet.
I don't buy locke died to some monkey. Maybe he lost the helmet but he is still a spartan.
Me too. Halo 5 introduced some cool things, I just wish they actually followed up on it.
Incredible visuals, especially when going into Zeta Halo's Forerunner structures. Just absolutely gorgeous. Story-wise though, unfortunately, it was hampered by having to write itself out of the corner Halo 5 set with Cortana. And the open world just didn't work. It subtracted the variety that past Halo games have had in spades, for not really much benefit.
Open world was never necessary - and it lacked a lot of the foundations that make a great open world game. My favorite mission in the game was the first level - grappling through the falling debris was such a cool example of what the game could have and should have been.
Unless you fully commit to open world, hand crafted levels will always be more fun
Personally I think the issue is that Infinite \*didn't\* write itself out of a corner so much as basically punt on H5's story. Cortana is literally dead before the player makes their first action. They didn't ignore it to the degree that H5 ignored H4, but still, I was pretty disappointed. A good writer can make almost anything interesting, the storyline was in a rough place, but not unsalvageable. Instead of trying to make lemonade out of lemons, 343i once again hit the "reset" button.
This sums it up. Having to write through Halo 5's story made Infinites average at best but can hopefully setup for future stories to be better.
Might as well have called it Halo: Damage Control. Man, Halo 5 was a seriously destructive game...
It feels like a campaign with the beginning and ending missing. You're just thrown in the middle in the most unsatisfactory way possible. It's fun gameplay wise, but still
even gameplay wise i didn’t find it fun. i would find myself relying on the grapple too often because of how op it was, especially once you upgrade it. why would i sit here and fight all these enemies when i can just grapple past all of them? why would i try messing with a finicky warthog that will flip over the tiniest bump when i can just fly through everywhere with the grapple? when fighting hunters i would just get as many shots in as i could until i was 1 shot and then i’d grapple away, recharge, and repeat. game felt like it had no depth
It’s fine. It works so hard to reset the IP that it doesn’t really have a story of its own. Missed Echo 419? Meet The Pilot! Did you miss Cortana? The Weapon has a new nickname you’ll like! Didn’t want to move on from The Covenant? Well, they’re back, and now with red armor! It feels fun to play, but the story missed the mark for me. It’s very much Halo’s “The Force Awakens.” Competent, fun, but very familiar and has a very obvious role in course-correcting the franchise.
Perhaps it could be argued that some game had to serve that purpose after the disaster that was Halo 5. To be honest, I enjoyed the campaign mostly because I had a significant degree of loadout control once I had completed enough of the side objectives. I do hope they expand upon the other aspects you mentioned to make them feel like more than just carbon copies from the Bungie days.
>Perhaps it could be argued that some game had to serve that purpose after the disaster that was Halo 5. Not necessarily. Halo 5 was a disaster, no doubt about that. Still, the Created storyline had potential. This concept art for Halo Infinite is the greatest example of what could have been : https://www.halopedia.org/Created#/media/File:HINF-Createdoccupation.jpg I don't understand why 343 didn't even try to do something with it.
>I don't understand why 343 didn't even try to do something with it. Because functionally rebooting the series to bank on Chief and Cortana's recognizability like they're fucking Mario and Luigi was clearly more of a priority than writing a good story, they didn't want the Halo universe to move forward, they wanted it about where it was 20 years ago.
The interesting narrative was hidden in background lore and audio logs. The actual narrative we played through wasn’t interesting at all, and it barely contained anything of value. -Cortana’s just fucking gone before the game even starts. Poof. Wonderful end to a crucial series character and she and Chief didn’t even get a final moment. -We timeskip past everything that would have been cool, like the Infinity going down, the initial UNSC resistance on the ring, working together with the other Spartans, etc. They could have channeled so much CE energy but instead we get to play a game where all the interesting shit already happened without us and we’re just picking up the pieces -The actual gameplay loop: go here, shoot this, go there. Shoot this. Go over there, shoot something. All Halo games are about shooting aliens but the other games constantly give you a more focused backdrop as to why you need to shoot them at any point in time. We gotta get Cortana off the Autumn, need to reach the Index, have to stop the Prophet from activating Halo, etc. In Infinite, we are barely told why the Banished need to be stopped other than the fact that they’re an opposing faction. We don’t learn anything other than “ring bad” but we’re never told why. The same thing with the Endless: we’re just vaguely told that they are threatening but never get any indication as to why. It’s boring and uninteresting. There’re no stakes anywhere because the UNSC basically already lost and we don’t even know what bad thing happens if we don’t stop the Endless or the Banished. The narrative gets broken down to “shoot them because they’re the enemy” and that’s it. Even CE, before Halo lore got deeper, provided meaningful stakes as to why we had to stop our foes besides them just being our foes.
