Yeah, that's a tank up in a silo that I blew up. Nice to know there's still some funky physics going on in this game; I think I was in the tank and it got blasted a hundred feet into the air by a drop pod?

Anyway, I've been digging into the Halo Infinite campaign after uninstalling Game Pass and just buying it on Steam. It seems really great so far! I'm not the biggest fan of Halo games, but I've played most of them and dig the combat flow. Infinite's combat is pretty much the same as in previous installments, but the addition of the grappling hook really does free up a lot of movement options. I'm a sucker for open world games in general and while Infinite doesn't really do a huge amount with theirs compared to something like Assassin's Creed, there still seem to be some hidden-away Forerunner armories to find that aren't just picked up on your minimap automatically, so it seems like it might be worth exploring?

I'm having a grand old time with this so if you've only been doing the multiplayer it might be worth giving the campaign a spin!

nice! i'm a bit of a halo sceptic (or rather- i had a hoot in my youth doing the classic couch multiplayer deathmatchslayer stuff but found the narrative fairly wooden), and the tiny contrarian in me found the recent adulations a bit much- but i watched that multiplayer stream you and the gang did a couple weeks back and it's piqued my interest. it's nice to see the throwback 'feel' of a game like halo updated with some modern touches.

should i finally find a GPU i'll checker out!

Personally, I've been very ho-hum on the campaign so far. I wouldn't say it's bad and it's definitely better than Halo 5, but I've generally been really unimpressed with 343's writing and that continues here.

* The fact that it launched (a) without co-op and (b) with no ability to replay missions is insane to me. It's just such a huge miss. Maybe co-op was hard to implement on the deadline, but not being able to replay missions is just stupid. Especially when they've decided on a structure with so many missable collectables.

* The open world doesn't really add anything to the game. If anything, it detracts from it. Sure, there are excuses to get into stupid Halo combat, but the story momentum just dies whenever you're wandering around. None of the locations work to tell a cohesive story and it just seems like an excuse to justify the upgrade system. They also fall back on the familiar crutch of putting a bunch of audio logs everywhere, but none of them say anything particularly interesting.

* The Pilot might be the single most obnoxious character in a video game ever. His dialogue seems to cycle exclusively between whining about going home, saying you're all going to die, and accusing you of killing everyone. I want to shoot him every time he comes on screen.

* Especially early on, it just felt like they stole a lot of ideas from other, better games. The little video of the pilot's family at the beginning is basically shot-for-shot taken from the first recording in Horizon Zero Dawn. The part where Chief punches the control console on the Brute ship is just the opening of Doom 2016.

* 343 seems to have assumed that most people played (and remembered, and care) about the Halo Wars story line. That is a bad assumption because it feels like I'm supposed to know who these characters are when in reality I have absolutely no idea. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize the Brute from the opening cutscene is different from the Brute later on. They look mostly alike and they sound mostly alike.

* It does the same obnoxious thing Doom Eternal did where it starts at a point where shit has clearly gone down since the last game, but it can't be bothered to explain any of it so the player is just constantly confused. There's a point where the not-Cortana says something like "It feels like something's missing" and I rolled my eyes so far back I could seem my own skull. Like, I f'ing know something's missing - you're the ones who are refusing to tell the story.

The story's not doing much for me (especially when the game just drops you in, really surprised there wasn't some type of recap video included), but it's also not getting in the way, so I'm not too bothered. I am enjoying the action and shooting my way through the open world plenty, even though it's a fairly barebones one. Might tick the difficulty down to Normal from Heroic though, cause it can get a bit much at times.

When you upgrade the grappling hook, you can basically fucking fly and it is amazing.

I have not finished it yet, but I spent most of today playing it and I played it whenever I could Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Before I continue, I want to clarify that I have had a whole lot of fun with this game.

