The grappling hook is the best thing that ever happened for the franchise. There were very few moments where I wasn’t having fun playing Halo Infinite. But nothing beats grappling-hooking across an enemy base to land on a group of enemies, drop a shield and tear into them with the ridiculously overpowered Arcane Sentinel Beam. Mechanically, Halo Infinite is the best Halo yet, and that hurts to say considering the story is hot garbage. I vehemently believe that there’s nothing that 343 could do in the next ten years to redeem Halo Infinite. It’s because of that idea that Halo Infinite feels like one glorified mission as opposed to a fully fleshed-out campaign. Even the concept of making Halo Infinite a live-service game is flawed, because that just can’t function with an active narrative.
HALO 2 CUTSCENES SERIES
I understand that Halo Infinite has had a rough development and needed to launch to promote the Xbox Series X, but it was not worth it to release like this.
The stakes have never felt more meaningless. But it lacked the gravity, gravitas and grandeur of any of the previous Halo games. You’re just beating your head against a bunch of Banished until you inevitably win. There’s quite literally nothing to jump into in Halo Infinite’s story. However, the concept of the story was flawed from its inception. Halo Infinite attempts to act as a soft-reboot of the current events, thereby making it easier for people to jump in. We can all go around saying that Halo Infinite needed more time in the oven, but that’s not the issue here. Halo Infinite does a better job than most, but come on, it’s not going to kill your fan base for Chief to stop acting like a stoic 80’s film character for more than a minute. There is so much more to this character that these games never get right. I am sick and tired of these games tiptoeing around John-117’s emotions with a blank helmet stare. One thing that Halo Infinite does that interests me is humanizing Master Chief, but it doesn’t go far enough. I guarantee you that whatever would have come of it would have been infinitely better than Halo Infinite. 343 should have had the guts to follow through with Halo 5’s narrative despite the divisiveness.
HALO 2 CUTSCENES UPDATE
343 claims that Halo Infinite is going to last a decade and update it with story content, but that’s nothing but an empty promise right now, and what we have right now is a boring Halo experience. Ironically, 343 ended up in the same spot it was in at the end of Halo 5: Guardians - at the end of Act 1 of a story with no additional pay off. There are almost no character arcs, each character feels like a foil for Master Chief, and it completely disrespects Cortana’s character arc from the previous games. Almost nothing important or notable happens from beginning to end. The developers wrote off important beats and emotional arcs lazily in an attempt to bring about a new era of Halo, one that’s cheaply made and feels like it’s meant to appease the fans.īut as a die-hard Halo fan, Halo Infinite delivers the most boring story in a Halo game.
Halo Infinite actively sets out to retcon the major story beats in Halo 5: Guardians by explaining them away through passive cutscenes. While I was upset that Halo Infinite fast-forwarded the most interesting part of the Halo narrative, I was excited to see how 343 handled the aftermath. Everything we know about those 18-months are explained through audio logs you find in the open world. The war with Cortana, the Arbiter, and Spartan Locke don’t show up. It’s not featured at all in Halo Infinite apart from passing references. For all intents and purposes, the promising story that was to follow Halo 5: Guardians came and went. The new villain is Escharum, the ruthless Warchief of the Banished, and Master Chief has to fight him alongside The Weapon, which is basically a discount Cortana. In Halo Infinite, the UNSC finds itself stranded on Zeta Halo in a war against the Banished, a splinter group of the Covenant that featured prominently in Halo Wars 2.