Halo Infinite Reviews
Halo Infinite is a genuine disappointment on multiple levels. The campaign is lackluster and lacks the promised couch co-op. The open-world map is largely devoid of life. The multiplayer is decent, but it's competing in a saturated market. Although I held out hope, that hope has evaporated.
With Halo Infinite, 343 Industries is looking to innovate on an established franchise. Yet despite the new additions, such as the semi-open world, the core game design still feels a bit dated and it seems that the developers didn't know how to actually handle the new features. The graphics are better, but have plenty of problems. Even though Master Chief is more agile, you still have to play passively. The world is unimaginative and the quests feel monotonous. Fortunately though, what Halo did right before, it does right now, and the varied enemies, along with the huge arsenal of weapons, will definitely keep existing fans entertained. For everyone else, however, this title is more of an above-average game that tries to push its boundaries but still fails to break away from slightly outdated gameplay mechanics.
Review in Czech | Read full review
If it sounds like I am hard on Halo Infinite’s campaign, it is because I am. I expected a lot from 343 Industries and Microsoft, and I am left feeling somewhat disappointed. With the multiplayer being spun off into a free-to-play standalone with its own monetization, we are now paying full price for this campaign, and it doesn’t live up to the price tag. Yes, the actual gameplay is superb, but that alone cannot carry an entire campaign.
The redeeming aspect about Halo Infinite is that underneath the unnecessary open world format and cookie cutter story missions, the core gameplay is Halo at its best. While it's much faster paced than the Bungie-era, Infinite improves tenfold upon the disappointing 343 releases so far. The story is nothing to write home about but engaging in a full blown scrap with a squad of Banished feels brilliant. This is largely down to the new tools at Master Chief's disposal, along with the added weapon variants. Few things are as satisfying as grappling a grunt and electrocuting all the surrounding enemies, then finishing them off with a sweep of a Sentinel Beam or perfectly placed Mangler shots. The downside is how this is surrounded by bloat, in a new direction for Halo that doesn't quite land on its first outing, despite being incredibly polished and excellent from one skirmish to the next.
The shooting mechanism which already reached its height in the previous work has gone through further refinement, and the introduction of semi-open world experience adds much needed exploration to the game. Add to this, the audio and visual style brings a sense of nostalgia and made this game worthy successor of classic Halo. In terms of the story, however, the game focuses on adding new narrative while the liability left by the previous work often neglected, made its continuity superficial at best. Although the fun of the game itself cannot be denied, the unsatisfactory storytelling still remains as a chronic problem of 343 Industries' Halo.
Review in Korean | Read full review
It's strange to see games that become worse after launch, but this is undeniably true for Halo Infinite. Because I trusted that couch co-op, a staple of the Halo experience, would be added in a post-launch patch, I gave the title the benefit of the doubt. I also expected multiplayer seasons to be plentiful, regular and full of engaging cosmetics, maps and modes. None of these things has happened.
Infinite wants so badly to feel like a fresh start—to deliver onto players a familiar setting that they can revel in but with a host of new tools. But that fresh start comes at the expense of all the big, beautiful, and ambitious ways in which the last few titles in the series made us want to take part in the Covenant War.
It's plausible Halo Infinite will eventually become an era-defining game, one that reestablishes it as a dominant shooter franchise, but it's not there yet and there's no telling when it will be.
Halo Infinite is a fresh new take on the franchise, and manages to bring everything together into a game that is innovative, familiar, and a lot of fun to play.
Halo Infinite might be kind of underwhelming on the single player side, but multiplayer has tons of promise if 343 can tackle launch issues swiftly.
Halo Infinite is an ambitious next step for the franchise, where they aim to recreate the wonder and mystery that Combat Evolved did twenty years ago. I don’t feel that the game reaches the heights that have been set for it, with limited multiplayer content and a campaign that has numerous elements that don't quite hit the mark. It feels, finite instead of being Infinite as the titling of the game suggests.
Halo Infinite offers a brief campaign with uneven writing, and a functional but safe implementation of the new open-world levels. It's still a great shooter with strong core mechanics that help carry the experience, but as multiplayer is now standalone and free, the value proposition of this full priced solo adventure is rather diluted.
If the audio didn’t absolutely carry this game, the one thing that I will give Halo Infinite is that it manages to be a good game, better than the other 2 big shooter games released recently. 343 Industries didn’t name this Halo 6 because if they did it would be so far departed from the franchise entirely. Thankfully, this managed to do what I knew it could, which is be the best out of the three FPS games in the past month.
Halo Infinite might be the best campaign 343 has done, but considering I didn’t love the last two, I’m not sure how much weight that carries. Halo Reach remains the gold standard for me in that department, and while I had a lot of fun here zipping around the open world, and I can see the potential of the concept, something about Infinite feels small and unfinished to me compared to both other Halo campaigns, and other open world titles. I don’t need (or want) a sprawling Assassin’s Creed map that takes 200 hours to clear, but I think I need more diversity than what’s here, and a better story with better characters told within it.
And therein lies the inherent issue with launching Halo Infinite as a platform for the Halo series. It’s clear that there’s tons of potential here, and there’s so much to love about what 343 Industries has already introduced, but playing it at launch feels like you’re playing the worst version of what could rightly wind up being a fantastic game. Game Pass lets subscribers experience games like Halo Infinite on a whim, and it also lets developers like 343 take risks on launching a “Halo platform” that’s a work-in-progress. Currently, its single-player campaign is fun if somewhat empty, while its multiplayer flickers between exhilarating and frustrating. With the former being available on Game Pass while the latter is free-to-play, it’s not much of a gamble to just play it despite its problems, but by now I think we all miss when games felt like they were finished at launch.
I’ve shared many gripes I have with Halo Infinite. I’ve shared them meticulously because I love this franchise and want it to continue succeeding. Beyond them all, I absolutely love playing it. The campaign’s open-world gameplay is phenomenal, and I can’t wait to play through it again on legendary, especially with a friend in the future. Despite my disappointment in the narrative, the lead performances are strong, and the presentation is cinematic. I’ve been playing Halo multiplayer with my friends for nearly twenty years. We’ve kept up with the Master Chief Collection over the years, but Infinite is the most addicted we’ve been in a long time. It’s far from perfect, but I can’t wait to see how Halo Infinite evolves over the coming months and years.
Halo Infinite can't quite deliver on being an open-world throwback, but it's the best shooting the series has seen to date.
Halo Infinite gives players the pleasure of engaging gameplay that never grows stale, but suffers from a lack of variety in environments and lackluster antagonists.
Halo Infinite features the same great gameplay and control from past campaigns, merged together with some awesome new additions like the Grappleshot, slide mechanic and AI field scan ability to bring the series up to modern FPS standards. The story and open-world design ultimately feel a bit lacking, but it’s still tonnes of fun regardless. Let’s finish the fight!