To prepare for Infinite, I am playing through the entire Halo franchise (FINISHED)

[LudicrousSpeed]

So I finally finished Halo Infinite yesterday. What a bizarre game. Some aspects of it are absolutely top notch, others are average at best or below average. It's hard to imagine what kind of development hell this game must have been in to have taken so long to make, and some aspects of it to be so poorly implemented or rushed.

For starters, the top notch stuff. The game (on Series X) performs amazingly. The sound is incredible, and most importantly, the core gameplay is extremely good. I would argue the Infinite sandbox is the best of any Halo game. There are better overall packages in the series, but gameplay wise, imho Infinite stands on top, or maybe tied with Halo 4. I love the variety of the enemies and vehicles, and the weapons. And how ammo has to constantly be managed, which has you swapping weapons quite often. It's entirely different than other shooters, where you have a few guns and just replenish ammo. The grappling hook just opens up the entire game with endless gameplay possibilities. Not only that, but it makes on foot traversal very fun.

Now to the negatives. The game has one outdoor biome, and then everything inside looks exactly the same. This is maybe the most damning negative I have, because a game that took this long to make shouldn't look so rushed or plain. Another gripe I have is that the open world structure is very generic and cookie cutter. It's a FarCry clone, like Horizon or Spider-Man. Repeating the same open world objectives again and again gets old.

My final complaint is the narrative, spoilers. It's... bad. Imho anyway. I understand maybe they wanted to wipe the slate clean and maybe reboot the franchise after all of the Cortana stuff, but the direction they went in was very poor. Instead of dealing with the Cortana stuff and her Created army directly, it seems everything important happens off screen or in flashbacks. I also believe they were planning on story DLC, which has now been canceled, so that could explain why some of the story is confusing or doesn't make sense.

So we have a new species of villain, the Endless. They are an ancient species who apparently can survive the effects of a Halo ring firing. They were imprisoned on whatever ring Infinite is on (Zeta One? I forget) and Atriox/Banished were trying to awaken them. They awakened the Harbinger, who also was trying to awaken/free the Endless. You stop them in the game, but in the ending I believe it looks like Atriox frees them anyway. Cortana regrets her decisions and sacrifices herself.

I loved the extreme leap towards a more sci-fi narrative that 343 went in Halo 4. With Infinite it's more generic junk. There are no Promethean enemies in Infinite. What a shame. So I guess in the next Halo, the main villains will be Atriox, and Endless. Which, hey, give me this same open world design with some improved mission structure and a more varied environment, I'm fucking in. But I loved the Promethean enemies and that narrative.

Overall, 7.5. Only for the single player.