I get the sense that 343 wanted to do a systems-heavy Zelda-like open world but never figured out how to put it together, so what we've got is a smaller version of a Far Cry open world. That kinda pains me a bit, but I have to admit that most of my time in the open world has been spent opening the map, picking a waypoint, doing the side activity, opening the map again, picking another waypoint, etc. There doesn't seem to be all that much room for making your own fun or going off the beaten path. You locate a FOB, defeat all the enemies on it, activate it, you get some new icons on your map, you go free prisoners/destroy a facility/fight a boss, rinse, repeat. It's still Halo combat, and I've been replaying Halo games over and over for about fifteen years now, and I still love doing this stuff on a mechanical level... but the context has never been more boring.

That said, my lizard brain still finds something comforting about checking off all the boxes. It's not terribly engaging gameplay, but if you just want to grapple hook your way around a big-ass combat zone, blasting enemies with whatever weapons you can pick up and changing tactics up all the time, this is your game. It does that very, very, very well.

As far as the linear levels go, they're... fine, but again, they don't feel as methodically designed as Halo used to feel. I have spent a lot of time finding power seeds and putting them in power nodes to open a door. It feels kinda like a Destiny strike more than a story-and-event driven single player campaign.

And as far as writing goes... I'm not a huge fan. For one, the story is taking a direction that kinda has me rolling my eyes (they seem to be introducing yet another faction of heretofore unheard of villains). That wouldn't bug me so much if not-Cortana wasn't... well, exactly what I expected she'd be. A bubblegum personality that points out the obvious in a jaunty tone, as if that makes it funny. This game is loaded with "empty" dialog, people saying stuff that isn't funny or relevant or emotional or anything, someone decided they needed words here so not-Cortana is saying something. I hesitate to even call it snark.

Halo 5's story was abysmal, though, and its gameplay wasn't really anything to write home about (it depended far too much on AI teammates to counter poorly balanced difficulty). Infinite's story so far doesn't bother me, it's just not all that interesting, and its combat has been superb. I'm playing it on Heroic and I'm going to keep playing it and I just might do everything because I enjoy the combat so much, and because I want a Wasp to fly around the open world.

Oh, and they brought back the Scorpion controls from Halo 1. From 2 onward, you control the bottom part of the tank with the left analog stick and the top with the right, allowing you to aim and drive independently. Instead, it now just steers where you aim the camera, which sucks. Please, for the love of God, change it back.

Sorry to sound so negative. I'm not really down on the game, necessarily, I think it's pretty good. But Bungie's run of this franchise and Halo 4 are some of my favorite games ever and I never tire of playing them. Halo 5 is a game I disliked more and more every time I played it and Infinite doesn't seem like it's going anywhere special.

Unless they do what I was kinda hoping they would do and just go all Marathon Infinity on us. Let's go dimension-hopping in a Halo game!

So first off, I'm a big fan of the Bungie era games, specifically the campaigns, I always enjoyed the multiplayer too but I looked at that as more of a bonus, campaign is what I came to these games for. By the time 4 was out I had switched over to PC so I never played it until just about a year ago when it was added to MCC PC, and I thought it was "fine", an okay first shot out of the gate. Have not played 5, from everything i've heard/seen it sounds like I'm not missing much but I'm still hoping we get a PC port eventually so I can see for myself.

With that said, I think this is the worst Halo campaign, easily. The open world brings nothing to the table, it's just your average open world filler to pad out length. The actual story missions themselves are all dull and thanks to the VERY limited tileset nearly indistinguishable from each other. The story itself is....bad, I like what they were *attempting* to do with Master Chief, Weapon, and the Pilot but I just don't think the writing for that worked personally. The actual plot on the other hand had me rolling my eyes at the end, I have zero interest in seeing where this goes.

The grappleshot adds a fun mobility to the combat, but the other equipment items might as well not exist thanks to how clunky it is to switch to them on the fly(I tried to use drop wall more which did come in handy, but I never touched thruster). It all kind of breaks down though when you just endlessly fight the same configurations of the banished over the same type of bases or hallways over and over and over again. The bosses fights are all miserable and add nothing but frustration.

I'm really enjoying the multiplayer, and I can definitely be a bit of a contrarian, but i'm very surprised at how this one has been received critically, and I really wonder if it will go through a revaluation in a few months.

