I wouldn't argue Halo Wars games have great story. However, I had a blast playing both.

Spent many hours doing skirmish matches as well.

Finished Halo Wars 2. It was a solid but unspectacular game. Shared many of the flaws the original did. It does have great skirmish options and cool multiplayer but the campaign was very meh. Story was not all that exciting. Atriox was a bad ass enemy but you only see him in a cut scene wiping out a room of Spartans. You don't even fight him in the campaign. AI in the game is really bad, like the first one. You can have an entire battalion of units just sit and get wiped out because they don't fire back at an enemy very close to them. I had to restart a couple of campaign missions because I lost vital units that way. RTS games are all about babysitting units sometimes but it gets ridiculous in this game, especially later when the Banished start using Jackals.

I would rate the games in this order:

Halo 4
Halo Reach
Halo CE
Halo 2
Halo 3
Halo Guardians
Halo ODST
Halo Wars
Halo Wars 2

Halo 4 was so fucking good. Really bizarre that the same developer went on to make Guardians. The narrative is so crazy in Guardians, I really hope they rebound with Infinite.

Does anyone know if the DLC for HW2 expands the story much?

Never got into the Halo Wars games so I can't answer that question. Just wanted to say that I never cared about the Halo franchise until I got a copy of Halo 3. It was my gateway into the series that made me want to play the rest. Surprised that it ranked so low. 

Still enjoyed your thread a lot. Thanks for sharing your experience 

Yes it's definitely worth playing. I did rate the base game higher than you, but it's still safe to say Awakening the Nightmare is a very good campaign. Banished versus the Flood, 'nuff said.

Should play Halo 4 and 5 again myself before Infinite. I also loved 4 and 5 was alright despite some flaws and mess of a story.

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.

Yeah. I have very similar feeling regarding Halo Infinite.

In terms of gameplay, it's the best Halo has played since the Bungie era, if not ever. The weapons all feel amazing to use, and there's minimal redundancy between them. The power equipment is the best iteration of the "fourth leg" added to the classic "Golden Tripod" since equipment was added in Halo 3; you have to pick them up off the map like in Halo 3, but they're reusable like in Reach & Halo 4, though you only get a few charges before they're depleted. I honestly would not mind one bit if Halo Infinite sets the standard for all future games, and that 343i doesn't try to reinvent the wheel again.

The campaign had some amazing moments, but in general was hampered by bog-standard open-world design complete with the standard checklist of repetitive busy work objectives (e.g., liberate X number of UNSC FOBs, rescue X number of Marine squads, kill X number of Banished HVTs), as well as a total lack of variety in the outdoors environments. This stands in stark contrast to previous Halo games, which had discrete levels that took place in different locales, with varied biomes. The best parts of Infinite are its linear main story missions, which look more polished and play much better. Also, I was also bummed that 343i yet again decided to ditch the antagonist of their previous game, have them killed off-screen between games, and have a new one as the overarching threat. They got rid of the Didact and replaced him with evil!Cortana in Halo 5, and then replaced her with the Big Bad Duo of Banished War Chief Escharum and the mysterious Harbinger. At least it seems like Atriox and the Banished are still a threat, and hopefully 343i keeps them around in Halo 7.

It's a great game, and overall I'd say it's 343i's best Halo game to date, but it could have been so much better.

I played through all of the Halo Franchise in preparation for Halo Infinite launching too, most of them for the first time. I had played Halo fully before and most of Halo 2 in co-op I believe but none of the others. (I skipped ODST as I did not feel it.)

My main complaint about Halo Infinite probably would be that it felt so small for the type of game it was imitating. If you are going to transition to an open world game design then it really needs to be bigger than what Infinite produced. I was done with the campaign in under 17 hours, which is tiny for an open world game with side content. I mean I played 56 hours of Far Cry 6. Game quality is more important than length but Infinite felt like a game made with limited resources when in reality it had tons of money and time poured into it.

I agree with most of the criticisms here of Halo Infinite campaign. Very strange to me that it all took place in one biome. I also agree with the positives mentioned, especially how great the gameplay feels. In my opinion, it is the best that Halo has ever felt. And Halo already had the best FPS gameplay ever. Consequently, the PvP experience is great. It's the first Halo that I have put serious PvP time into. I have several hundred hours in it at this point.

I'd give the campaign something like a 7/10. The PVP experience started at the same 7/10. But, after 2 years of updates, it is a solid 10/10. Overall, I say the game is a 9/10 at this point. I wish they had come out of the gate stronger, so they wouldn't have scrapped their expansion plans.

I actually feel a lot better about 343 handling the series going forward. This game was a big change for them. In some respects they dropped the ball, but they delivered incredibly good gameplay. They now seem to understand how a live service shooter works, and certainly everyone understands that the campaign needs to feel more varied at this point. So, I expect a great entry next time. Changing the engine does make me a little bit nervous. But overall, I feel good about the future of the series.

Yeah I was done and shelved the game after about 20~ hours.

Wasn't a good selection of maps on launch either.

Game was great, just empty, needed another year of development time to really add in the extra "stuff".

It's always going to be hard to make a Halo game where it will *forever* be judged and compared to the height and fervor of Halo 3, which was a massive event itself.

Would love to see Bungie come back to the fold.

I was wondering which halo you enjoyed most through your playthroughs. For myself I enjoyed halo 2 the most.