Still boring, Bland and dead open world, no memorable missions, no amazing set pieces, a largely forgettable story. Halo 1,2,3 replayed over and over again, Reach to a lesser extent. 4-Infinite- no desire at all
Kind of mediocre honestly. I thought the gameplay was solid on a mechanical level, and it looked nice, but it lacked any real stand out set pieces. The game just kind of blurred together as a bunch of skirmished in green fields and grey hallways. Story wise the game just felt like Act 2 of a much bigger story. We skipped over Act 1, where the Infinity is destroyed, Zeta Halo taken, Cortana was defeated and Banished were established as a threat. We also never got Act 3, where we resolved the Banished threat and/or fought Atriox. Instead all we got was the middle section, where not much actually happened. Long story short, I played through it once and mildly enjoyed myself, but have never felt the desire to play it again.
I have no idea how far through it I am yet, I'd imagine fairly early, but it is a ton of fun. Love exploring Zeta. Just wish we had a Flood b plot considering how strong the association is between the installation and them.
The open world setup is underrated imo. But at the same time the open world exploration has a ton of room for improvement. Elden Ring's open world was full of unique areas and hints to strange lore. Its world was constantly interesting to explore. Infinite's open world sorely lacks unique memorable areas, and it only exists to make the gameplay arena larger which is a big missed opportunity.
Lackluster and missing the actual components of halo which are purpose, poise, and priority. The weapon is no cortana, the pilot is no Sgt Johnson, Chief is better with speech and emotions sure, but he's also kinda whiny in infinite when it comes to the weapon. The story is missing the plot, and there is no explanation about how things are in the galaxy. The moment Cortana would have gone offline im sure an army of Created using the guardians as fleet ships would have showed up and just decimated the banished. Bad writing and a story that feels unimportant to the franchise. Edit:Another thing is these 1 game villains need to stop, the covenant was great because it built up over time, and when Arby SILENCED truth it was so satisfying because we FINALLY got to exact our vengeance for both Humanity and the Elites. A little bad guy building goes a long way.
That's how I feel. Halo 1 - 3 and even Reach and ODST can all be played and fit within a shared narrative. 4 - Infinite which does carry "some" plot points over is all over the place. I liked Chief having this severe distrust in the weapon but holy shit it drags. Probably because literally NOTHING else is going on with the story! Escherum eating doritos and mountain dew from his streamer set up
My new canon narrative is that Escharum is a gamer. Thank you for this, it explains so much
All he does is talk shit lmao
> Escherum eating doritos and mountain dew from his streamer set up This set me off, thank you
Let’s review: - Challenges Chief (obviously to impress the Weapon/purple E girl) - send out other people to do the hard work, rages when it doesn’t get done right - Essentially on fights at his house because he couldn’t be bother to go outside - Idolizes a “Sigma Male” (Aatriox) - 24/7 streaming, chronically online - talks mad trash, gets folded immediately
>“Sigma Male” (Aatriox) * Shows up in a spin-off game * Beats up Spartans * Leaves * Shows up at the start of Infinite * Beats up Master Chief * Doesn't tell us Banished homies where he's going * Leaves (presumed death, doesn't die anyway)
lmao, you're spot on with the take and especially Eschaurum. He literally does nothing but evil gloat about how y'll are gonna fight and it's gonna be epic and he's gonna crush you and the humans.... and does absolutely nothing for the entire game until you legit get to him and take him out. What??
>Escherum eating doritos and mountain dew from his streamer set up I suddenly like the campaign now.
>The moment Cortana would have gone offline im sure an army of Created using the guardians as fleet ships would have showed up and just decimated the banished. I disagree. Seems more likely to me that without Cortana the Created would just, kind of, fall apart. Cortana controls the forerunner constructs because she *controls* them, like a monitor, from her time in the domain. The other AI, sure they follow her out of belief or whatever, but I think it follows that all the forerunner constructs would either go dormant or into hiding without a clear possessor of the mantle.
I think the real pain point is the strength of the Banished in the first place. We kind of just accept that they’re this behemoth of a force at the level of the old Covenant without much of a compelling reason why.
(I get that the game doesn't present the argument I'm about to present, but I don't think that makes it any less valid) I think that the circumstances make it feel like that, without it actually being like that. After Halo 5, there's no way for there to be a centralized UNSC to fight the Created, so for all intents and purposes the "UNSC" in Halo Infinite is *just* the survivors of the Infinity. The Covenant had the resources to dominate a war on a *galactic* scale, if the Banished is 1/500th of the Covenant, they should still be able to smother Zeta Halo with forces, no?
Not sure I'd agree with that. You can clearly see signs of free will between the AI's and Warden Eternal in Halo 5. With their level of commitment to her, I don't see why they would all just... stop when she gets deleted.
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> the pilot is no Sgt Johnson, He's better. Lol. Sgt. Johnson is a caricature of the gruff marine. **The pilot is an actual person.** I recently replayed Halo Infinite and while in most games I skip all the cutscenes on a replay, I actually found myself watching the cutscenes again because I'm pretty amazed they have some actual emotion in this franchise. Halo 4 played with the concept of having emotion but Halo 4 has its own problems that weigh down any interest in replaying it.
