When I last talked about Halo Infinite's multiplayer, I said that its core play has the potential to endure even as the industry marches into the future. Its longevity isn't down to it simply having countless assignments to turn in or a multitude of trophies to place in a case. It will survive because it could take years to master all of the game's weapons and exhaust all possible combat encounters it could generate. But before you become convinced we're living in some gilded age of Halo, it's worth taking a look at the small print on the multiplayer.

Two hulking chains threaten to keep Infinite from soaring as a long-term competitor in its genre. Firstly, there's the hidden fee of the live service format: the technical instability of its software at launch. You get programs sputtering and glitching their way out of the gate even at the best of times, but there was a dark patch about a decade ago in which a lot of AAA blockbusters were emerging misshapen from the mould. Much of the crisis stemmed from the rampant manufacture of annual releases. More recently, it felt like the industry was digging itself out of that pit, but with the proliferation of perpetually updating products, it appears to be sliding right back in. Microsoft's new wunderkind has not been spared.

Secondly, a game that wants to court long-term interest needs to ensure there are no cracks in its long-term objective and reward systems, but Infinite is leaking all over the shop. You're going to see its glitches and faulty meta-structures come together to bring out the worst in the other. They're like two bored children on a long car trip.

Going all the way back to Halo 3, there was a website on which you could bask in the glory of your medal collection and match history. Infinite doesn't come with its own version of that cabinet of accolades. 343 also recently deleted most of the service records for Halo 4 backwards, and some of the stats they left intact are clearly wrong. Waypoint tells me I have completed 13/10 missions in Combat Evolved: Anniversary, which I find suspicious. There are also no publicly displayed levels or persistent qualifications that carry between all modes in Infinite. You can raise your rank in Ranked Arena, but that is for your eyes only.

The only mode-agnostic progression system in this FPS is its Battle Pass. If you're not familiar with Battle Passes, the idea is that you get a new rewards card at the start of a season, and as you play, you level it up. At each level, you unlock rewards, and these passes usually come with a free reward track and a paid one. Infinite's is no exception. This record is integral to how Halo now vends cosmetics. In Infinite, you can claim some underwhelming skins by plodding through the Campaign, but there are no armour pieces available through that channel, even though you could be paying as much as £50 for it.

You can acquire some items by completing all the timed Challenges for a week, but this earns you second-rate accessories like emblems and visors rather than the building blocks of an outfit. Some of these items can also be incompatible with the base armour you're wearing, so that's cool. The free Battle Pass is equally stingy with cosmetics of substance. But 343 is giving you the game free of charge; it's not an unreasonable ask that you pay a few bucks if you want to spruce yourself up.

The current Battle Pass costs about $10; unlike most competingcommodities, Infinite's permits don't expire, and the present one lasts for about six months. Now and then, the developers also drop an event in which anyone can unlock themed pieces. If the current numbers hold, you'll be able to pay for two-and-a-half years of Halo Infinite Battle Passes for the same price you'd pay for one AAA game. I'm not going to turn my nose up at that.

Yet, after you've completed your Battle Pass for the season, you hit a drought of rewards. There's no prestiging, no continuing to raise your level for kicks; you just stop hard. And at the time of writing, I've already come to that stop. Granted, that was as a freakishly avid player of the game, but I'm not alone. And I'd take an educated guess that plenty of customers who've bought entry to this fashion club are going to hit level 100 long before May 2022. Unfortunately, even slamming into the buffers at the back of the Battle Pass won't win you Infinite's top-end haute couture.

The most eye-catching baubles sell independently through an in-game store. In that emporium, weapon and vehicle skin bundles come in around $10, while armour sets will take a $20 bite out of your bank balance. You can buy some of the items from those bundles separately, but not others. The store also switches stock from day to day and week to week, meaning if you don't purchase a product now, you might never get the chance to, which feels needlessly manipulative.

$20 for some video game clothes was not a good deal in Fortnite, and it's not a good deal in Halo Infinite. Still, as discussed, you can get some nifty duds without double-dipping. I wish I could unlock some less irritating AI to roll with, though. Your multiplayer matches are now commentated by saccharine sidekicks that make Guilty Spark look straight-laced. They usually go for some low-hanging "That just happened!" jokes and speak with a 100-decibel chipperness that is out of step with the rest of the game's tone. But let's point the brunt of our criticism at the XP system, which you can't negotiate around if you want to unlock armour.

The progression continuum of Infinite's Battle Pass is inadvisably flat. Most games with levels make it so that the next leg requires more XP than the previous. An achievement curve ensures that we do not become bored with the tasks, each asking more from us than the last. Additionally, inclines in progression systems make sure that greater rewards are balanced against greater challenges. In Infinite, each level takes 1,000 XP to complete, which ensures a steady stream of new acquisitions into your armoury. However, it also means that we don't get the desirable experiences I discussed above. With a level level progression, the early stages dawdle by too slowly while the end stages are too easy to complete.

And no longer do you receive any experience points for your performance during a match. There's no bonus for a win or pulling off a multikill, and no penalty for a loss or finishing with a miserable K/D. That game design golden rule that reward should be proportional to success goes out the window. This time around, we earn XP through Challenges, but whether you advance on a Challenge is often highly dependent on luck, and these missions even incentivise play that diminishes users' enjoyment. Most Challenges task us with winning or completing matches of a certain gametype or bagging a prescribed number of bodies via a specific method. Typical examples include winning 2 Strongholds matches or killing 20 Spartans with the Sidekick.

