Halo: Combat Evolved came out two decades ago, and it is legacy among the most important releases ever has cast a shadow that the remaining franchise lives in every time a new game releases. Halo is dumb. It is also awesome. The main challenge, I'd think, for making a new game in a long-running franchise, particularly if you aren't the initial developer, is giving players all of the awesome stuff that built them into adore the series without pissing them off by leaving out the dumb shit they love for whatever reason. It is a challenge that 343 Industries has appeared to struggle with ever since taking over for Bungie, particularly when it comes to the question of the items related to Master Chief. But Halo Infinite, the latest in the franchise, feels like both a concession as to the fans want and a big, meaty, green-gloved middle finger towards the pressures that come with making games in the series.
John-117 (Master Chief's “real” name) isn't a fascinating character. He should be interesting. In the end, he was kidnapped through the UNSC as a child, substituted for a clone that would die soon after so that his parents would simply think him dead, and conscripted in to the Spartan program to become super-soldier on the frontlines of a seemingly never-ending war against extraterrestrial monsters. Given everything Master Chief went through, the deeply weird codependence that developed between him and his AI companion, Cortana, constitutes a whole lot of sense. But despite all that, Master Chief somehow still manages to be boring.
There are moments in Halo Infinite's exceedingly fun and, yes, exceedingly dumb campaign when 343 pokes and prods at the myth of Master Chief and also the reasons that fans think they care in regards to a walking, talking suit of armor. These moments occur when Chief's new AI companion, The Weapon, attempts to make him open up about his feelings around Cortana and why he will not trust another glowy hologram lady. The Weapon balks at Chief's stoicism. Is fighting aliens the one thing he cares about? Doesn't he want friendship? Doesn't he desire a loving, trusting relationship? Is there something which motivates him and provides him grounds to live apart from saving mankind again and again? What about, I dunno, trauma?
The response to all the questions, as you may expect, isn't any, not necessarily. Halo Infinite's campaign does everything it may to provide Master Chief a clear slate so that everything emotional ickiness is defined to relax, and future games within the series might have John-117 doing what he is doing best, which is killing aliens with no emotional baggage weighing him down. Players like Master Chief for the same reasons they enjoy Mario and Sonic: He and his circumstances never change. If Nintendo suddenly injected some kind of Marriage Story plot between Peach and her mustachioed, red-hatted knight into their next Mario game, it might be fun one time, but dragging it out would become older. As interesting as the stories in Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians were, especially considering they had to follow along with that which was a pretty cut-and-dried ending to a fairly straightforward trilogy, additionally they lingered too long in a territory that Halo is uncomfortable with, namely moral ambiguity and Chief's and Cortana's messy professional-turned-personal relationship.
While Halo Infinite could easily get the series back to where it's preferred, it will so elliptically. The storyline picks up sort of where Guardians left off, with humanity aboard the Infinity, just trying to puzzle out how you can survive. Specifically, the opening shows the Infinity getting torn to shreds through the Banished, a Covenant splinter group. Following a visually confusing battle, Master Chief is defeated and thrown in the ship, to become left floating in space above Zeta Halo. Months pass, and Master Chief, somehow alive, is discovered by among the only surviving human pilots. Resurrected, Chief heads with the pilot towards the surface of Zeta Halo to prevent the Banished from fixing the broken Forerunner weapon and killing all of humanity, though at this point it's unclear how much of humanity is even left.
The trouble with Halo Infinite's story is that it's trying to be two very different things for 2 very different audiences. It really wants to give newcomers a comparatively straightforward tale of the guy in armor saving humanity, whilst somehow overall a sprawling narrative that spanned five games, a number of spinoffs, novels, comics, and anything else in between. The primary problem with this approach is that it concludes the story from the second Halo trilogy before Infinite's tale even starts. Everything that you might be prepared to happen after the Forerunner trilogy is told as backstory while Master Chief fights the Banished on Zeta Halo. It would almost end up like if Return of the Jedi was told entirely in flashbacks while Luke Skywalker was trapped on Pillio. Contrary, Infinite seems like an epilogue towards the main narrative, a liminal entry that's stuck between your past and the future of the franchise. This bizarre approach robs dedicated fans of the payoff that they are probably expecting while leaving newcomers completely adrift within an indiscernible soap opera jam-packed with jargon along with a faceless protagonist horny for the memories of the holographic AI woman.
I question the haphazard way that Halo Infinite's story unfolds and whether which has something to do with 343 turning it into an open-world game. In the event that was the tradeoff, i quickly believe the developers made the best call. If any formerly linear shooter deserves to be an open-world game, it's Halo. Around I enjoyed the greater exploratory sections of Gears 5, The Coalition was smart to not dive headfirst into the waters of open-world design. Considering the characters can't even jump, you don't want them kicking around in the sandbox for too much time before providing them with a piece of waist-high cover to duck behind. Your government Halo, meanwhile, has always been something of the sandbox shooter, particularly in its multiplayer arenas, which formula translates perfectly for an open-world environment.