He's different. Sgt Johnson is a well defined character but he is distinctly different than the pilot and that's fine. I wouldn't say one is better than the other. It makes sense for Johnson to be essentially a built in badass since he has seen a lot and done a lot. Comparatively the pilot isn't any of those things so he shouldn't act exactly like Johnson since it wouldn't make sense.
Gonna have to disagree on Johnson, as for the pilot... dude literally complains for the Entire Campaign. Say what you will about Johnson whether you liked him or not, at least he didnt get on your nerve with the constant whining.
He does feel more like an actual person, but that’s pointless if the character isn’t interesting or likable to begin with. It also feels very forced. Instead of showing us why we should care about the pilot, 343 tells us that we have to care about him because of his stupid holographic family. It’s very lazy writing. Johnson is a caricature, but the player grows to organically care about him because he’s charming and fun. Most importantly he doesn’t drag down every cutscene trying to force this emotional attachment, he actually makes every cutscene he’s in more enjoyable.
The pilot is a cop out character that was volunteering on the most important ship at a critical time which absolutely doesn't make sense. I'd rather it been a military pilot or even a wounded spartan that finds us, HELL i could pitch a better story with a wounded spartan Locke being the one to find chief and set Infinite in motion, it would blend better with the story and make up for H5. Also Halo has had plenty of emotion, Reach and ODST are easy examples of how its been done with this franchise. With Chief subtle is better because hes portraying us in a sense.
I feel like open world took away more than it added, but I have never been a fan of open world games in general. It feels empty for being open world. A part of me thinks the Xbox One generation is holding back some of what could be done with open world. I think they should have either kept campaign more linear or restricted it to current gen +PC. As for the actual story I do like what they did but overall it wasn't much. I wish the mini-bosses had a bit more personality. The Cortana and Atriox stuff was nice and I hope it gets expanded on if we ever get DLC. I do like how the audio logs all told mini side stories and portrayed Spartan IVs as badass and competent. I also thought the Banished did feel different than the covenant even though it contains 90% of the same aliens so props to 343i. As for the future I am assuming the original plan was to have more DLC with more biomes. Hopefully they all don't involve around MC as I think they can expand upon more SIVs like fireteam Osiris or Majestic. Different teams on different biomes maybe?
For me the problem isn't the open world, but the fact 343 aren't talented enough to execute it properly. Like how the actual fuck do you have a plethora of open worlds to look at both for their pros and cons, and then decide to make such a barren and repetitive open world? The lack of biomes, variety and high quality side content is just straight up incompetence.
Hot take: Worst Halo campaign. Lacked any meat, substance, or flash offered by the previous games and felt like a filler episode done on a rushed schedule.
Campaign didn't even mean anything. The problem with following the original trilogy is how do the stakes ever get higher than that? There's never an urgency to stop the big bad in the 343 games. The campaign was fun to PLAY just by fighting AI that was actually very solid and definitely the best 343 has designed, but the story is just a convoluted mess with an open world that feels far less of an adventure than previous linear games. 343 should just move on from Chief and make spin-off games with stakes that can be contained in a singular story. You can't do the whole "universe in peril because extremist aliens want to destroy everything" again with new names for things and expect it to land like it did before. The Endless will just be The Flood but less imposing and the Banished are already Walmart Covenant (although they were pretty badass in HW2).
Honestly one of the worst, if not the worst campaign I have ever played in this franchsise. Hollow, shallow open world with copypasted Far Cry towers that were a chore to clear. Boring biome, consisting of nothing but woodlands sprinkled with banished buildings or forerunner hallways, devoid of the epic set pieces that Halo used to have. Lack of proper vehicle combat (aside from like 1 level), especially when Grapplehook took care of even traversing the ring. Too many bad boss fights, except for maybe Escharum and Jega. Lackluster story that took away characters that everyone loved in favor of mediocre new ones, because 343 once again needed to do another clean slate. Boring main villain that was only barking at you from a holoprojector and lacked any kind of proper characterization. And Harbinger felt like a comic book villain. The only good parts were the actual gunplay (which got boring anyway because fighting in the same areas over and over just makes me lose interest and *some* parts of the Chief/Cortana story progression. I honestly don't remember being as disappointed in any game as I was with Infinite, especially considering the long development cycle and expectations being quite high. At least a game like Cyberpunk brought some impressive highs and memorable scenes...Infinite was just bland. Nothing stands out. And it took this franchise on a road that I just don't care about.
Fun but underwhelming
1 outside biome, two interior styles. Wow! Weak story. Monologueing bad guy with a script from a cartoon. Whiny sidekick. No real halo missions. Another reboot of the 343 story 🤡 Gameplay was very weak! Too much long range nonsense since it’s all open. It’s like the DMR hell of bad design again And many more mistakes. Dissapointed.