Select gametypes like FFA Slayer or Fiesta have dedicated playlists, but most don't. So, if you're looking for a CTF or an Oddball match for your Challenge, all you can do is put yourself at the mercy of the generic hoppers' RNG. Whether you are grouped with a team skilled enough to clinch victory or if you land on a map housing the weapon you need is also up to chance. If the required weapon does spawn on a map, there's no promise you'll get to handle it either. I've spent a good six days working towards a big capstone reward but had to abandon my pursuit because I'd spent hours without matches of a certain flavour.

When a player does not drop into the gametype they're seeking, this encourages them to quit so they can search again. If a teammate bails on you in ranked competition, you have a gaping void in your lineup and are virtually guaranteed a loss. If someone jumps ship in a social throwdown, the game replaces them with a dim-witted bot that can't simulate human behaviour. The upside to the Challenges is that they can coerce players to learn unfamiliar new weapons and demo tools and gametypes they'd never normally touch. Yet, you're also, for the first time, locked into implements and rules that might not be your cup of tea.

Hate the randomness of engagements in Free-For-All? Too bad, you have to score 7,500 points in FFA battles to fill one of your tickets. Do you feel like dirt trying to thread the needle of a Sniper shot? Then you're not going to enjoy snagging 10 Sniper kills. You can obtain "Challenge Swaps" to trade a current job for a random alternative, but you could roll another stinker, and you have a finite supply of Swaps. That is unless you want to put more real money into the game. You get the grift.

The Challenges further coax players into sabotaging their team. Participants are taught to execute on kill methods that cross off their personal objectives rather than the collective objective of winning. For example, someone might be able to deliver a fatal gunshot to an opponent but opt for a much harder Back Smack attack because they need five Back Smacks for a Challenge. They might swap a weapon they're proficient with for one they can barely aim because that gun outputs XP as much as it does bullets. The Challenge menu takes an aeon to load in when you first boot, and you can't check it in-match. A pernicious glitch also means that sometimes the game doesn't log your Challenge progress at all. It's crushing in the cases that you performed some unlikely feat such as grappling a player out of their vehicle or chaining a shock attack between four Spartans.

The absolute anathema for players are the Big Team Battle Challenges. This gametype takes a lot of nights off. Regardless of platform, you can try to match into it and find you can't connect to the server or that the session gets jammed loading. You may discover that completing the weekly missions is impossible, even if you've spent evenings building up to it, because the networking back-end is on fire. The tendency of the matchmaking system to slow to a crawl is also annoying if you're burning an XP Boost which ticks away over the course of an hour. 343 recently tried to patch the game to fix BTB, but if anything, they just made it angry. Sometimes, a match in this mode will soft or hard lock for me now, and occasionally, the game will crash during the search process for any playlist. Both those issues I'm encountering on Xbox One specifically.

I'm not much of a cheerleader for these epic showdowns anyway. With twelve Spartans to a team, my contribution feels like a drop in the bucket. In previous Halos, your diminished stature in these matches was counteracted by access to vehicles, but in Infinite, that access is fairly random. The most destructive vehicles don't spawn at bases but at unpredictable drop-off points. And while the majority of multiplayer maps look passable or even brilliant in their allure, the BTB environs resemble those underbaked Campaign zones. Community Director Brian Jarrard says the team are currently considering omitting all BTB Challenges from the game and that efforts to repair the mode are ongoing.

If you're looking for a more compelling vehicle for play, I'd recommend Attrition. It's only appeared during a two-week event so far with no announced plans to add it to the regular rotation, but its overall pacing matches that punchy immediacy of the moment-to-moment combat. I saw assertive predictions that Halo Infinite would be a battle royale: one in which a hundred Spartans could helldrop onto a map and duke it out with found weaponry. But rather than trying to borrow the scale of a PUBG, 343 has done something more interesting: it's copied those ubiquitous revival and closing circle mechanics from its genre.

In Attrition, your team has a joint and limited pool of lives. Once you've depleted them, any downed player must be resurrected to rejoin the action. If one side expends all its lives and every member then dies, they lose the round. When the bag of respawns is empty, a toxic red field starts closing around the combatants. Because lives in this mode are a scarce resource, players can't be careless in their play, and the need to pick up fallen squadmates builds a real sense of camaraderie with your fellow fighters. That creeping wall of damage also keeps the action focused and prevents the endgame from dragging on.

From BTB to Attrition, the game records our hard-fought wins and losses through its Theater feature. In this incarnation of the video editor, icons annotate the timeline, marking key moments in the match, which is a wonderful idea. Yet, Theater is grievously buggy on console and might somehow be worse on PC. You're always up against HUDs turning invisible, and the fast-forward button cutting out. While the last few Halos support a map editor, it is current AWOL from Infinite. The studio tells us it won't see the light of day until months down the line, probably towards the end of 2022.

While getting some of these complaints off my chest is cathartic, I don't relish delivering the news of how sick Infinite's multiplayer is. Where a game's goals are meant to motivate players to explore the most fulfilling parts of their systems, some of Infinite's work in the opposite direction, exposing players to the frustrating extremes of its sandboxes. In its least competent areas, Halo Infinite is literally broken.

No review of a live service game is absolute; the whole idea is that they evolve over time. And Infinite's developers have been receptive to feedback, already weening the game off of some of its worst proclivities, even when it ran against their profit incentive. Halo 5 also launched with an anaemic featureset and eventually became the most fully-featured of the family. Maybe Infinite could follow in its footsteps. Still, I suspect it's going to be slow-going moving ahead, and I wonder how "fixed" Infinite can ever be when its financial model depends on sucking some players dry. If you need a silver lining, let it be that contextual systems and extras aside, Infinite has a scintillating multiplayer at its core. Thanks for reading.