Completed the campaign last night on Heroic. The gameplay is above average, the physics system works really well in tandem with the grapple mechanic. My favorite thing to do is tap A to jump, then grapple towards the ground. This flings you up in the air, then you hit A again when you collide with the ground to do a "super hop" shooting you forward across the ground. This works really well against (non-red) hunters, who just kind of get stuck facing the opposite direction as you shoot the orange parts on their back. The gameplay was a lot of fun, even if supposedly 2/3rds of the campaign was cut during development. Easy to recommend on gamepass.

That said, I largely ignored the story, most of it felt contrived and boring, in all honesty. Every character was forgettable, except for the pilot, who was fraught with angst nearly the entire game. The Cortana/Weapon/Halsey voice actor did a great job.

Continuing with critique, the open world and indoor levels were very repetitive. The 2 spartan hunters at one point were bullet sponges on Heroic difficulty. It took around 20 BR rounds to kill the chopper spartan killer, meanwhile he could kill you in about 10 shots from his chopper. Jumping in most vehicles just ends in death at this difficulty, unless you immediately kill any enemies wielding heavy weapons and consistently move unpredictably. But why do this when you can super ground slam every enemy with your infinite grapple dive bomb upgrade. :P

tl;dr It was fine, felt like a 343i game with a fresh coat of paint. I don't anticipate replaying the campaign, unless I decided to track down skulls and spider-man my way on easy.

@panfoot: while I don't really agree with most of your post, the following part rings very true to me :

"The grappleshot adds a fun mobility to the combat, but the other equipment items might as well not exist thanks to how clunky it is to switch to them on the fly(I tried to use drop wall more which did come in handy, but I never touched thruster)"

I basically exclusively use the grapple as switching to anything else in the moment is too clumsy and a waste of time as the grapple, utility wise, is extremely useful in pretty much any situation. The only time I use the other things are in multiplayer, and even there I find the grapple to be the most effective item.

The PC version on Game Pass is so buggy for me that I can't play anymore. I mean I literally can't - the campaign stopped loading. I don't think it's a network issue? (at least I can join multiplayer matches fine) This has been such a hassle starting from the preloading period: campaign dlc download being weird, sign in dialog box not going away, hitting play inexplicably launching microsoft store instead, progress not saving in open world portion, getting stuck in a respawn loop and not being able to exit, and now game not launching....

Funnily enough the last time I experienced this many issues with a game on Game Pass was with The Master Chief Collection. Kind of nostalgic in a way.

I'm about to boot it up now, and am filled with trepidation because of this. You have to admire their consistency I guess (with regards to the MCC)?

I'm not in the open world part of the campaign yet, and tell me if I'm doing something wrong here because I'm not much of a Halo guy, but does the opening part of this game just suck? The only guns I can seem to find are pistols, and that one thing that shoots blue energy balls. None of the enemies seem interesting. I think the grappling hook is too slow. I think everything is too slow, but I tend to prefer a faster FPS anyways.

I'm glad that you're enjoying this awesome FPS game.

I have had no such problems and haven't heard of anyone having these issues, other than the poster above.

Have you made it past the first ten minutes of gameplay? I recall getting an assault rifle very early and I'm pretty sure I had a shotgun by the half hour mark. You can push Z on a keyboard or down on the D-Pad to get a sorta pulse scan that highlights anything you can interact with in the immediate vicinity. The Pulse Rifle (that gun that shoots three energy balls in bursts) is one of the most common guns throughout the campaign. I haven't used it much because there's usually something else laying around (the Mangler, most often) but I have found myself in situations requiring it. The Plasma Pistol (tiny alien pistol) can be charged and that charge shot gets rid of shields of all types (maybe not boss shields, I don't remember). The human pistol does way better damage than you might think and its headshot damage is really good. Not Battle Rifle good, but definitely good.