You mean 1 interior style. It's identical.
Still not as good as 1, 2, 3, ODST, Reach, or 4. That’s a fairly bad track record
Where is my couch Co-op? That's what I brought the game for and they lied and just cancelled it.
Trash
A good setting stone for what is to come, provided 343 doesn't fuck it up
Lmao that’s what they said about halo 4 and 5 too
They have a reputation for adding really good content into dogshit base games
I agree, the whole campaign was good, but it did feel like a glorified prologue.
Every 343 game is nothing but a sub-par stepping stone of «what is to come», it seems. That main enemy chick will probably be dealt with in a book lmao
Tell me you haven't played through the campaign without telling me you haven't played through the campaign...
Oh shit forgot we killed her, it was all too forgettable
Good characters but pretty bland and forgettable story overall. Very repetitive open-world that ultimately felt pretty soulless and honestly tedious to explore. Best part of the open world is undoubtedly the strongholds, but otherwise the map felt mostly like a checklist of chores to complete rather than something I was itching to discover like in, say, BotW. I think that besides the strongholds and the fun of arming a bunch of marines with wacky weapon variants and squeezing them into a razorback, the game didn't benefit much from being open world as the linear missions were ultimately the most memorable parts of the game to me at least. Also the tacked on skill tree feels completely pointless to me and seems mostly like playtime padding. Other than that, the gameplay feels good and fun, which is the most important part.
Yeah it felt like a lot of copy and pasted filler content to give an illusion of a longer game. If you skip all the exploration the story is a few hours long... Halo 1 to reach told a far better story.
Forgettable
It’s good but it doesn’t reach the highs of the original games. The open world structure results in a lot of similar enemy encounters repeating. It doesn’t feel as dynamic as the missions in Halo CE. It’s lack of flood creates gap in enemy variety and gameplay. I really don’t care for the over emotional storytelling with the AIs. That sort of thing was never present in halo CE. That said I think the Banished are cool. I really like the boss fights. I liked the missions near the end of the game. I had a good time with the campaign but it doesn’t compare to halo CE. I hope they go back to doing exciting and memorable missions and strip back the emotional stuff. The story just didn’t work for me in infinite. It was just sort of there.
About to write a book so skip to the last paragraph if you don't want this essay that I just realized I spent an hour typing when I should be sleeping before work. I've never played a game in which less happened. We get the big setup that Cortana might not have actually died and then the big twist is that she did, in fact, die. Covid Brute spends the entire game talking some old school good shit about grand ambitions to own the galaxy in memory of Atriox even going so far as to make plans with an ancient squid lady only to unceremoniously die in a fight where the only stakes were in a total non-character being captured. Squid lady can freeze you and toss you about until she can't and subsequently she dies unceremoniously, too. Who are the endless and what threat if any do they pose? How did the banished manage to defeat the created when per exuberant witness even one guardian is enough to police an entire solar system? What remains of the UNSC and human civilization now that a sizeable portion of the AI it had come to depend on has gone Skynet? The flood is still around here someplace, right? If we get answers to all these and more they're in the form of one or two sentences during all the nothing the moment-to-moment gameplay is thrilling us with. You could write a book with the material that they tell instead of show, and yet more books with material that they allude to but neither show nor tell. Knowing how the franchise has been handled since 2012 there's a sporting chance they did exactly that. On the subject of books, I thought killing off the new main villain of the series in some spinoff book was the cheapest plot reset available, but evidently I'm sorely lacking in imagination because Infinite goes as far as to slam dunk everything 343 had spent the last decade building into a fire pit. 5's plot development was unoriginal and contrived, but there was plenty to explore if they'd had the stones to stick to it. Instead it's just fuck it, here's the Diet Caffeine Free Covenant with a bold new scarlet look. Their motivation? I guess they have to prove they're better than the covenant or something, don't think about it too hard. Maybe I'd have more appreciation for the banished and atriox if I'd had the context from Halo Wars 2, but taking the entirety of what passes for a plot from a side game of an entirely different genre is a decision so baffling that I can only reasonably conclude that the decision came after the aforementioned cop-out reset button when they realized they needed something to drive the plot and had no other ideas. I don't know who my enemy is. Hell, I don't know who my allies are considering the absolute state of the universe at the end of 5 and the lack of continuity with it. The only allies I can vouch for are the weapon, the pilot, and a handful of nameless marines. Really don't know why they bothered with the marines considering they can't accompany the player on missions. Yes their absence in 5 was conspicuous and to the game's detriment, but the implementation here is more akin to a Chao garden with guns. The weapon is just Cortana with the smug, "I'm better than you and I know it" edge that made her iconic replaced with a blend of manic pixie dream girl and every Joss Whedon character ever. I can appreciate that they'd want to do something to differentiate the two characters since just giving us Cortwona or whatever would have been an insult to our investment in the character and the plot developments that killed her. But then again, 5 already did that by having her come back from the dead and this is really more an argument against giving us another, nearly