Over 6 years after the release of Halo 5, the campaign for Halo Infinite finally released. Master Chief looks way different now, and the progression of the story started in Halo 4 is mostly stopped to focus on a new self-contained story. The only thing that you get when you pay 60 dollars for Halo Infinite is the campaign, so that is what this is a review of.
Give and Take (Mostly Take)
Clearly Halo Infinite is built off of Halo 5, as one would expect. It’s also clear that they tried to make this game very different from Halo 5 because a lot of the new features in Halo 5 are removed. No more running tackle, weird ground pound moves, and stuff like that. You do keep aiming down sights for every weapon and climbing on stuff by pressing A, though. Instead, for the campaign at least, Master Chief gets a new permanent ability that totally changes the game. This ability is the heavily promoted grappling hook. There are other abilities, but they are almost totally useless compared to the grappling hook unless you are playing on Legendary difficulty, or possibly Heroic with some Skulls enabled. These other abilities aren’t really new, either.
The Grappling Hook Is…
It’s obvious why they felt this was necessary. With the move to an open world, even the running that they added in Halo Reach wasn’t going to be enough to have a balanced level of speed in huge environments.
Besides just taking you places, the grappling hook also lets you climb on stuff, pull weapons to you, and stun Jackals with shields. In the campaign at least pulling weapons is pretty much useless since you can move so fast with the grappling hook towards them and the enemies aren’t taking them before you anyway, but the other abilities are useful.
So is this a good change? That is very debatable. It is definitely cool and interesting, but at the expense of making the game way easier than it would be otherwise, since it is pretty much an overpowered version of the dodging mechanic in Halo 5. The reason it was necessary isn’t too justified in being there in the first place, though.
Open World in Halo?
Halo Infinite hops on the, at this point, decade long trend of making everything open world. Like Metal Gear Solid V though, which this game is very similar to, being open world really hurts this game’s level design.
With most of the game being open world, Master Chief gets basically an infinite amount of approaches to every situation, and for all of these situations it is relatively easy to find a solution that lets you cheese it. There are linear missions too, but they are the most simplistic and repetitive of any Halo game.
Long story short, this is one of the most fun FPS campaigns out there, but that is mostly because the vast majority of FPS campaigns do poorly in the area of level design where Halo Infinite doesn’t really try.
Another big change from previous Halo games is including a bunch of boss fights. They are definitely better than previous Halo boss fights, and the boss fights of most FPS games for that matter, but they still don’t really make a good argument for FPS games having boss fights in the first place. The balancing of these boss fights is pretty questionable, with the game having an odd difficulty curve.
Controversial Graphics
Before it came out Halo Infinite was most well known for its 2020 gameplay video which has heavily criticized for its graphics. The final game doesn’t really look much different besides the lighting, which is vastly improved. In fact it has some of the best lighting in any video game.
An area that should have been improved more was the close-ups of faces. Besides the guy who can speak Spanish who looks mostly good, everyone looks pretty odd. It seemed like it may have been stylistic because most of the close-ups were of holograms, but the close-ups of non-holograms look exactly the same.
Aside from that the guns, vehicles, enemies, environments, ect. all look good, which is good to see.
The Music Is Pretty Good
Something that you will notice when playing this game that you probably didn’t notice nearly as much in previous Halo games is the music. Overall this game has one of the best soundtracks in a Halo game easily and is pretty up there for video game soundtracks in general, too.
Also sound-related is the voice acting, which is quite good. It is barely ever weird or awkward, despite the sometimes unimpressive writing. The voice acting is also plentiful and dynamic during battles, which is nice to see. Sometimes the enemies will say odd things for the situation they are in, though, so the system isn’t perfect.
Not Worth 60 Dollars
This campaign is simply overpriced. It doesn’t really add much of substance over previous campaigns in this series, and those were far from justifying the 60 dollar price of those games. At best this game should have been priced 50 dollars, or more realistically 40 or even 30 dollars. The contents themselves aren’t really bad at all, being about average for the Halo series as a whole, they just aren’t what the price tag would lead you to expect. Of course you can easily get around this price tag using Xbox Game Pass.
Overall the game is a 7.5 out of 10.
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