Movement speed isn't super fast but I feel like I've definitely been zipping around the battlefields out in the open world, especially with the grapple hook, and especially with the faster cooldown upgrade on the grapple hook. Yes, for the record, I have played Doom and Dusk and Amid Evil and other "faster" shooters, and I am playing with a mouse and keyboard, but I still don't feel like this game is all that slow. I am playing on Heroic and that might make a difference.

PC Game Pass can be wonky at times. I can offer the age old PC Gamer quote of "works for me" which is especially helpful to people for whom it doesn't work. I've also heard some grumblings online about this game specifically being iffy with Game Pass but it really does seem to be a lottery.

As for the game itself - I was never a Halo fan and found the gameplay rather slow and plodding. There was always this gigantic dissonance between the gameplay being this goofy beach-ball physics world with enemies that don't seem to have much artistic consistency saying even goofier one liners - and then this incredibly self serious story with a choir backdrop. It's an odd game but fans that love Halo sure do seem to like Halo. I played Halo 5 a while back to sort of get ready for this one or at least know whats going on and turns out that was largely a waste of time as apparently Infinite takes places 2 years after Halo 5 and there is a some novel that bridges the gap which I will never read. The Halo 5 campaign was pretty bombastic at times and apart from it feeling like just more Halo with a few new tricks up its sleeve I remember having a decent enough time with.

Infinite is similarly more Halo with a few new ticks up it's sleeve. The open world so far is OK. I could never understand why you would place this big sci-fi epic in what is, for all intents and purposes, a forest. Really reminded me of all those early days SyFy original shows like StarGate where despite travelling to different worlds and otherwordly dimensions, those locations always somehow ended up being a forest (the show was low budget and was shot in Canada). I guess what doesn't help the open world is how bad all the "wheel based" vehicles function when you're not just driving them down a straight path in a scripted campaign. The Warthog feels like a beach ball that constantly flips over whenever you hit the slightest rock. The grappling hook makes up for this by being quite handy and when upgraded can be shot off with a decent enough frequency to make traversal not an issue even when scaling huge mountains. The few times I tried exploring a bit off to the side I hit invisible walls blocking my progress which made me question how worth it is to go off the beaten path.

Generally speaking it's decent fun. I'm glad most Halo fans are digging it since they seem to have been let down by the latest 343 entries in the series. For me it's something to play while I wait for anything else to come out. I'll probably finish it if the campaign is not too long. A few hours in and I'm already sort of getting tired of the open world and think I'll just start mainlining the Primary Mission objective.

I'm glad it's working fine for you, but the reason why you haven't heard of anyone having these issues is simply because you haven't looked. I stopped bothering to troubleshoot on my end because I looked at forums and subreddit and saw a lot of people describing the exact same issues I was having.

Stickyed post about campaign issues on reddit - you don't have to scroll very far to see hundreds of posters describing the same issues I ran across

And here's a lengthy thread on the official forums about campaign not loading (the latest issue I ran into).

And of course I found countless other individual posts/threads. I don't know how widespread these issues are (of course a popular game will have more people playing so even a rare bug will trip a lot of people), but given the sheer number of separate issues I and others ran into in such short amount of time and given 343's poor track record, I'm inclined to believe that maybe these bugs aren't so rare.

@justin258: I'm past the part where you escape from the exploding ship and now I'm in some place that's very blue, I think. I want to say that took me about 45 minutes to an hour. Haven't found a shotgun anywhere. Do they hide weapons or something in places that aren't obvious that you would need to use the scan to find them? I mean, I'm not paying super close attention to what's in my environment, but every time I see a weapon rack on the wall, it's always those pulse rifles.

My only problem so far is like, you're playing Master Chief, this all around arse kicking bad mother, but if you fight more than 2 enemies at once you get cream crackered. Even on normal.

I'm also glad for the cross-save feature. Playing with a controller is generally fine in the open world, but some of the arena like spaces with bosses that keeps rushing at you tend to be a real pain to me and after dying like 5-6 times to one of them, I switched over to PC and killed them on the first try. It's also just so much less cumbersome (even if not still perfect) to use all of your skills with a mouse&keyboard.

