Halo: Infinite review

    HALO: INFINITE is a game that I was extremely reluctant to get into. HALO 5 was not just a disappointing game to me but I felt it derailed the entirety of my investment into the Halo franchise. Which is a shame because I'd played and beaten every other Halo game as well as read a bunch of its novels. It wasn't my favorite sci-fi franchise (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon Five, and Mass Effect all beat it) but it was in the top five.

    Basically, I'm willing to overlook a lot of gameplay issues but the characters have to remain intact and the problem of Halo 5 was that it derailed Cortana as well as established a status quo that wasn't very interesting. The key components of a good Halo story are humanity is on the ropes, the Master Chief as the only possible salvation, and the relationship between him and Cortana.

    Halo: Infinite manages to redeem most of the problems with Halo 5 by wrapping up the "evil" Cortana plot off-camera. While some people may think this is a disappointment, I think the plot was better assigned to the dust bin of gaming history rather than trying to repair a fundamentally flawed concept. Here, the Banished, the villains from Halo Wars 2, have seized Halo Zeta as well as defeated the entire UNSC military. Worse, Master Chief is defeated by their leader, Atriox, in hand-to-hand combat.

    Having the best of humanity's forces defeated by the Banished, a group of pirates and raiders, helps reinforce that mankind is still centuries if not millennia behind the rest of the Covenant races. It was only luck as well as the Arbiter's revolt that resulted in humanity not being exterminated. Having them act like they're a superpower after their "victory" was always a mistake in the post-Halo 3 Expanded Universe.

    This is a nice reminder that we're a little fish in a big pond with the exception of the Master Chief. Well, Master Chief somehow survives for six months by going into stasis and floating in deep space. A Pelican pilot finds him and revives him, only to be bemused by the fact Master Chief believes it is his mission to continue the war against the Banished. Atriox is apparently dead (yeah, right) and Cortana deleted but a new Brute chieftain has taken control over the Ring. Given a Halo can destroy all life in the galaxy, stopping him is Master Chief's new priority.

    Halo: Infinite is, as is, a very small open-world RPG that still has most of the appeal from the original three games plus a few new things that are awesome.  It also is lacking the Forge and Multiplayer in the base game but "Season Two" is already fixing most of these problems. The best new addition is definitely the grappling hook and having Master Chief move around like Batman in Arkham City increases the game's appeal significantly.

    Mostly, the game players like Halo. You fight Grunts, Brutes, Elites, Jackals, and Hunters in various arenas. The open-world elements have you rescue Marines, assault fortresses, and take down high-value targets. The actual campaign is about twelve or fourteen hours long, which is about a typical Halo-game's length. There's some bullet sponge-y bosses but even those I didn't dislike that much due to the addition of the grappling hook adding some new combat options.

    The best part of the game is the relationship with Master Chief, Weapon, and the Pilot. They are simple characters but doesn't mean they're shallow characters. The villain, as played by Clancy Brown, is serviceable but a bit stereotypical. Even so, there's enough character development that I actually was invested in seeing how it all shook out. I'm not sure who the "Endless" are but they seem a decent set up for sequels, unlike the Prometheans.

    Overall, my opinion of Halo: Infinite is extremely positive but it's a game that shoots for the moon rather than the stars. There's very much a "return to basics" feel to the game and a casting aside a lot of what didn't work in the previous sequels. The storyline is good and I am satisfied with it ending but it certainly doesn't have the same epic level as the original games. It feels very much like it's waiting for more installments to finish off the story.

8.5/10