Halo: Infinite reveals in our test why open worlds can also be a problem. The bland game world distracts from the brilliant shooter gameplay.
Halo: Infinite fights on many fronts and in the process sets itself a – fittingly for the title – seemingly impossible task. As a multiplayer shooter, it not only has to hold its own between the top dogs Battlefield and Call of Duty, but also win over old and new fans with its campaign. After all, the controversial Halo 5 has offended and alienated many loyal players, whom the Master Chief now has to win over again.
On the other hand, the PC community has had much less contact with the history-steeped Xbox series. It even jumps on the current open-world trend and brings the Master Chief back in top form. But is that enough to pull off the balancing act?
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The story is terrible …
Have your paper and pen ready, this will be on the exam: 18 months after Halo 5: Guardians, Pelican spaceship pilot Echo 216 forks out the Master Chief, aka Spartan number 117, aka John, who is adrift in space. John thanks his saviour by dragging him back to the last remaining Halo ring, Zeta – also known as Installation 07. A place steeped in history: This is where humanity lost its final battle against the exiles led by Warchief Atriox, who defeated the Master Chief in head-to-head combat and threw him out into space.
If your head is already spinning, that’s how you’ll feel for most of Halo: Infinite’s campaign. Developer 343 wastes no time in explaining the basics to newcomers or introducing new characters. Instead, you are constantly bombarded with meaningful names and terms like Cortana, Blood Fathers, Atriox or Infinity, which conceal what is actually a comparatively simple story: After Atriox’s disappearance, the grim exiled aliens have taken up residence here. With the remaining humans, we wage a kind of guerrilla war against them to prevent them from using the Halo Ring as a weapon, and fight a personal feud with the new chief Escharum, who accepts us as an equal opponent.
At the same time, we want to find out what happened to our former partner Cortana. The good-humoured AI companion Weapon, whom we fish out of a Bloodfather construct, helps in this – you can already tell: you need to know Halo to understand Infinite.
However, the lack of introductions is only one problem in the campaign, which is about 10 to 20 hours long. The playing time depends heavily on how extensively you explore the hub worlds. The many open-world side issues take the wind out of the story’s sails and stretch it unnecessarily. One minute you’re escaping spectacularly from an exploding spaceship, the next you have to deactivate three anti-aircraft guns or read data from four transmitters. Yawn!
.. and fantastic!
What is difficult for newcomers to digest makes fan hearts beat faster. Those familiar with Halo can ignore the criticism of the lack of hand-holding and get their tissues and blankets ready for tears and goosebumps. The familiar imposing soundtrack chases you through abandoned ruins resounding with the echoes of a vast intergalactic heritage, and the fantastically written dialogue, superbly dubbed in English and German, conveys much more than just hollow lore phrases.
The Master Chief comes across as sympathetic and human even when wearing a helmet, while communicating delightfully dryly with his AI. Can you hack it? No! and already the armoured fist lands in the filigree alien technology. Okay, that’s the way to do it. Both can’t help but make a mocking comment here and there, while the excited Echo urges caution over the radio or scolds the reckless duo. You just have to take the three of them to your heart.
There’s more to it than light entertainment, though. Halo: Infinite is incredibly emotionally charged because there is so much bubbling under the surface. The Master Chief appears to be strong and composed, but is very much at odds with himself on the inside. He is consumed by feelings of guilt because he lost his companion Cortana and the fight against Atriox.
At the same time, one senses at all times how intimate their relationship still is, without needing many words. Even Escharum, who could have come from Rogues for Dummies with his shallow motivation, still shows depth. He and the Master Chief are remarkably similar and both honourably respect each other as warriors on the battlefield. No character remains one-dimensional.
The open world was not needed
Battlefield also fits the new dimensions: Halo repeatedly dispenses with the usual tube levels in between and releases us into open-world hubs. Actually a logical further development that goes with current trends. But the open areas still seem a little out of date.
For one thing, Zeta simply doesn’t offer the visual diversity that we want from open game worlds today. The contrast between the monumental alien buildings and the mountainous forest landscape actually creates an atmosphere of departure and invites us to explore. Again and again we discover secluded spots where exotic birds circle above waterfalls or fallen Spartans in crevices next to which an audio log tells of their tragic fate. But the Halo Ring just looks the same everywhere, so we quickly got fed up.
The linear passages also lead us through the same stately catacombs deep in the structures of the ring, but here the staging takes it up a notch when we fight off several Pelicans at once or fight our way past aggressive guard drones to a lift.