@glots: Console badly needs an equipment wheel rather than the system they have in place now. It's an exercise in contortion trying to swap what gadget you're using and it generally makes you take your thumbs off the stick to do it.

It's an even greater problem since there's little incentive to do it all that often in the course of normal gameplay. Other than the grappling hook, I'm not finding any of the gadgets worthwhile. When the game throws a boss fight at you where you are supposed to "do the thing" you just don't have the practice at it since I want to have the grapple equipped like 95% of the time.

"Seems" Like being the key word here.

This is one the best version of Halo gameplay I think we've seen and the multiplayer is fantastic.

This is without a doubt the worst Halo Campaign since 4. Obviously thats just an opinion but I've played through all of them leading up to Infinite's release and I cant think a single set-piece in Infinite I'd like to play again.

The only thing the Open World added to the game is a dope sandbox to cruise around in Co-Op Mode with a friend while you laugh and have fun doing imaginative physics combos or whatever swells your heart. Otherwise it just bogs down the pacing and is mostly just janky driving from point to point with very sparse emergent gameplay I'm not entirely convinced arent scripted.

Its cool seeing some of the old Halo 1 aesthetics redone in modern graphics but its mostly just a hollow reminder of how much better the original games are. I do enjoy a good story and that always scores points from me, but more then anything I come to games looking for cool Set-pieces and this game has almost none. The best parts are the parts where you load into an interior as they're the closest thing this game has to levels but if they count as levels they arent the ones you want to revisit.

I think everyone can agree that the "Silent Cartographer" is quintessential Halo, but if Halo CE was just 7 hours of Silent Cartographer (without Co-Op) I dont think we'd be here today.

TLDR; very disappointing level design and structure saved by the some of the tightest moment to moment gameplay around.

Also god damn if that Pilot isnt the most obnoxious character I've encountered in some time. The Weapon was more successfully executed I think, though I do just miss OG Cortana.

@therealturk: I'll second this complaint about the "quick menu" approach they've chosen. I don't think I've ever seen a game do it this way and probably with good reason. They should have either used a full wheel with time dilation in single player or just had the quick slots be linear so that you press left for grenades and then continuing to press left cycles through a horizontal bar of grenades.

I also kind of hate having to go around pressing the "scan" button constantly when I'm looking for audio logs etc. I want to place the ping on a thumbstick press but I need sprint on L3, and nothing on R3 seems like a good choice to swap onto the Dpad.

Finished it off on Heroic and I am not ever going to play this on Legendary like I have done with Bungee 's Halos.

Campaign is OK, mostly because the game play holds up. However, I feel like that would have been better if dash-function would been assigned to B-button and enhanced scanner would use the normal scanner's d-pad down. Ended up using the dash-thing only once, enhanced scanner was useful at later part of the game where enemies tend to hide quite a lot during the combat. Shield got lots of use during the later 2/3 of the game where it almost felt essential.

Open world did not feel like it offered anything new and felt small. However it took away the variety of the biomes. No more is there snow, beaches or deserts. Just woods, mountains and hexagons that weirdly floaty vehicles like to get stuck on or flip off.

Story was weirdly boring and felt like it was structured just wrong. Near the end it got somewhat interesting but it definitely felt that it would have been better if you knew somethings at the beginning. Now the beginning 2/3 of the game is just boring exposition and main antagonist taunting you. The later part is just somewhat interesting exposition.

Last thing that stood out was difficulty wall that some bosses had. There was 3 bosses that I basically only seemed to beat when the lady luck shined her favor upon me. This game loves to throw at you bullet spongy bosses that rush towards you and have attacks with large area of effect and high damage. This forces you play the role of the Spider-Man in desperate seek of more ammo.

Overall, it felt like average shooter and weak compared to the Bungie's Halo games.

yeah I'm far from the only one who's had issues with Game Pass. It just seems to be broken for a lot of people?

I definitely think the writing here is the worst part of the game but I don't mind because I mostly tune it out and go back to pew pew!

