In high school, one of my friends bought me a copy of Morrowind for the Xbox when he found out I got an Xbox. He really liked Morrowind, and wanted me to like Morrowind too.

This was 2005, and Morrowind for the Xbox had been out for a while; so had the Xbox itself. Most people had traded in their Xbox by this point, because Halo 2 had been out for quite a while and there was nothing else to play on the Xbox; this sent the cost of Xbox games through the proverbial floor, and ironically resulted in there being lots of games to play on the Xbox, even if you didn’t have a ton of money to spend because you were 16 years old. I played Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK 2 EO, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Burnout 3, Fable, Psychonauts, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Ninja Gaiden Black and a whole load of other really good games that did not really cost a lot of money. I did not, however, play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, because The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is really boring. It’s a game about walking between Wikipedia pages.

Despite the fact that Xbox games were very cheap and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was very boring, I was still touched by my friend’s gesture of buying me a video game. As such, I spent about four months of my life reading about other people playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind so that I could convincingly lie to my friend about playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. That’s how much I liked my friend. That’s how boring The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is.

I played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind again tonight via the weird time-travel magic of the original Xbox emulator, and I was unsurprised to find that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is still really boring, despite the fact that you can now see further than before and the textures look nicer (or so I’m told) and the game loads really fast (gotta load all that text!). I’m sorry, friend from the past - but if you somehow showed up on my doorstep tomorrow with a new copy of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for me, I’d still lie to you about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind being really not boring. Some things never change!

Your enjoyment of Forza Horizon 5 will depend a whole lot on your ability to overlook the presentation layer. I know, I know - Backloggd hyper-analysis of a corporate car-driving game - but you straight-up invade the Mexican backwaters in a military cargo plane that smash-drops Broncos and Mercedes and Chevys onto farmlands, for fuck's sake lol!!

Once you've established military/music outpost, the game spends altogether too much time establishing the little dude who is going to be leading the invasion, which more or less sets the tone for this game constantly grappling between "driving good" and "talking bad". I'm all for expression of personal identity in video games, but juxtaposing the aggressive capital-wank (car logo!!!!!!!!) and colonial-wank with a "i'm a disabled they/them :)" character-creation gives this thing huge "Gaming in the Biden Years" energy. Between this and Call of Duty: Vanguard's "world war ii but make it yass qween" stuff, it's been a great week for rainbow flags on the proverbial B52 bomber.

The game starting you out with one insufferably offensive "¡ayyyy cabron we drive the car loco, si!" sidekick and then almost immediately transplanting in the British people from the previous game is really funny! There are more Scottish characters in this than there are Mexicans! But that feels wholly fitting for a game like this, which doesn't really want you thinking about too much of anything; best exemplified by your sidekick explaining the meaning of "mi casa es su casa" to you in an unskippable cutscene that caps off an unskippable tutorial on how to click A to buy a house.

When you're not thinking, you're driving a car - and suddenly, the game becomes transportive. Even on the Series S, it looks absolutely unbelievable - this is a racing game where you can make decisions by looking at the mud tracks the cars in front have made and check encroaching shadows of racers behind you to work out where you should be blocking the road without ever using the rear-view. The cars move within this well-tuned sweet-spot between arcade and sim driving (on Hard assist settings, at least) that lets you feel like you're in control without foisting all the real-life considerations of the machine on you. It's incredibly immersive and fantasy-enabling, but the dream rarely lasts - finish a race, and the alarm clock will ring, forcing you to A-button through minutes of menus and roulettes and Xbox avatars doing the nay-nay in front of an unbelievably realistic render of a Porsche 911 Turbo before you'll be allowed to turn the keys again.

I gotta admit - I'm a sucker for in-game gambling mechanics. I like spinning wheels and opening crates and ticking boxes and all that - but the driving here is so good that all the progression mechanics and open-worlding feel like obstructions in the way of what could be a series of menus to action if it wanted. Driving from point-to-point between events is pleasant, but the game will invariably just stick you on the map's sprawling motorway to get between objectives, which leads to minutes upon mindless minutes spent barreling in top gear like some kind of high-octane version of Truck Simulator: Latin America.

I don't really have a problem with the way Microsoft have set up the actual timeline of progression here, though - it's scattershot and unordered, but it does let casual players get straight to the 1989 Ferrari Testarossa (shoutouts to OutRun, this game's essential antithesis) without having to give away months of their lifespan unless they really want to. Horizon 5's a great idle distraction - especially with Quick Resume allowing you to jump in and out of it within like 20 seconds - but it also takes up like half of my hard disk. You could fit 22 Mario Kart 8's into that bytespace!!