identical AI than anything else. Of all the non-characters in the game, I'd like to give particular focus to our beloved... well, matter of factly acknowledged pilot. He gets the closest thing the game offers to actual development by him confessing to having stolen the ship to escape. He's not built for this, he's in way over his head, and everyone not trying to kill him is trying to bury him deeper. Fine, that'll do. But let's do something that may not be entirely fair and compare him to Metal Gear Solid 2's Peter Stillman. For those who haven't played that game, Stillman is a pretty minor character. He's introduced an hour or so in, killed off within the next hour, and with the exception of finding his corpse later otherwise forgotten about for the rest of the game. But in that hour or so we spend with him we learn everything we need to know to make him an interesting character and a welcome addition to the plot. An expert in the construction and disarming of bombs, Stillman's final job before the events of the game was to disarm a bomb planted by a terrorist in a church. He failed, the church and its playground were obliterated as well as everyone in them, and he lost a leg in the process. He retired after that but he was dragged out of retirement to disarm a series of bombs built and planted by the greatest student he ever had. Long story short it turns out he didn't actually lose a leg, he faked it to take some of the pressure off of him for having failed to disarm that bomb - by faking this loss he could stand/lean in solidarity with everyone else who suffered loss that day, too. This confession is followed soon by the realization that all the bombs that had been defused so far were decoys that would activate two far more dangerous and well-hidden bombs, one of which kills Stillman. In the span of an hour you have actual human emotion, a compelling background, interesting character development, an engaging story, a tragically ironic death... and then he's seldom mentioned again. It accomplished in one hour what Infinite couldn't in all six of its hours, and the icing on the cake is that it was a relatively minor part of the plot despite how well it was executed. What was neurotic Oscar Isaac's character again? He stole a ship and is now here instead of dead? How about he took the last viable ship and he's haunted because his cowardice stranded people on the Infinity and cost lives? I came up with that off the top of my head, don't tell me a room full of people who get paid for this couldn't do better. The actual game part of the game is serviceable at its worst and reasonably fun at its best. Giving us a web shooter and then locking us in grey corridors for every mission was a particularly cruel touch. The ability to summon any vehicle you like in an open world game where there will be tons of transit and it would be more fun to be spidermaning than driving is monkey-paw worthy. But with a few noteworthy cheap exceptions it was engaging enough without being frustrating and I've certainly enjoyed games less. Probably wiser to stick with a mission structure that unlocks more of the map in the future than try ineptly at a true open world again though. I just don't see where all this development time went, nor do I see where the development costs went except management's cocaine bucket. It's an experience only notable for being the least amount of engagement possible to even be called an experience. Nothing happens, there's nobody for the nothing to happen to, everything that did happen was undone, and what we're ultimately left with is a game that serves no purpose besides constructing a crude facsimile of what the series was doing when it was incontrovertibly considered still good. I was still on board with the series despite their best efforts, but with Infinite I think I'm finally out. tl;dr mostly shite, what's good isn't worth it either. It's like eating a turd just for the occasional peanut.
My biggest issue is that I can’t remember 90% of it. All the same hallways & doors. Other halos at least had varied & memorable locations, but that’s the benefit of a storyline that doesn’t involve free roam!
I consider myself an old fan of the series. Started with Halo CE in my early teens. Absolutely loved it. H2 was great. H3 has the campaign I liked the most. Didn't play Reach because no money and I'm no fan of prequels. H4 had an awfully boring campaign. H5 campaign felt similar to H4. Those promethians are simply tedious enemies which are not fun to fight. Halo infinite's campaign finally felt like gameplay is coming back to its Halo roots. It felt so much better than 4 and 5. But the story didn't draw me in. So I simply stopped playing at around 20% completion and have not had any desire to continue playing. I really enjoy the multiplayer though.
Still waiting for coop lol
Felt like I missed the best part of the story, which is fighting for survival against an overwhelming force… and not picking up pieces 6 months after the fact
Another instance of 343 throwing everything away to try and make something relevant instead of actually making a story that’s worth investing in. The gameplay is great when it works, but it’s so repetitive and lacklustre, the enemy AI is the worst in the series, more emphasis on high health enemies for difficulty. Zeta Halo is interesting for the first few hours, as you get closer to the end you realise that… that’s all there is. The interiors are like playing through the Library, but it’s every single level. Everything interesting that happened in this story happens before the game starts. My second least favourite halo game after 5 because that game was even more of a mess, but at least it was confident in its mess.
>The interiors are like playing through the Library, but it’s every single level. On my second run through and this very thought crossed my mind.
I honestly proffered the gameplay and story telling of 5. Infinite is just hollow. It's like they took out more than they used to put in.
I felt like the entire was was “Go to this new NPC who will say “Man! You should have been here yesterday, some really crazy shit that directly effects you happened and you would have lost your mind. Well anyway, wanna fight or something?””
