Halo Infinite Campaign review
By Andy Robinson
On paper, Halo in an open-world setup feels like a perfect marriage.
Even though previous Halo entries were very much linear games, their best moments featured sprawling environments, beautiful vistas and the agency to jump in a Warthog and tear off in your own direction. The shift to a large, freeform map potentially offers a world full of Halo’s best bits.
This series has always been about the sandbox and manipulating its sublime combat loops – shoot! Grenade! Punch! – with freedom and panache. Transporting this formula over to an even bigger world with a map, skill tree, activities and all the other trappings of the open-world genre makes so much sense, and in Halo Infinite’s campaign, it’s a mostly compelling evolution.
Infinite opens with one of many nods to the original Combat Evolved, with Master Chief marauding through a linear enemy starship level, concluding with the famous Spartan taking control of the bridge and dispatching many Brutes, Grunts and Jackals along the way.
Halo Infinite campaign review | VGC
Soon after, Chief finds himself on the Zeta Halo, a ring world that has been occupied by alien forces known as The Banished. The Chief is flanked by a new AI companion and a cowardly pilot, as he steps out on the seemingly endless stretch of green and blue, and embarks on a campaign of alien massacre and ancient relics.
This time around, players are free to explore the Halo ring in a fairly open structure; there’s a map dotted with upgrades to collect, bases to liberate and high-value targets to assassinate. But developer 343 is keen to emphasise that this isn’t an open-world in the traditional GTA sense: the map isn’t the size of a small city and players are subtly ushered through smaller, manageable chunks of the world to explore, without going too far off course.
Although players are free to take on side activities and explore the wilderness of Zeta Halo, there’s always subtle guidance keeping you within a manageable space, until you’re ready to take on the nearby mega-fortress and progress the story further. The format works well, and it means that you never really feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things to do on the map, as in other big-world shooters.
By completing side activities, players are rewarded with Valor points. The more of this resource you collect, the more weapons and vehicles you’ll unlock to spawn from the various Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) around Zeta Halo. For the first time, Master Chief also has a skill tree, with various upgrades able to be unlocked using collectable Spartan Cores hidden around the world. This is a great way of encouraging players into the wilderness to improve their equipment, even if it feels like Chief’s powers could’ve benefited from a bit more depth.
The scale of Zeta Halo solves many issues players had with 343’s previous games, Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians. The environments – of course – are sprawling, naturalistic and hugely reminiscent of the classic Xbox games, which will please those who found 343’s previous playgrounds to be cramped and artistically disconnected from the series’ roots.
The setup also means that the narrative is less intrusive, relying more on radio chatter and audio logs than 5’s occasionally overbearing cut-scenes (although the cinematic sequences that are here are excellent, with some brilliant performances from …….
Source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/review/halo-infinite-2/