On the other hand, the generic open-world tasks from the construction kit don’t win any trophies either. You take over outposts or enemy bases that are visually very similar to each other, to which you can then also travel quickly, destroy propaganda towers, free allies or take out high-ranking targets. The reward is the resource bravery, for which you unlock new vehicles and weapons. But there are plenty of both to be found in the game world. The open world doesn’t really make Halo any freer; on the contrary, the expansive areas only distract from the incredibly fun shooter fireworks.
Grab hooks and gadgets: What’s new
Gameplay-wise, Halo: Infinite is a plank, because it scores points exactly where many other shooters weaken: in the enemy AI, the shooting feel and the enormous variety of weapons. In addition, the grappling hook is an ingenious innovation that, together with other gadgets, adds extra momentum to the arsenal. This goes some way to excusing even the generic banished fortresses, because we love moving through them and shooting everything while destroying energy silos or sabotaging factories.
Using the grappling hook, you not only effortlessly scale mountains like a nimble Spartan goat or pull yourself up onto tall buildings to take a sniper by surprise. You can also cling directly to shields and paralyse enemies in this way or board vehicles in order to drag the driver out and take over the wheel yourself in the next breath.
The Spartan cores also allow you to experiment with your play style. Use the grappling hook or dash jump to get out of trouble quickly, while the shield allows you to hold a position longer. You can gradually upgrade your skills by finding the modules while exploring and putting them into your suit.
Where Halo outpaces other shooters
In addition, there’s an insanely large selection of guns and grenades, each of which you carry two types. Included are old favourites like the Alliance needle gun with its barrage of laser projectiles, razor-sharp light beams, plasma bullets or even classic sniper and assault rifles.
New are shock weapons whose projectiles chain together and jump from enemy to enemy or individual weapons like the Mangler, a bolt pistol that blows the helmets off even thickly armoured exiles at close range. All accompanied by massive hit feedback, elegant animations and crisp weapon sounds that boom, roar, hiss and hiss as we sift through exiles with bullets.
But there’s more to the wide selection than just a gimmick: your shotgun can be as thick as you like, but you’ll shoot yourself silly against shields, while a plasma rifle melts them like butter. The enemies also react cleverly, dodging grenades and charging at you just when you need to reload.
Even on the easiest of the four difficulty levels, the hordes of aliens can be dangerous to you if you don’t learn the right tactics against each type. Sword-carrying elites, for example, make themselves invisible – here the fourth and last gadget, the sensor against optical camouflage, helps. The little Grunts are not to be underestimated either, when they rush at you death-defyingly with grenades on their own bodies. But it’s also a bit cute when they shout out loud: Please don’t kill me, let me kill you!
But the shootouts get even crisper and more exciting when we face other Spartans in multiplayer.
This content is still missing:
Actually, you can also experience the entire campaign together in co-op. But because the developers have concentrated on single player and multiplayer for the time being, you’ll have to be patient: The co-op mode is expected to start in Season 2, which will probably be in spring 2022. You will probably have to wait until Season 3, i.e. summer 2022, for the Forge level editor.
The multiplayer is too good to die young
Halo Infinite has shown guts. The multiplayer portion was released in advance for free, throwing itself right into the middle of the battlefield between heavyweights Battlefield 2042 and Call of Duty: Vanguard. A risky strategy that worked: Almost 300,000 players jumped into the fray simultaneously via Steam alone. Where Battlefield struggles with its own technology, Halo runs smooth as butter, and while Vanguard treads well-trodden paths, Halo feels bold and fresh these days. The community is showering the PvP shooter with praise – and we too were enthralled by the multiplayer even before the single player.
But as bright as the fire is in the free beta, which is actually not a beta and is still blazing at release, it is also clear and obvious that it cannot continue to burn like this for long. Halo is different, demanding, old-fashioned – but not only in a good way. It grates exactly where the modern shooter competition shines: In progression and long-term motivation. Where a CoD or BF rewards and celebrates every cool action, while tens of maps, modes and unlocks entice, the yield in Halo Infinite remains unusually meagre.
Two modes, two worlds
Halo Infinite does away with meticulous loadout tinkering familiar from modern shooters. Instead, each player starts with the same simple equipment of assault rifle, pistol and two grenades. Gadgets such as a particularly strong tank, an optical camouflage or the powerful sci-fi weapons with their lasers and plasma projectiles must be collected along the way. So everyone has the same prerequisites – which brings back memories of classics like Unreal Tournament.