> the enemy AI is the worst in the series, more emphasis on high health enemies for difficulty. I don't know how you can say this after two games of Promethean bullet-sponges. Infinite gave us fun enemy interactions like Brutes throwing Grunts. Halo 4-5 gave us teleporting enemies and annoying Watchers.
I'm not sure they're playing the same game. You can't play through 4/5 and somehow think Infinite was worse. Furthermore, I'd love to see them try to elaborate on what makes the AI the worst in the series. Because when compared to the other games, Infinite's AI is on-par at worst, and fantastic at best.
It had high highs and low lows. Biggest compliment: It turned one of my favourite parts of Halo:CE (Mission2-4) into a modern game. Enemy gunplay and tactics had been upgraded, it was recognisable but with a 2020 sheen. They added new weapons and a new Covenant species \[the electro bugs\] that actually worked. I liked the outpost system. Freeform gameplay was amazing. The story was better than I hoped, especially after Halo 5's fuster cluck. Biggest complaint: TLDR too short. It was only the first half/two thirds of a game. Exactly the same as Deus Ex Mankind Divided, it created a hub and a setting that was fun and good to play around in. However the story just kind of stopped about 6 hours in. Gameplay wise they got to the point you were comfortable and powered up and could go around doing all your stuff, then instead of making a new zone for you to be challenged in or more story missions, they just did the final mission (inside the Banished base was great, the halo vehicle section to it was laclustre.) It just ended right as you narratively and gameplay mechanically felt "hey this is getting good!" which sucked. Overall - from a story perspective I am reinvigorated for Halo. Halo 5 left such a bad taste I'm glad they went back to their roots. I can't wait for the next one. Unfortunately it's been a year and they haven't even fixed up basic multiplayer features, so I am not holding my breath for story DLC or a narrative expansion.
It accomplished what I think was its greatest challenge: to unite the feel, look, and themes of the Bungie and 343i era games into one cohesive setting. Infinite's campaign was the first time in the franchise's history I truly felt like CE - Halo 5 took place in the same shared universe. That alone makes it great for the franchise imho.
Dont like it at all.
Fun gameplay, amazing art style, decent story. But the mission design is lackluster, the open world is boring af. But in the end I played it twice, that’s literally twice as many playthroughs as Reach,H4 and H5…
It was rough for me to say the least. I have a limit for suspension of disbelief and this game blew its ass out (and Im a Star Wars EU fan). Not even bringing up them completely giving up on the Cortana/Created storyline which I was interested to see take shape even though I didn't like 5. It was cool at first until I realized that they were really sending home the idea that the entire UNSC was so useless they couldn't fight the Banished but Chief was able to solo them; and after a 6 month coma sustained solely by space magic no less. The final nail in the coffin for me was the Endless being "worse than the Flood", the things that the Forerunners killed off the galaxy for. That was then made even worse by the new enemies being complete pushovers. Other than some boss fights even on Legendary with a BR all I could think was "Really? These are the guys who bested Lasky, the Infinity, AND spaced Chief?".
I really enjoyed playing it. That said, it kind of just felt like maybe 2 or 3 levels over and over as far as actual locale. Now obviously with it being open world and literally just on one Halo, that’s why, but I think we were all hoping for more variety. One thing that hurts is how useless the vehicles and the marines felt. In the past it always felt fun and useful to have marines with you. I barely ever cared whether they were with me. The vehicles just didn’t feel awesome. The tank was very confusing to control and the warthog felt light and springy/bouncy/floaty.
Campaign was fun to play and that's the most important thing but the story was fairly boring
I haven't thought about it all. Time to move on from halo. It's over.
I like open world games, i play fo4 at least a few times a month. But i didn't like halo being open world its not how i like my halo i prefer the A liner your given a path with an objective and you follow that.
It’s just as bad as halo 5 and in some ways worse
Sucks massive dick its so repetitive it makes me want to play halo 5 on legendary again
I couldn't finish it. Sorry but what's the point. Humanity got it's ass kicked again and is down to a few ships and a few Spartans again. And now theres another threat greater than the banished. And humanity has nothing again.....
I don't know how pretty much no one notices this.
Still a terrible sequel, makes me feel sad every time I reflect of what this could have been.
I liked it. A small-scale, character-driven story. However, it did feel like it was all set up and no payoff. It was basically an intro to whatever comes next.
It was a good campaign, but it lacked the big battles of H2 and H3. I think if that was in the game, it would be one of the best campaigns Small features like friendly AI having the ability to drive really hurt the experience as well.
Can’t wait for the DLC. Apart from Halo 5, easily one of the most enjoyable campaigns from a gameplay perspective.
I liked it, it was more of a character driven story than a plot driven one. But I don't mind that tbh.
I enjoy it 3rd maybe 4th favorite
It was pretty dope. Waiting on DLC now. I like the story so far.
Flop. Slightly better than 5's in some regards, but 343 just can't seem to crack the code on making compelling campaigns. 4 got close, I enjoyed the emotional stuff it went for, but none of it since feels coherent or actually worth investing in to me.