Basically, 343 combines the feeling of Big Team Struggle with just enough Far Cry -style design (thankfully avoiding any need to inject stealth into a Halo game) and sets it on a map that is awe-inspiring in scope without attempting to do an excessive amount of visually. All the good Halo stuff is there, and you reach decide how and when you need to approach it. You are able to hijack Ghosts from patrolling Grunts, cause a chain reaction of explosive barrels, snipe Elites from a cliff, and do your best Rambo impression having a detachable Heavy Machine Gun, all while storming the same outpost. Infinite's campaign is structured in chunks, to ensure that you're never out in the wilderness for too long before it drags you back into the main story. You will not explore all of Zeta Halo, but what's there is enough, and you can travel anywhere on its destroyed section that you are permitted to explore whenever you want. The first time you are taking back a FOB for the UNSC and find out a bunch of icons pop up on the map, you might roll your vision, but completing your checklist of side material and secondary objectives never feels as arduous and gratuitous as it can in a modern Assassin's Creed or any other Ubisoft title.
But there's something else new to Halo Infinite that seems like a level bolder choice from the game's designers, something which much more fundamentally changes the scope and elegance from the game, enough where you begin to question whether or not you're still playing Halo and why no one considered this mechanic earlier. I'm referring to the Grappleshot.
The Grappleshot is basically a mix of the grappling hook in only Cause using the Super Shotgun's Meat Hook in Doom Eternal. It functions as both a traversal tool and a weapon. You can reverse-Scorpion the right path to enemies and clock them in the face, propel yourself in to the air and snipe enemies on the way down, or grab an explosive barrel to chuck at a mob. At one point while exploring Zeta, I had been given a hundred-foot wall. I possibly could spend precious minutes trying to navigate a Warthog round the wall, but instead I used the Grappleshot and Infinite's physics system to catapult myself up and also over the wall like I had been goddamn Spider-Man.
You can, of course, play through Halo Infinite, save for some segments, without ever while using Grappleshot. It's merely another tool the game provides you with, similar to the Thruster, Threat Sensor, and Drop Wall. Why can you do that? Whether I had been in a tough fight or simply bouncing round the open world, I discovered myself incapable of not using the Grappleshot. I'm not overstating the situation when i state that it became just as essential in fighting the Banished as any of the other weapons in the game, which there are lots of. I never enjoy playing Halo campaigns without friends, and the fact that we must wait until we can play Infinite co-op is a big downgrade for me. But, because of the Grappleshot, I forgot I even had friends to play with in a few minutes. It is simply that fun to use.
The Grappleshot became so fundamental to my knowledge about Infinite that, when I went back to playing the multiplayer and didn't have access to everything the time, I felt like I had been playing a completely different game, along with a lesser one at that. While Halo Infinite's multiplayer might share its name and mechanics with the single-player campaign, it truly seems like its very own thing. Considering the multiplayer launched (albeit as a “beta”) just below a month ahead of the single-player campaign, and considering it's free-to-play, most people looking over this will probably already have formed an opinion on it. For which it's worth, I think Infinite's multiplayer is fine. As far as 343's Halo multiplayer attempts go, it's easily my favorite, mostly because it feels the most like classic Halo. But, simply a few weeks later, I already find myself getting bored using what the multiplayer offers, and that is doubly true now that I've experienced the campaign.
As much as players are rightfully slobbering over Halo Infinite's multiplayer design, I've found so that it is safe, and given anything else that 343 changed about Halo with this game, “safe” is a disappointment. There are some subtle choices which make Infinite feel like a good advance for the series, like how it’s handled sprinting, sliding, and mantling. The weapon balance seems to be in an excellent place already and many seem to be genuinely fun to make use of (save the Bulldog, which seems like a crime), and the gadget system mostly works. But having become so familiar with the Grappleshot, to see how deep of the impact it had on the game's overall feel and design in the campaign, I now feel tired of the multiplayer's “golden” shoot-melee-grenade triangle. Our favorite clippable moments so far involve the Grappleshot (and sometimes the Thruster). Oh, you continued a sniper frenzy? That's quaint. I grappled behind a guy and threw an explosive barrel at the rear of his head.
Maybe giving players the Grappleshot all of the time could have been an excessive amount of a good thing. The multiplayer has already been fun, and I continues to possess fun playing it, despite not necessarily accessing the most fun thing about the sport. Halo Infinite's multiplayer is fun, it works, and it feels like Halo, and at no more your day, that's what 343 set out to do.
Still, I'm wondering if 343 might have been a little bolder. Maybe these were scared that Halo fans wouldn't approve, and perhaps the general positive reaction to the multiplayer so far proves the developers made the right call. I understand, I understand: Each time 343 made major changes, it messed the game up. Sooner or later, I'd like to visit a 343 Industries Halo that wasn't fully bowing to fans while also not completely missing the point about what makes Halo fun in the first place. So far, it's either been one or the other.
When I believe about Halo's infinite future, I want to see a lot of Grappleshot, or at least exactly what the Grappleshot represents. It's not a hand-me-down mechanic from Bungie. It's also not completely from left field. It's taking something that's worked in other games and reclaiming it entirely for Halo. It's giving players the choice to zip in to the future or to stay firmly planted in the past. Halo Infinite is a fantastic mainline entry in the franchise, maybe the best since Halo 3, but it also seems like a game title still all too often grappling with its past. Hopefully, following this third attempt, 343 may have earned enough trust to follow its own vision for the franchise.
