This obviously isn't a review and I'll be back to make proper reviews soon, but my first impressions with the beta are VERY good so far. While I would like to see some better optimization on PC and I kind of hate the new shotgun, everything else so far has been great and especially for a beta. The grapple shot is the best thing ever, the new personal A.I.s add a lot of personality, every weapon has a place in the sandbox unlike Halo 4 and 5, the movement is extremely fun, and they finally added bots fight against. Absolutely phenomenal. I could see this being one of my favorite games in the series. I hope they eventually add playable elites, assassinations, and more weapons that I miss, but 343i has done a fantastic job with the beta. I can't wait until its full release and here's hoping the campaign is par to quality.

TL;DR - "This game really makes you feel like you're Spider-Man"

Guns feel amazing, I usually like to stick to a few weapons but I found myself swapping often and trying to utilize a variety of weapons. The open world is an absolute game changer, exploring it feels great and discovering a UNSC prisoner camp just by wandering into gets you pump. Movement/equipment feels awesome. Of course the grappling hook changes how Chief fundamentally moves, but I found myself using the other equipment nearly just as often especially the drop shield. I can't think of a recent gaming moment that has filled me with as excitement as jumping of the moving gondola, grappling to a drone enemy over an instant death pit, death-punching him, and then just as I'm about to fall to my death I grapple back to the gondala.

Say what you will about the story or long development, Halo Infinite is the game I had the most fun playing in 2021.

third review: ahh man... reading that second review is so painful. 343 finally figured out the gameplay and completely fumbled the bag. it just needs more maps, man. maybe this will smooth out in a few years, but it's gonna be a lot longer than almost anyone thought

second review: i have a feeling this score will keep changing until it's eventually a perfect 5/5. the campaign, while flawed, was a ton of fun, and surprisingly challenging on heroic. so much room for experimentation. the multiplayer is a fucking revelation. best pvp game for me since reach. with more maps, modes, fixes, etc., this game will easily be my favorite fps within a year or 2. excellent, excellent work from 343. best gameplay in the series, bar none

first review: still too early to leave a rating (i'm really curious how the campaign turns out), but my GOD is the multiplayer fucking fun. best pvp shooter gameplay in YEARS. fix the progression and add playlists and its everything i've dreamed about for halo

343 has finally delivered a campaign truly worthy of John-117. Infinite's campaign has a gripping story that expands the Halo lore, wraps up what needed wrapping up, and asks intriguing questions, lays out intriguing new mysteries, for the Chief to solve. Great open world gameplay that is terribly fun to traverse. The environment variety is a bit limited, but it's hard to be upset about it when the environments are so beautifully crafted and filled with such interesting and engaging enemy encounters.

Now just patch up the multiplayer's issues and we'll be all set.

• waits 5 minutes in a lobby, gets stuck playing Oddball
• goes pistol only when it becomes obvious it's still better than the assault rifle
• gets teabagged after dying for the first time
• gets rocketed from part of the map that looks inaccessible
• spawns into the path of someone's melee

Yep, it's Halo all right.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

UPDATE (11/18):

In all seriousness, though, the more I play Halo Infinite the more I like it and the more obviously polished it seems. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, not that anyone asked for it: an exegesis of my original review.

I think the snark I felt on Day 1 of Halo Infinite's beta week probably arose out of something I'd sort of repressed: that I've always found the Halo series somewhat alienating, somewhat opaque. Maybe it goes back to high school, when my friends with Xboxes couldn't stop raving about Halo. I joined in for a few of their LAN parties, where my latent GoldenEye prowess at least gave me a fighting chance, but I never really "got" it. The shooting felt good for a console game (I was more of an Allied Assault and, later, original Call of Duty guy), but the washed-out aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way and the Gregorian chants made me snicker.

It wasn't until 2008 that I owned a Microsoft console, and even then, neither Halo 2 nor Halo 3 held my interest for very long. (To date, I have only finished one Halo campaign: the first one, and that was in 2020.) The only game in the series I ever really connected with was Halo: Reach, which I played to fill the hours of one of the loneliest years of my life. Reach was the first Halo confident enough to shake up the series' formula, and to lean into its sillier side by featuring its wackiest, dumbest game modes just as prominently as Team Slayer.

Most of my time in Reach was spent playing Grifball, a "sport" in which one player attempts to suicide-bomb the opposing team's goal while everyone else gives chase with giant hammers. Sure, modes like this technically had existed in Halo 3, as user-created custom games -- but in Reach, they had the full weight of developer Bungie's resources behind them. For the first time, it felt like Halo saw through its own pretentiousness to create the kind of multiplayer experience my high-school friends had raved about a decade earlier.

I think it's safe to say that Halo Infinite is the most comfortable Halo since Reach, and I mean that as both compliment and critique. On the one hand, handling Halo's signature arsenal and piloting Ghosts has maybe never felt better; the presentation is slick beyond belief, every audiovisual aesthetic smoothed to the gaming equivalent of glass. The maps available so far aim for different swathes of the color palette, from a desert marketplace to a neon-glowy nightclub district to what resemble paintball arenas evoking the primary-color blockiness of Halo 3.