The small version of the game also feels a bit like an e-sports tournament, where teams of four fight for kills and objectives such as capture the flag in a small space. The large version with twelve players on both sides shifts the battles to expansive maps à la Battlefield, where the vehicles provide much more chaos and creative freedom. Halo Infinite actually combines the best of two shooter worlds, but sells its strengths completely short. But let’s first get to what sets Halo apart from the competition.
The small mode: Tactics and skill in the smallest space
It’s in the smaller of the two game modes that Halo Infinite feels so very tactical and oldschool. Nested alleys, shops and underground tunnels lead to narrow alcoves that give snipers a perfect view of sprawling places like an oriental bazaar. But we also find enough ways to skilfully circumvent them or to plan our own ambushes. Not only do you look for the optimal weapon and practise aiming, but with only four players on each side, you also have to coordinate, cooperate and position yourselves correctly.
Compared to higher numbers of participants, it is immediately noticeable if someone doesn’t care about teamwork – especially with the objectives. These classically require eliminating as many opponents as possible, capturing the enemy flag, keeping points or, ideally, continuously moving a ball across the map. Those who prefer to go solo on a kill hunt are not only quickly caught off guard, but sometimes also completely ruin the tour for their team.
The big mode: Sandbox chaos à la Battlefield
The tactical depth is not lost in the large 24-player variant, but it is enhanced by a sandbox chaos full of player stories and glorious triumphs, as known from Battlefield in its best moments. While the vehicles are barely shown off in the small mode, here you can throw yourself on a Warthog combat jeep with your squad and crash straight into the enemy base.
While you’re riddling the overawed Spartans with bullets, banshee planes swoop down from above or whole groups entrench themselves for raids at strategic points on the sprawling maps around green hills, rock shelters, bunkers and stranded spaceships to cut off your way back in a dramatic shootout. Here, of course, the big competitor is Battlefield 2042, which captivates us just as much gameplay-wise, but is plagued by massive problems when it comes to the technology.
Many battles turn into a relentless head-to-head race in Halo’s big mode, where every little victory and every kill counts. The modes chase your twelve players all over the battlefield as you have to get the enemy flag, capture all points and hold them at the same time or collect energy cells scattered everywhere.
Cohesion and goal-oriented play win here too, there’s just a lot more happening around you. In both modes, the shooting and the feel of the weapons are beyond reproach – even if you have to learn the ropes before you can successfully shoot.
Halo is perfect for finally getting good at shooters
Halo Infinite doesn’t let you cheat, because luck plays almost no role: you extremely rarely land a random headshot on a weakened enemy, there are no quick kills from the hip. Because compared to CoD, BF and co., the sci-fi shooter has an enormously high time to kill. Because of the futuristic shields of the Spartans, you need several hits even with headshots to render an enemy harmless.
If you want to get a kill, you have to keep the crosshairs on the enemy, constantly compensate for the recoil and keep moving yourself so as not to become an easy victim. A complicated dance that can be quite demanding at first. But in Halo Infinite you learn shooter skills that will help you in all other shooter games.
If this has given you a taste for the game, here are some of the unknown highlights that are currently shaking up the shooter genre:
Halo also manages to make even shield hits feel massive and satisfying thanks to its unique arsenal of weapons. Plasma cannons fizzingly melt the invisible cloak of protection, laser beams slice into multiple enemies at once, while assault rifle fire drums in our ears and a dull thud rewards knocking enemy players right out of their armour in close combat. So the same old human Spartan opponents don’t detract from the massive gameplay one bit.
You feel particularly powerful with the legendary sniper rifles or rocket launchers that appear on the maps during matches. They suddenly kill with just one shot and turn us into gods on the battlefield for a moment.
How about the technology?
Halo Infinite offers extensive settings options for texture quality, reflections, lighting and more on the PC. In multiplayer, futuristic buildings alternate atmospherically with alpine valleys or arid deserts. In single player, the visual diversity suffers somewhat because you are only on the green Halo ring and in the all very similar Bloodfather constructions. With our Geforce RTX 2070 and a Core i7-8700k, the shooter managed between 40 and 60fps at high settings and 4K resolution. At Full HD, there were no problems maintaining the 60fps.
The controls are customisable in detail and work smoothly with controller or mouse and keyboard. Although Halo is actually at home on the console, the latter actually convinces us more because it is easier to aim and the vehicles don’t whiz around quite so awkwardly. Still, it’s unusual to steer them with the mouse and use both sticks on the gamepad.