I think a while back Jeff pointed out that this sort of dismissal of people's issues isn't helpful - I think it was around the time Cyberpunk launched. If a game works for you flawlessly then that's great, but people should be able to talk about their technical problems without being dismissed, made to feel that they're isolated cases, or that those issues have no bearing on their user experience.

I've had plenty of issues both with Halo Infinite and with the game pass/xbox app. In case you still feel like being dismissive I'll provide links to the threads full of people who have shared this crummy experience. In the first two hours of playing Halo infinite I had to deal with:

- The mouse not being locked to the game window. I run a dual monitor setup, as do plenty of PC owners, and having the mouse drift from my primary monitor to my secondary monitor whenever I try to turn around is less than ideal. Halo Infinite only has the option to go borderless fullscreen (why?!?). When I googled this issue the response from Microsoft support was recommending people disable secondary monitors, which seems frankly insane. I also saw a lot of posts from people with G-Sync monitors who are having issues as a result of not being able to go fullscreen with this game.

- The audio in the game being buggy as hell. For some reason spoken voices all appear faint/muffled, as though being spoken from a great distance. This seems to be related to the way Halo Infinite deals with surround/stereo? Whenever I load up the game there seems to be a 50/50 chance that the audio will randomly work properly or not - inconsistent bugs are the fucking worst. Very frustrating loading the game, getting to a cutscene, then having to restart because I can't hear what anyone is saying.

- The xbox app failing to launch the game. I absolutely hate the xbox app. It's clunky and slow, the party system is a mess, the app is constantly giving me redundant notifications (like telling me my credit card is out of date when it clearly isn't), randomly giving me store prices in incorrect currencies, and with some games such as Halo Infinite completely failing to launch the game. Instead when I clicked "Play" it opened a random microsoft store page (I've linked an article directing people to the convoluted fix for this). Weirdly it wasn't even the first time launching the game, it just decided to stop working after a few plays. I had to reset the game data and redownload a patch from the xbox app settings to get this to work. Awesome.

- Straight up crashing. Halo Infinite hard crashed on me twice in the space of an hour. No error message, no freezing ingame, just flashed out of existence. One second I'm going up an elevator, the next i'm staring at my desktop.

I don't want to be totally negative because the game plays beautifully once you've managed to get past the myriad technical issues. The grapplehook is amazing - having jumped around with it in the multiplayer for the last few weeks I was able to seamlessly start flicking around corners and it pairs so nicely with the open world that it's honestly hard for me to believe that this wasn't always a feature of every Halo game. It's just a shame that the incredibly cool gameplay is tripped up by technical garbage.

They don't really hide them, it's just not as obvious when they're not in weapon racks that really stand out. Those are Banished weapon racks and are mostly (not always) for their weapons specifically. There are some good guns on them, but like every other Halo game all of them are kinda odd. To make the best use of them, you have to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. Pulse Carbines - the three shot burst blue gun - has slow moving projectiles but they can home in a little bit and they're really good versus shields, so they're great against Jackals/Elites/Shielded Brutes. Needlers home in as well and are pretty weak individually, but if you land enough hits on an enemy all of the needles stuck in them will explode and deal a lot of damage. When shot normally, a Plasma Pistol does little damage, but a single charged shot will wipe out any shield in the game except some bosses. All of the Banished guns are like this, so you sorta just have to try them and experiment and figure out how they all work and how you might be able to apply their uses in any given situation.

As for the more standard human weapons (Assault Rifle, Magnum, Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, etc.), sometimes the Banished can be seen carrying them but usually they're found near corpses or you pick them up from the Marines you save or you just pick them up from any given FOB before leaving to go on a mission. Usually I found ammo for those in crates and such.

Everything in general is much easier to find if you push that Pulse button. If you feel like using a different gun, push it and see what's around. There's usually something.

After I said that, I fired up the game again and it got stuck when I pushed Tab to look at the map screen. The more I played of the game, the more I saw pop-in and lights flickering and other weird stuff. I suppose I must have tempted fate a bit. I apologize if I appeared dismissive, this wasn't my goal.