But on the other hand, what's missing out of the gate is official support for all the game modes that made Reach a more singular experience. And not only can you forget about playing Grifball, Hockey, Headhunter, or Race, among others -- you won't even find an official playlist for free-for-all Slayer. The lack of variety in game modes disappointingly betrays the obvious efforts developer 343 has undertaken to both improve and diversify Infinite's visuals since its disastrous showing at E3 2020.

Although it will probably be patched sooner than later, it's worth considering the multiplayer's abysmal progression system as effectively an extension of 343's overconfidence in launching with, for lack of a better term, "lowest-common-denominator Halo." The game rewards a flat 100 XP per match played, no matter the length, no matter whether you win or lose, no matter whether you're the top player or the worst of the lot. You might get a few hundred more XP on occasion if you manage to, say, rack up five kills with some non-optimal weapon.

What's egregious here isn't that it takes forever to get enough XP to unlock a single cosmetic that looks like it wasn't designed by an AI. What's egregious is that you could play the best game of your life in Halo Infinite, and you'll be rewarded the same as you would for getting absolutely stomped. This is particularly frustrating for players of average skill, like me. The fact is that I don't have the same twitch reflexes as when I played Reach a decade ago (let alone OG Halo a decade before that). Simply put, I'm not as good at competitive shooters as I used to be. Getting rewarded a little extra for performing well is critical to my engagement with games like this, in which I'm almost certain to be dominated by teenagers and by people who have been playing Halo games more consistently for the past twenty years.

On my second night with the game, I wiped out the opposing team in Oddball with five or six successive swings of that weird little skull, a remarkable feat for a Halo player as untalented as myself. It felt amazing, but it felt almost as bad a few minutes later when Infinite rewarded me the same as if I'd spent the entire match AFK. (You can already start to see players using this as a strategy to farm XP, by the way. The number of AFK players I've been saddled with, especially in Ranked, is nothing short of alarming.)

Needless to say, games can have meaningful progression systems that are also monetized; Apex Legends kept me on the hook for over two and a half years. Even the novelty of a shiny new Halo only lasts for so long. What's more, "new Halo" is not a sustainable identity for this (or any future) game in the series. 343 will need to inject more personality into Infinite and fundamentally rethink its progression systems for me to still be playing it in a few weeks' time.

if you want to have a perfect encapsulation of the modern state of triple-A video games, then the free-to-play multiplayer mode of Halo Infinite is where you need to find it.

loading up this game is kind of an upsetting experience. the UI is absolutely terrible, just like Halo 5 the game is missing series-staple features like Forge, game modes like Infection, Assault, Juggernaut (this isn't even all of it, the game will release without a campaign co-op mode for the first time in series history, which to me would be like a fighting game being released without a training mode), locking basic customization features behind an obscenely miserly battlepass grind that doles out a drip feed of additions to a customization suite that no longer deigns to let you change the color of your character freely, made more insidious by the game itself placing more emphasis on individual player expression than any game in the series before it, what with each player using their own colors even in team game modes and a roll call at the beginning of every match to show off your cosmetics and give shitty little kids an opportunity to call you a Default.

however. once you're in the game? once you're haloing? oh man. oh buddy. it's fucking halo!!! halo just rules, the place it sits between more classic boomer shooters and more modern "boots on the ground" fare has always given it a distinct niche, one that rewards strategy and knowledge of its systems in ways that it's contemporaries simply don't, whilst offering a vast enough sandbox of intersecting weapons, vehicles, and ephemera that the game becomes an engine for creating hilarious stories to share with your friends. why else do you think the theater mode exists? (well, existed lol) just on a visceral game feel level this is by far 343's most successful iteration of the sandbox to date, excising much of the bizarre decisions that inflicted their Halo 4 efforts while still carving out it's own niche within a series that still maintains it's older efforts to play at your leisure through the master chief collection. it's very early days yet so we don't know exactly how balancing, map design, and things like that are gonna shake out in the long run, but just on a base level? this game is such a blast. two decades of iteration and tweaking of this formula have created a game that is like kinesthetic ambrosia, and it's refreshing to play a western modern-AAA game with visibly absurd money behind it that feels consciously designed, y'know?

i love the master chief collection for offering so much halo so readily, but the fact that it offers so much is kind of why it always feels depopulated and muted despite having a healthy player base. everything is so decentralized that there isn't really A Halo that everyone is playing, y'know? and that's what excites me about Infinite. a free-to-play halo game that everyone can play together and enjoy...once they get through the actively depressing menus lmao. even takes up a very normal and sensible amount of space on your hard drive!! i don't have to plan my life around having halo installed!! it's a miracle!!!

halo night with the squad...it's been a long time without you, my friend...

Fans of Halo and Street Fighter have a lot in common - put ten of them in a room, and you'll get ten different opinions on what the best game in the franchise is.