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.

Nothing… Nothing ends.

Simplest point of comparison with Halo is Star Wars. Two original-borrowed trilogies of soft sci-fi fantasy that broke barriers of paradigm and profit, only then to be cast adrift in the outer space of an expanded universe, occasionally pulled out of statis by old gloryhunters and new profiteers in search of new-old money and not much else beyond. No one will ever be able to recapture their bottled god-fire because it now permeates and binds the air around us, invigorating countless other franchises and indies across the galaxy. You can’t really make a new Halo when a new Halo already exists within most shooting games on the market today. All that’s left for the forerunner is to try and make something new to itself with its own old tools.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve worked with Microsoft on software projects (at a thankfully comfortable distance). They know how to ruthlessly manage their first, second and third parties, and 343’s close-leashed position as custodians of Halo’s corpse makes for a fascinating case study - intrepid fans have dug out [countless examples](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/g2wf8e/is_anyone_concerned_after_reading_some_of_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf ) from across Infinite’s lifespan that point to a game development studio that functions more as a monitor of revolving independent contractors than a true arbiter of a franchise’s will. Why is this internal drama important when talking about this game, though? Well, Halo Infinite, moreso than almost any other game I can recently recall, is a series of parts that don’t just fail to add up to a sum, but could be regarded as a P = NP math problem that no one can reasonably solve - by all accounts, Halo should be dead, but capital keeps trying to bring it back to modern life by stitching together disparate product-pieces.

To return to the Star Wars analogy - Halo Infinite is the Force Awakens of the Halo saga: a grab-bag of all the things you remember liking about the franchise (there’s a mission where John Halo literally just walks through corridors listening to audio dramas of the old games), hastily bound together using a vague plot that promises explanations that will finally dig the series out of the lore-hole it has created for itself. Luke Skywalker has vanished / but that’s a story for another time / somehow, Palpatine has returned / etc. You know the drill. Hokey Big Picture lore-weaving aside, the core premise here - that Master Chief has in-media-resurrected himself in the middle of his own franchise reboot and is the only one opposed to the rebuilding of the Halo rings - is surprisingly rich for a series that’s usually as straight as a battle rifle’s burst, and coupled with nascent themes of classic hard-male stoicism in the face of 2D-wife grief and a new life in a present-future society that no longer really venerates government agents and supersoldiers, there’s plenty to work with here; but like the Star Wars sequels, an intriguing foundation can’t be meaningfully sustained or built upon because every member of staff involved in the project is working themselves to death to meet truly insane deadlines. Apparently the final year of delays gave 343 time to add a ton of new (often funny, creative!) dialogue, and it’s telling that so much of it is self-aware - “The Banished only have one idea and they keep reusing it” sighs your companion as you complete your fourth ‘find the battery for this door’ quest in the space of the same mission.

It’s really hard to articulate the feel of Halo Infinite’s campaign without playing it yourself. After a tedious tutorial section that evokes The Library from Halo: Combat Evolved, the game begins to present itself as a hacked-together Forza Horizon-like: a never-ending treadmill of disposable jaunts, enjoyable content you can mindlessly cycle through without greater thought and commitment. Set marker, follow line to marker, click on things that are marked, open map, set marker, follow line to marker. And honestly, when you’re burst from the stresses of reality, trying to fill out a spare lunch break or blow off steam after work? Idly driving a warthog to a big field where you can go back to 2004 and do some double-taps on shield jackals is not the worst feeling in the world to immerse yourself in. I did everything on the open world map, without even meaning to - and I enjoyed myself! Microsoft are beginning to properly stake a pitch for their coming generation, I think - assimilate previously beloved IP, distill their essence, and crush tired contractors under a corporate boot-heel until they can present the game in an easily consumable form that can satisfy broader and broader generational divides in the product marketplace. Games really can just be mindlessly tread-milling cyphers of low-level brain activity for kids and adults alike.