Anyway, as a more general comment replying to the thread I beat the game today. I actually did wind up doing all of the side quests except the extremely low level stuff (I did not go looking for Mjolnir Lockers or Spartan Cores after I fully upgraded the Shield and Grapple). The combat in this game is top-tier and easily the best reason to play it. Uh, maybe the only reason to play it. Even without the grapple hook, it would have been pretty good, but zipping around the battlefield like Spider-Man, grabbing barrels to throw at enemies, grabbing loose weapons because you ran out of ammo in the scramble, and grapple-meleeing and enemy are all awesome. Late in the game, I spent a lot of time flinging myself around battlefields with the grapple physics and it all feels so perfect. You can get a grapple upgrade that allows you to zoom in on a guy and sucker punch him so hard that a shockwave flies out, stunning all the dudes around him. If that isn't fun, I don't know what to tell you.

Just use it wisely. Not sparingly, this is something I did every fight, but don't grapple your ass into the middle of five very large, angry Brutes while Jackals line up sniper shots on you. I played Halo Infinite on Heroic and I'd say it was as difficult as some other Halo's on Legendary, and definitely more difficult than 3 on Legendary. It's balanced, but it's definitely hard. Some of those bosses can really fuck you up so approach them with a plan instead of just waltzing right in guns blazing.

Everything else, unfortunately, ranges from "bad" (the story and character writing) to "OK, I guess" (the music). Visually, it's a very good-looking game, but it consists almost entirely of three environments - blue-tinged Forerunner hallways, red-tinged Banished hallways, and the second level of the original Halo stretched out into a smaller version of a Far Cry open world. Considering this is a twenty-thirty hour game if you do everything (and a five-ten hour one if you focus on story), I'm not going to give it points for looking good when it just cycles between a handful of different repetitive aesthetics. No snowy mountain peaks, no deserts, no enormous chasms, just those three things mentioned.

If you like the combat and you think the grapple is fun, I definitely recommend sticking with it. If that's not doing anything for you, it pains me to say that there isn't much here that I could recommend.

EDIT: Actually, I wanted to remark on something else already mentioned in this thread.

There are four pieces of equipment in this game that you can carry around with you all the time - Grapple, Threat Sensor, Drop Wall, and... uh... Dodge Faster, or whatever it's called. And four different grenade types. On PC, 1-4 switches equipment and you just push a button to cycle grenade types. On controller, which I used some but not often, you push right to open a tiny sub-menu in the bottom corner of the screen and then push a directional button to change equipment. This sucks. The best way to do this is take your thumb off the right analog stick, reposition your hand to change equipment, and put your hand back. That's a lot to do in some of these combat scenarios where you can die in a few seconds. Same with grenades. Both of those need to be radial menus that slow down or pause the action while you pick something. Alternatively, the game should have been designed without changing equipment in mind - you could use B or click an analog stick to dash, bind grapple and nothing else to RB, just drop a threat sensor at your feet when you push down to scan for items, and let the leftover right d-pad button drop one of those shield walls, while left cycles grenade types. And allow plasma grenades to pull double-duty, spike grenades were always superfluous, so that you only have three things to cycle through.

As a huge fan of the Halo campaigns, when I was grappling around the open world, my thought was...

"This feels ordinary."

The campaigns have always been about memorable combat encounters through varied environments, and they kept pushing you forward. Now I'm just running around an open environment, like I'd done countless times in the past decade, and the only interesting thing is the Halo combat. But considering I don't really need to upgrade much in this game and there are no side stories to speak of, it feels kind of meaningless.

I'm around 4 hours in and the things I was dreading about putting this design in Halo has come to pass. Sure, they changed it up. But they stripped out what made these games special in the first place: replaying awesome levels because they all stood out as something memorable you want to experience again and again.

@justin258: It's not that I'm having trouble using the guns effectively. I'm just not having fun using any of them. That's why I'm wondering if I'm missing "the cool guns" somewhere or if I just don't like the pace and flow of this game. It just sounds like the more human weapons are in the open world part? I'm just not in the open world yet, and it's hard for me to want to get there when I'm not having fun playing it.