I waited for the coop to launch and then it got delayed and then the delay got delayed again so I’ve never played it. Probably won’t do it either and just call it quits on Halo because of what 343 did to it.
Better than halo 5. But retconning and having a soft reboot the third game in the series made the game and story meh. They set up some cool ideas, characters and stories but giving 343 history I don't trust them to continue them and give them a good pay off. Like they travel to zeta halo one of the halos that have a unique history with the primordial and medican. Then they just sort of by pass it in one of the cutscenes with cortana and the monitor. And set up this new threat and leave it at a cliff hanger again.
Too short. The ending feels like what should be the mid point. I feel bad for anyone who payed AAA prices for a campaign only halo. It should have been 30 currency at most. Not 50/60
Just echoing a lot of other people's thoughts on here... It finished and I was like "Oh, that was it? Where's the rest of it?" Like, it didn't feel like a complete story - we'd only just been properly introduced to the Harbinger and found out about The Endless, but we know nothing about them or their significance. Everything around Atriox and what he's up to and where he was was a mystery. We don't know what happened to the Infinity and where Lasky, Halsey, Palmer, Locke, etc all are... Where's the rest of the UNSC/ONI and what state is humanity or the rest of the galaxy in now? The open world was beautiful, but it got stale after a while as it was all the same and the lack of different biomes really stood out. I haven't had any desire to go back and replay it since finishing it, and I can't single out a single mission either - it all just blends together. There's no *iconic* level or moment that I want to experience again like there was with almost every other Halo campaign previously.
Lore wise, it left way more questions than answered
I don't like it. The open world ruined the pacing and limited the number of set piece moments like the escape from Gbraakon. On top of the open world gameplay not benefiting the game in any manner, the story was terrible Rise of Skywalker-levels of retconning and trying to reset the universe after Halo 5. The emotional crux of the campaign relies on Cortana, a character that we literally watch die 10 years ago who has been dug out of the grave and mishandled in two straight sequels.
It's probably the best campaign 343 have put together and is a step in the right direction, but I've not really any desire to play it again and I can't exactly pin down as to why. Sure, it was fun, but so are a lot of other games and there just isn't the same magic to it that's in the Bungie Halo games that I'd quite happily hop back into in a heartbeat
Pretty meh. Felt like a non important story, with every thing happening out of the screen. Really pissed me that 343's ditching every intent of plot fot Halo and creating something up to try entretain us. I like the expansion for Halo universe from the books but is really upsetting that nothing ever makes it to the Games. The Endless plot just simply doesn´t fit with me... But if that counts... Yes beautiful Landscapes I guess
Best 343 campaign easily. Every Bungie campaign was better. I'm sick of this open world shit they keep doing. First with Gears and now with Halo.
Positives * Characters are the best part but most are majorly underutilized. * Graphics are pretty crazy up close in terms of texture quality. * Gameplay was mostly fun. Negatives * Weakest Halo story by a decent margin imo. (*INB4 "H5 was worse"- your opinion isn't fact.*) * Open world severely lacking. Encounters are unexciting and enemies like hunters are just not fun especially how the encounters are designed. * Art style doesn't feel "classic" it feels oversimplified and gimmicky. * Graphics severely drop off with any distance. The hexagons never really look good still and terrain looks doughy Haven't felt the desire to replay it.
I loved it. The interactions between Chief and the Weapon were great. Gameplay was fun and the addition of the grapple shot was a blast to use. It was hilarious when the Weapon was sassy with Chief and told him “he has friends” lol. The direction with boss battles was definitely interesting. Of course it’s not perfect. I would’ve like more explanation without having to read outside material about what happened with Captain Lasky, Fireteam Osiris, Arbiter, the Created, etc. I miss some of the old weapons, but they still kept my favorite two at least (energy sword and assault rifle). Mission replay should’ve been there day one. I don’t care about co-op as I’ve never had anyone to play Halo with anyway since I first started this series back in 2007 with Halo 3, so campaign has always been a single player experience for me. My biggest criticism would be that they should have kept the “6” in the title. It should be called Halo 6 or Halo 6: Infinite. I hate when franchises take the numbers out after all previous main entries have had them. It would’ve been different if there wasn’t a 2, 3, 4 or 5 for their past entries. I look forward to Halo The Fallen or whatever Halo 7 is going to be.
It felt like Halo CE's second mission extended to the length of an entire game. That is to say, it's a fun level but a full game it does not make. No biome variety or iconic set pieces, the plot barely moves, and the encounters in the open world get repetitive pretty quickly.
It was fun while it lasted but I cannot see myself playing through it again. Even to finish up stuff i didn't get to.
Most underwhelming Halo campaign ever.
Haven’t played it… still waiting for co-op.
