A breathtaking exploration and crafting game with unlimited worlds to explore. I ran through the introductory quest series, "Awakening," which teaches the main gameplay systems. I think the concept is interesting and would have wanted to explore more, but it is too tiresome to try to keep the ship fueled up (it requires three different types of fuel, lots of time spent gathering crafting ingredients), and tons of other crafting tasks start to get in the way of the exploration and quests. There is a game mode where your ship never runs out of fuel and your exosuit never runs out of life support, which might be worth playing, but that mode also removes all the hostile enemies, makes all crafting free, and unlocks all blueprints, which might be too much giveaways. Still, I could try that mode and see how it is.

Began playing via XBox Game Pass cloud streaming. Amazing, beautiful open world to explore that truly brings Ptolemaic Egypt to life. Unfortunately, gameplay (quests and combat) gets too repetitive, and even the main quest storyline is relatively flimsy. Side quests, as one might expect, have even more meager storylines. Note that there is a "Discovery Mode" where you can explore the whole in-game world without combat or quests and learn real world facts through narrated, guided tours, which is a surprising highlight of the game (some people will much prefer it to the actual game mode), but unfortunately, also got a little boring for me after a while.

I played through the first two campaign missions on XBox Game Pass cloud streaming. I thought the gameplay was well-done, but it wasn't what I was looking for. It is an FPS with weirdly frequent weapon switching due to low ammo limits for each weapon type, so you use scavenged weapons a lot. Punching enemies does much more damage than shooting them. I didn't know the story of past Halo games, so it felt like starting a movie in the middle. Despite all that, it struck me as a good game with some highly cinematic sequences that felt like being in a sci-fi action movie. I was more in the mood for a game with character progression / RPG elements, but I would be willing to come back to Halo Infinite if I wanted more of a straightforward shooter.

The control scheme using real physics makes moving around the world and even performing simple actions difficult and frustrating. The only way to progress is to examine things in the world that add clues to your ship's computer, so the game largely revolves around struggling to get to various places in order to look at something to record notes about it. I started to uncover the storyline of what was happening, but I found it too frustrating to continue, with too little payoff for the difficulty of getting around. I stopped after perhaps 8 hours of playtime.