The hands-on gameplay - the moving of Master Chief, the shooting of his guns, the effects of shooting his guns at different targets, managing which guns should be doing the shooting, managing your position in the sandbox, etc. - is tight, and perhaps the best that I can remember it feeling since Halo 3. The grapple is a welcome addition for both traversal and combat, albeit one that overpowers all other equipment options to the point that it might as well be your third gun, a (perhaps unintentionally) radical departure from Halo’s unbreakable twenty-year two-gun tenet. I do think it’s worth putting a disclaimer on this review: about three or four hours in, I was being bore down upon by a Sword Elite on the edge of a cliff, and managed to beat him by pulling a nearby hammer into my hands as he ran towards me, leaping off the rock-face’s edge and then grappling myself back towards the poor guy at full tilt for a face-breaking gravity swing that sent him ragdolling into the horizon - a moment so awesomely Halo that it positively coloured my perception of the game for at least three or four more hours that followed. If nothing else, it’s worth trying Infinite’s open world just to see what grapple-hooking can do for the classic Halo combat pyramid.

Certain enemies, like elites, jackals and brutes, function the exact same as they always have, and it’s fun to watch classic Halo AI reckon with the new abilities of Spider-Chief - they’re often powerless to deal with an enemy that swings from post-to-post and can disappear in the blink of an eye. It feels like 343 were almost afraid of how powerful the near-unlimited use of grapple makes the player - I played on Heroic difficulty, and the game responded in kind by putting me in countless situations that would have been deemed unreasonably cruel in past Halo games - multiple hammer brutes, backed by rocket-launching grunts, covered by jackal snipers from all angles. It’s mad! Taking outposts and bases really can end up feeling like a miniature RTS or tactics game, with thought constantly being given to marine placement, jailbreaks, weapon loadouts and the front-lines of enemy encampment that need to be broken. Going in gung-ho is totally possible, though, provided you are willing to constantly web-shoot yourself from alien freak to alien freak with a god-almighty upgraded Sidekick pistol in hand - one of the best FPS guns in gaming history, and it’s a tragedy that they don’t have this thing in multiplayer!

As another reviewer said on here, this is, at its best, the second level from Halo: CE (aptly named “Halo”) spun out into a full video game - and it’s clear 343 are still building their stuff with Bungie’s software toolbelt. I don’t think having some things stay the same is necessarily a bad thing - why mess with success? - but there is something oddly perverse about 343 Industries doing a Weekend At Bernie’s on a digital corpse Bungie has long since discarded. Three core games in, and nothing 343 has originally developed thus far - the Promethean enemies, the new weapons, the dual Spartan protagonists, the squad-based shooting, the Cortana AI army - has stuck to the wall. The story here, about the Precummers and the Foreskinners and the Banished (totally not the Covenant!) and all these other meaningless alien factions - is pure, unadulterated “Somehow, Palpatine has returned” B-movie badness for readers of Kevin J. Anderson novels, and barely registered on my synapses as anything other than an obstacle that stood in the way of me filling another warthog with rocket launcher party boys on a one-way trip to blowing up more armoured monkey fellas. You’ll just need to steel yourself against an unceasing torrent of cutesy quippery/one-linery between Master Chief and a version of Cortana who’s been patched with all of Twitter’s “men, am I right ladies?” talking points of the past decade. It can sometimes all be worth it, though, when you land a clean sniper bullet right between a hunter’s eyes on the upswing of a well-positioned grappleshot.

Unfortunately, an otherwise mindlessly enjoyable game shits on the table and closes the door by ending with four unbroken hours of linear snap-map corridor shooting, a The Library on Spartan II growth supplements that only ceases marching down hallways to deliver static exposition delivered in a strict “Master Chief look at hologram” style that wordlessly screams “we already delayed this game twice and I haven’t seen my daughter in three weeks, please let me leave”. It’s so copy-and-pasted painful that I’d genuinely recommend just clearing out the open world and then shelving the game instead - unless you like struggling tooth and skewer for an ending so incomprehensible that all you can intuit is that you’re watching a bad-trip Battlestar Galactica cliffhanger of some kind.

Microsoft and 343 have talked a lot of talk about Halo Infinite as a platform for ten years of Halo games, and I can see what they mean - the meat and potatoes of this package in single and multi-player is hearty, fulfilling stuff. The problem isn’t really with how it looks or moves or feels or plays - it’s all fault of a hastily-wrapped enclosure that constantly deploys what I can only describe as “halo simulcra”, best exemplified by the game randomly letting you outside for ten minutes of the finale to drive a warthog and listen to the Halo theme song. Why? Because this is a Halo game, I guess, and Microsoft are giving you Halo as you most viscerally recall it. Don’t think too hard; like Forza Horizon 5, this is brain-off Game Pass Gaming at its very finest. Just don’t let it trick you into thinking it’s anything else. It will try.