Where Halo runs out of steam
Leveling bores
This sounds like a PvP dream between Unreal Tournament, CS:GO, Call of Duty and Battlefield. Halo actually brings everything to the table in terms of gameplay, it just doesn’t understand its modern target audience. Where many contemporary games overdo it with the rewards, Halo Infinite even removes the rudimentary ranks from its predecessors.
The only evidence of progress is that you receive 50 to 300 experience points per match – for completed games, not kills, weapon mastery or special actions. Halo fans will be pleased with the Battle Pass with Spartan armour pieces, familiar series skins or suit colours, but it takes far too long to unlock them because all the progress depends on the challenges.
Tasks like killing X enemies with a grenade launcher from the Gungoose only limit our gameplay fun in practice, are cryptically formulated for newcomers and are also difficult to implement because neither modes nor maps can be selected manually in the standard games.
343 has at least listened to the feedback since release and changed the rewards. Players now reap 300 XP for their first match, followed by 200, 100 and only from the 7th match onwards 50 XP – previously, this much was only available for the first round, after which players had to take part in the challenges in order to level up. A laudable improvement that makes progress less tedious. However, due to the lack of rewards for kills or goal-oriented play, it still feels tough and not very satisfying to reach the 1,000 points needed to level up.
A good shooter doesn’t need a Battle Pass that holds a carrot out in front of the player in exchange for a hand up to make it fun. But it just feels dry that the bottom line is the same, whether you won or lost, were good or bad.
Not enough Halo charm
Maps like Streets, with neon-lit cyberpunk alleys, or Behemoth, with large-scale desert sands for vehicles and a futuristic structure for direct hit-and-run battles in the middle, look spiffy. But since there are only ten maps, they keep popping up in the rotation and you quickly get fed up.
Same with the modes. Missing are earlier Halo highlights like Team Swat or Warzone, which break up standards à la Capture the Flag and Domination. The former is a hardcore mode without shields or motion sensors, which speeds up the game and the time to kill enormously. Headshots are the order of the day! Warzone plays on the large 24-player maps and introduces additional AI opponents, further multiplying the chaos. Both variants could theoretically still be delivered later, but are currently not in the shooter, which means there is a lack of variety.
Halo Infinite nevertheless remains a fantastic shooter surprise for PvP and story fans this autumn, which does not have to hide from BF 2042, CoD Vanguard and Warzone. For the free multiplayer to survive in the long term, however, the developers still have to tighten a few screws.
As a Halo fan, playing Infinite’s campaign always made me feel warm or gave me goosebumps. That’s how charged the story is around the familiar heroes fencing for an entire universe. Infinite doesn’t score points for its staging and background music: it’s rare, especially in shooters, that the characters’ relationships are given so much room to breathe and work. It takes a guy who never takes off his helmet and an AI to move me to tears. However, I also know the backstory of both of them – newcomers will probably miss the deeper level of the narrative.
The open world is sadly no more than a gimmick, but even gameplay-wise Infinite otherwise feels like I’m coming home. If I ran out of ammo, I was almost happy because I could try out a new weapon again. At some point I had the perfect answer for every enemy: fire away the shield with a plasma cannon, melee attack, whirl around, tie up the elites with a shock grenade and then eat breakfast one by one with a headshot from the Mangler. Oh yes. If a horde of angry brutes ran at me, I was quickly somewhere else, thanks to my grappling hook, and I was back in action.
Halo: Infinite also has everything a great shooter needs in multiplayer. The unique weapons bring a breath of fresh air to the standard arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns, snipers and the like, and the futuristic maps are intricate and versatile. If I don’t see any land in a direct clash, I simply run around the enemy and take advantage of the fact that I can take them out from behind in close combat with just one blow – or thunder a grenade into their midst. Or I throw myself into the thick of the action on the large maps with my team, diligently marking enemies for them and thus contributing to victory, even if my bullets don’t always hit the bull’s eye.
This makes Halo Infinite not too demanding even for shooter beginners, but at the same time the tactical demands are deep enough to keep veterans in front of the screen. Only in terms of variety, progression and diversity do the developers need to keep at it. Because in its current state, Halo primarily offers a fun basic framework for a long-lasting shooter. You know the maps and modes inside out after just a few hours, and even with the first changes, the levelling still feels trivial and unsatisfying. At the moment I’m having so much fun with the pure gameplay that it doesn’t matter that much. But in the long run, I miss something like this to work towards.
