Halo Infinite is a brilliant game. Honestly, against the odds, I feel that 343 has delivered one of the best first-person shooters of the last decade. It’s a release that far exceeds the studio’s previous work on Halo 4 and 5 in terms of design and in nailing the ‘combat sandbox’ experience. Worries I had about the transition to an open world have been assuaged and despite the seemingly difficult development period, I simply love the game. Is it perfect? Certainly not. There are numerous tech issues to address and fundamentally, I’m not sure this is the game that was originally envisaged based on reviewing early marketing assets. Regardless though, you’ve got to play it.
Let’s tackle the thorny issue of the open world first. The gradual shift in the games business away from linear design to wide-open play areas crammed with busy work and filler content is becoming a real issue – franchise titles like Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed exhibit these issues at their worst. Thankfully, Halo Infinite’s approach to level design works brilliantly, just as the preview build suggested, taking the foundational building blocks of Halo 1’s second mission and expanding it into something far larger in scope. It works and it retains much of what makes Halo special while introducing a level of freedom that feels like a natural extension. Think OG Crisis rather than latter-day Far Cry and hopefully you’ll get some idea of what I mean.
Halo Infinite is built around the concept of a broken Halo ring – look to the distance and you’ll see pieces floating in space, disconnected from one another. As you progress, you explore these pieces and they basically serve as mission zones – again, comparable to the second mission of Halo 1 but larger. You always have a main objective, just like a classic Halo game, but the width of the mission has been expanded allowing you to find your own way. The various outposts scattered around the map are optional but offer tangible rewards, such as vehicles, once taken. There’s never so much content as to feel overwhelming – you don’t feel as if Halo is a giant checklist of tasks – and this is ultimately why it works where so many modern open world games fail.
While there’s macro-scale, detail at the micro level also impresses. Weapons, structures, enemies and other objects all feature plenty of granular detail. You can walk up to and zoom in on many an object and it holds up well. You can see that a lot of love was poured into building these elements to populate the world. There’s a real density to the environments but also legibility – it’s easy to parse each scene but it never feels sparse. The striking contrast between more natural surfaces and the hexagonal structures visible across the world is genuinely excellent most of the time. In addition to moving Halo into a larger world, Infinite also marks the first time the series has tackled a day/night cycle – infiltrating a base at night feels different than taking it head-on mid-day, but lighting such a world is difficult.