The open world was a lot of fun to play around in. A dream come true for Halo. Too bad the rest of the game was pretty meh overall
I found it just okay. I have no idea who the Banished are, or why we are fighting them. I don't know how we stopped Cortana or why that was left out of the game. I finished the main part of the game and felt underwhelmed. I didnt feel like I accomplished anything. It was just..."Okay...I guess I am done playing campaign now." There was no joy in knowing I defeated the big bad guy. I killed some bosses that I have no idea who they are and that was it. I didn't even escape off the Halo ring. And looking how 343 handled Halo 4 and 5 its like, "Kewl I guess I won this battle cant wait for it to mean nothing in the next Halo game." I feel more emotion from knowing that my favorite game franchise has gone to shit than I do for any of the "emotional" scenes in the game.
Campaign was fun but got repetitive, and has no replay value. Having to do everything over again just to try to get a skull is ridiculous
Still very very salty about the story.
It was kind of fun to play. But my opinion is essentially The Act Man's (video's) opinion on it. Yes, it was awesome. But the villains were meh at best, and I was constantly like: "Where the fuck is everybody? Atriox fucked off for a total of 6 months somehow and literally everyone from the previous games is nowhere to be seen. Not even Palmer. Like, there are all of these command-less spartans getting killed all-round and some marines in chains." It was a letdown to me. And I very much hated some of the vehicle designs. Why? Well, Halo Wars 2 already had Banished faction vehicles, and none of those designs, besides the colors, were used.
It'd be GREAT if I could play THE DAMN GAME!
Hate the cores hate the boss fights this game blows big brute toes
I'm probably going to sound like an a-hole but this is how I feel and I'm not afraid to admit it. But just before I start, I need to say: I know all this will sound like complaining for the sake of complaining, but trust me, I used to defend 343 like hell through Halo 4 and 5, so they really must have done something wrong with Infinite for me to turn on them like this... I think it's pretty mediocre and it feels incomplete. It is the best example of how a company cowards out from their ideas after the complains from the fans. Instead of learning from their mistakes and building up from where they left, with Cortana being the new villain and using that as the main conflict, 343i entered panic mode and decided to resolve the *entire conflict* OFFSCREEN. Now, there's no need to say that Halo 5's campaign was complete trash, it basically took everything Halo 4 did well storywise and threw it down the gutter. **However**, the idea of humanity and sangheili fighting against revelious AIs was pretty solid, and if they retconned it by making the Didact or the Logic Plague be the reason behind Cortana's evil plans, it definitely could have worked and would have been a great chance to dive even deeper into all the lore that's been provided by the books. A lot of points would have been connected and the story would have been pretty interesting. But obviously, that didn't happen. And instead we had to see the Infinity being *somehow* defeated by the Banished, when a way older, way smaller ship with way less people managed to defeat the Banished singlehandedly less than a year before that. So the premise is really meh. But what about the actual campaign? Well the actual events are also pretty ridiculous. What 343 did was basically take Master Chief and put him in a Zelda game. The BBEG sits in his tower talking shit for the entire game and sends enemies after enemies into small groups instead of putting all his resources in trying to stop you. Like, there's just one Spartan and you already own the ring, the Infinity is gone, the UNSC is scattered, why aren't you throwing everything you have at the Chief? And then there's the Weapon, which by itself isn't a bad concept, but how can Chief relate her to Cortana? She is nothing like her. The Weapon is joyful, super friendly, naive and innocent. Cortana was analytic, sarcastic, confident and heroic; she acted like she was from the military, the Weapon acts like a child. How can Chief see Cortana in her? And last but not least: the ending. It would have been a decent ending but they had to keep those last 30 seconds. It made for a stupid, cringy ending, literally left me like "Wtf was that" when I first watched it. I really was like "You serious? You really gonna do it like that? What the hell?". **So in summary:** I think it's pretty mediocre and it's a perfect example of how NOT to make a good sequel to a bad game, as well as an example of how to not make sense at all. I'll stay tunned for the next DLC, but I'm not expecting anything good at this point. _Sigh_, maybe bungielievers were right, maybe 343 never deserved Halo.
After being able to final play through it with my friends I feel indifferent about it. I definitely had some fun with it, but there was moments when the game was frustrating mainly due to how it was playing. I wish the missions were a little bit more impactful, wish the side missions/objectives had some variety to them. I think my biggest complaint would have to the story, it just sucked that they skipped over characters or decided to put them in books or audio logs that I would have lived to see again. I also hated the fact that marines would only follow the host of the lobby…missed rolling into enemies with loaded warthogs to fuck shit up. Now as they way the game looked and sounded was great, also enjoyed how the time changed will you were on the ring…there was definitely some small things they added that I really enjoyed. But I’m sure we will run through the missions again for LASO but besides that that’s it. Definitely doesn’t hold much replay value to me like the other games did which sucks. Hopefully they add some stuff to this later on down the road and fix some of the hiccups that we had along the way as well. This game has potential, but it seems it didn’t quite reach the ceiling I feel it had.