- Genre: FPS
- Platform: Xbox Series X
- Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One
This feels like a game that was searching for an identity that it never found. It’s very clearly Halo, but it tried to push too far into the Ubisoft open world formula, and it doesn’t really feel like it made it there. While the shooter part of it works really well, it felt dragged down by the rest of the metagame in the half dozen or so hours I put into it to the point where I just didn’t feel like picking it back up.
The core mechanics of this game are still as good as ever. Ya I get if a console shooter isn’t your cup of tea, but for what it’s aiming for it’s still incredibly fun in moment to moment combat. The guns have really clear archetypes and you kind of fade into the ones that you like to play with the most. Aim assist is just present enough to reduce the frustration of aiming on a gamepad. Running enemies over in vehicles is still fun. The Ghost being as small as it is meant that I could pretty much bring it anywhere, including into encounters it didn’t belong. However, it’s the enemies that still work the best.
Halo enemies always had really clear purposes, and that still works here. Grunts are still your fodder and effectively die in one hit, but they fit the role of distracting you well. Jackals still have the pain in the ass shield, which encourages you to get into melee range or use explosives to clear them out. Larger enemies like Brutes encourage precision in order to kill them faster via headshots. New enemies like the Skimmer add a level of verticality to throw you off just scanning at ground level. In general, the encounters are built well around sprinkling a few different types of enemies to make you approach them in varied ways based on the environment. In a vacuum it works well, and in past games it’s been able to be balanced against slow growth due to the linearity of the experience. That is all gone here.
The open world nature of this entry just feels like a mistake. Rather than having crafted encounters along a relatively linear path, you’ve got random encounters that constantly pop up going between points. Rather than the core gameplay being progression through a story, you’ve got a lot of miscellaneous stuff scattered about. The problem is that there’s only so much you can do with this kind of gameplay. It’s Assassin’s Creed or Ghost of Tsushima without the variety. You don’t really have the ability to do large scale traversal puzzles like that series. You don’t really have the choice to do stealth-focused gameplay or action-heavy sequences as a distinct choice. You just have guns blazing.
Where this ends up dragging is that every encounter feels the same. As you’re going from story point to story point you’ll inevitably see a bunch of encounters. However, it all bleeds together. You’ll see your half dozen grunts, a couple jackals, and a couple brutes/hunters/elites. Rinse and repeat. Between story spots you might see a half dozen of these. You’ll also see typically a handful of side quests – rescue a squad, destroy a base, kill a target – that also just have the same combat. Because the open world just has so much ambient combat, you quickly reach a point where it becomes a chore to traverse, rather than fun to traverse.
Within a pretty short time I basically just started hijacking the first Ghost I could find and running around guns blazing. From a practical standpoint, it made encounters much easier to skip because I could just zoom right on past. When I got to an encounter I did need to engage in, it also meant that I was in a moving resource with infinite ammunition and pretty predictably high power. From a min/max standpoint it was just far more effective. However, whenever I didn’t have a Ghost the game instead just felt like a chore. At that point I knew this one wasn’t working out for me.
It also ultimately didn’t help that there’s no co-op. I’ve played almost every entry in the series exclusively in co-op, so not having that is a huge drag. I could see this style of metagame working well in co-op because I could log in with the same group of people, run around for a while doing whatever as we shoot the shit, and over time we could progress through the game. Doing repetitive things over time wouldn’t matter as much because that’s kind of not the point of just having fun playing games in that group setting. Not having co-op at launch – although it’s apparently coming soon™ – is a baffling decision for a series built on co-op stories and multiplayer gameplay.
Infinite just kind of feels open world for the sake of being open world, and it feels to me like an anchor around the game’s neck. The core shooting mechanics are still fantastic, but when you are doing repetitive ambient encounters instead of crafted linear segments, there just doesn’t feel like any sense of progression or growth. Every encounter gets kind of samey, and over time I just felt like avoiding them entirely. For a game built around combat, not engaging is a weird thing. In all likelihood I’ll revisit this when co-op finally launches, but for now this one feels like a swerve that isn’t working for me.
