Post
by Raid » Sun Jun 18, 2023 9:25 am
Halo: Infinite
Ian, Alex and I played through this in co-op over the last few weeks. It has, I think, the strongest gameplay of any of the Halo games, a series I used to adore because of how good it felt to play (and lost interest in immediately when Bungie stopped developing), and it's entirely down to the grappling hook. It's not often a series adds a feature that so completely changes how it plays, but that fits so seamlessly into the experience. The grappling hook wouldn't work without the floaty physics that the series had from the start, and because of them you can slingshot yourself around the environments like Spiderman. The ability to pull explosive barrels towards you to use like impromptu grenades is a bonus, but really it's the way you can get yourself rapidly into and out of danger that makes it.
But unfortunately it's a game of two halves. The gameplay is great, but the mission design and the way it tells the story is often terrible. It really does feel half-finished, or at the very least rushed. 95% of the cutscenes in the game could have been radio messages during gameplay. It takes away your control just to show you a closeup of a talking head, and the heads aren't all that nice to listen to. Echo-216, the Pelican pilot, is a dreadful character that the game clearly wants us to feel sympathy for but that only made me roll my eyes. Weapon, the replacement Cortana, has a really chirpy and upbeat delivery, but she is constantly making mistakes and underestimating the difficulty of what she's doing, to the point where she becomes annoying instead of naïve. Escharum, the Brute chieftain, snarls and growls and keeps telling you how you're going to die, and is so one-note a villain that you just have to tune him out. I'm not really sure why the series has focused on the Brutes when the Elites were so much more interesting.
In the end we ended up just automatically skipping all of the cutscenes because they kept ruining the pace of the game, but because I'm fairly invested in the Halo story I watched them on Youtube afterwards. The irritating thing is that there's a half-decent story in there if you're a fan of the rest of the series, but the way it's all delivered is dull and oftentimes annoying. In almost every cutscene, the characters discuss something, then a question is asked that someone doesn't want to answer, and they just move on silently. The game's closing cutscene ends with the UNSC characters sharing their actual names, Echo-216 gives a fairly normal human name, but as AIs in the series choose their own, Weapon proudly proclaims that she's chosen the perfect name. The game then immediately ends without her saying what it is. Do they think that this is a cliff-hanger?
The level design is pretty standard for a Halo game, with sections set in the open landscape of the ringworld, and others set in the confusingly-laid-out Forerunner interiors where every room looks the same. The game requires an objective highlight function because it constantly forces you to search for power cells to open doors - seriously, it must happen 20 times over the course of the game. It's not remotely fun, and only serves to make you backtrack through environments you've just cleared of enemies. It's such a shame as the open environments are great, and I get the feeling they didn't have time to make more of them.
And it's unfinished too. The narrative clearly isn't over, with an ending cutscene that both doesn't make sense - bringing a character whose death was the entire driving force for the antagonists back to life, and an event that's hinted at but never really explained.
Anyway, this has already turned into far more of an essay than I meant it to. tl;dr - fun gameplay, rubbish story delivery.
They sure are hitting all the great settings; ninjas, cowboys and pirates! Whats next, a proper Commandos 3? 