I think the game you like the most from a franchise is a function of time and place rather than quality and content. I'm a diehard for Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, and it's undoubtedly because it's the one I played a ton of it on the original Xbox with my friends in the year following Daigo's straight-finessed blowup of EVO 2004; if I'd come to it cold-turkey on a Fightcade emulator in 2017 or whatever, I doubt the game would be able to hold me at all, despite its inherent 2D magic. I can look past its flaws - of which there are quite a few - because they're being covered up by falling rose petals of epic parries and hard-won comebacks.

Halo 3 is my favourite Halo game - exquisite graphics, a solid weapon roster, a campaign full of memorable "epic" moments and a flawless "it just works" multiplayer mode that highlighted every new strength of the Xbox 360. I played it religiously in the dying days of my teenage years, when time was plenty and money was scarce and I could give a good game the respect it deserved. With Halo 3, I couldn't have asked for more - it's been 14 years now, and I can still remember specific moments in time from that game like I'm watching them in Theater Mode in the present.

Ask the older boys on my hometown street what the best Halo game is, and they'd probably yearn for the perfect simplicity of the Halo: Combat Evolved pistol play, or champion the revolutionary nature of Halo 2's dual-wielding dual-protagonists and never-done-before online play. My old work colleagues might advocate for Halo Reach's gut-wrenching, grit-writhing story or the inclusion of cherry-picked gameplay elements from the juggernaut that was early-2010s Call of Duty (I thought that Reach was my favourite Halo, but replaying it in the Master Chief Collection revealed that the game's attempt to be a COD-contemporary has curdled it like blue space milk). Some jazz-loving freaks who read the Halo books might even try to convince you that ODST was The One. And someone, somewhere, is no doubt extolling the virtues of Halo 4 and Halo 5 - though it ain't me, nor anyone who I can find on Backloggd. They're definitely out there, though. Like the Street Fighter fans who swear down that EX 3 was the best one.

These subjective perceptions of Halo's appeal is why a Halo with the title Infinite was always gonna be an impossible ring for any game developer to jump through. It kinda feels like Halo Infinite has always existed as a sort of back-handed joke and a cack-handed game; a seventh-generation relic from a bygone era of shooters, hopelessly playing catchup with Fortnite, Apex Legends, and its old rival, Call of Duty. Infinite's botched reception last year was, of course, downright cruel - but also emblematic of how players have come to regard post-Reach Halo: a franchise that can no longer please anyone.

After a few days of Halo Infinite's multiplayer, I think it's safe to say that they somehow found a way to please everyone across 20 years of Halo history. It's funny - most people I've played with so far have a Halo backstory that they wanna share with their fireteam - "Oh, I really liked Halo 3..." ; "hmm I think my last one was 4?" ; "Yeah they added sliding in Halo 5, it was pretty cool." ; and so on - but no matter their origin story, my headset usually lights up with plenty "AWW YEAH"s and "AWW FUCK YEAH"s within a minute or two of the Slaying getting underway.

I'm not sure what it is exactly that's working for everyone, but Infinite seems to be this very delicate blend of every Halo that came before - there's the power items from 3, the sprinting from 4, the armor stuff from Reach, the out-there soundtrack decisions of ODST (overwrought Mogwai/Imagine Dragons post-rock for Halo is a cool choice imo) - but none of it takes centre-stage in a dominant, overbearing way. It just feels good to be a spaceguy with a spacegun and drive a spaceship. The classic Halo shit, with a little bit of Quake III and Unreal Tournament's item spawning thrown in for good measure this time - could Infinite fill that wafer-thin market slice that's been crying out for a new arena shooter? One that doesn't involve dying every 10 seconds to guys who've been playing every day since 1999? Anything but another ADS military shooter, please.

For me, the mark of a good multiplayer game is that even repeated death is fun - and repeatedly running in fear from an xX_Xx-tagged pro gamer Spartan with a gravity hammer prompts just as many "HAHAH OH SHIT!! DUDE" moments as getting a killstreak with a Ghost does. 343 may have rediscovered the essential Halo energy that permeated the Bungie entries.

... In multiplayer, at least. It does feel a little weird to heap praise on what is essentially a glamorous beta test for the online mode. I know nothing at all about the campaign, apart from the fact it's some huge Halo of the Wild open world thing with Master Chief going back to the halo rings yet again. I will probably play it, get bored of following waypoints and climbing towers, and then put it back on the shelf - such is the power of GamePass Gaming! But I could see myself sticking around for Infinite's multiplayer - god knows I'll have to if I ever wanna unlock anything.

Campaign: Whatever. Far Cry but better. Not by much though.

Multiplayer: Limited playlists, low amount of maps, and SBMM make this rather unsavory to play. Im also just not really a Halo guy.

Also it's a battle pass that spans half a fucking year. You can take your time with it, stop whining about a lack of xp progression between matches. The monetization system is the same as any other game with a cosmetic shop you pack of fucking nerds. No one cares that you don't get to play dress up with the armor cause you don't want to pay for it.
Dipshit redditors really like whining about everything. Be glad you fucking dorks don't have to deal with lootboxes anymore, I'll take the current shop over that rng bullshit.