I made a much bigger post literally right below yours acknowledging this. My original goal wasn't to be dismissive, it was to assure Sethmode that issues weren't common. It appears I was mistaken when I made the comment and should have double checked. I do apologize if my comment has irritated or upset anyone.

There are more of them in the open world, yes, although with the way Halo games are designed you usually wind up using alien weapons a lot anyway. Please don't take this as me being an ass, but if you're not enjoying the way these early guns are used, then you might want to pass? I loved playing this and I do think it's worth trying to get into, but the weapons hanging around in the first two linear levels are largely the guns you'll be using throughout the game. Later parts of the game do add more and there are special versions of most weapons in the game, but you'll still find yourself having to use whatever's laying around very often and that frequently involves using some of the weapons you don't seem to be having a good time with.

@goosemunch: As one of those Steam weirdoes mentioned by Mr. Gerstmann, I can tell you that the PC version they charge 60 bucks for on Steam has the same problems. I do think it's the network issue, since the campaign started loading as soon as I turned off the wi-fi.

If this game launched last year, I can almost hear Brad Shoemaker saying "343 makes Bethesda look like they have their shit together"...

@justin258: It's just the way Halo games play since the "ancient" days of Halo 2. They lowered ammo capacity of UNSC weapons compared to Halo Combat Evolved, as if they encourage one to switch weapons as often as possible.

Pretty far in, and I am definitely enjoying myself. For context, I'm playing on Heroic, on Xbox (I'll play on PC when co-op drops, maybe?). I don't play open world games generally, I find them kind of overwhelming and tedious. I definitely don't like Far Cry games. I've never played the Halo Wars games or ODST (I didn't actually own a 360). I play the multiplayer on PC

While I get the complaint that the levels aren't as "memorable" as the heights of the first Halo trilogy, I am definitely enjoying the pacing so far, and I think the more open levels are quite good. Flipping the fortified bases is tough and takes a while, they play almost like puzzle boxes. The fort with the tank in the shielded room that you get to use at the end was a great moment. The linear levels are fine but maybe not super interesting to look at (though the encounters are designed well enough). I think the combat is in general very fun, though the hunter encounters are honestly too simple. I basically never switch off the grapple, it's a lot of fun to play with.

I also think this game does something I kinda missed from the later entries - there's a lot of little (2-3 minute) breaks between bigger fights - where you can choose where to go next - that give you a chance to cool down and access your situation. I honestly found "encounter-hallway-encounter" design of the later games kind of tedious, especially at harder difficulties.

The writing is fine. It's definitely better than 5 (a game I didn't finish), not as good as 1-3 but maybe comparable to 4 (a game I thought was okay). I like the pilot, don't really find him annoying. Surprised to see so much venom around this guy, honestly? The Banished stuff is, I mean it's fine, I wouldn't call it good or bad, and it's at least well acted. Not-Cortana is fun, and I am enjoying Mr. Halo's dry humor. The Grunts, as always, get the dumbest/best lines. They at least had fun with it, which I appreciate.

My biggest complaint so far is that the Brute bosses are extremely bullet-spongy, and arming them all with the scrap cannons feels kind of unfair. I was able to cheese the Hammer Boss by picking up every explosive barrel and placing them where he stands at the end of the cutscene, then yeeting grenades and rockets into him. It's kinda silly to kill a boss like that in under 10 seconds but it was extremely funny, and for what it's worth I had a good time doing it. The quick-switch grenades/items are kind of clunky, but it's not an insurmountable hurdle.

I'm also playing it on PC and also running into a lot of issues. I've had at least one loading section break a day for the last 4 days. Like it'll stop and just sit on that screen that rotates out tooltips, and the only solution is to alt-f4 the game. I just had a sequence today break where I had to use a grav lift that seemed to be hiding a load and instead of finishing a load half way up the grav lift the screen went black and my controller rumbled constantly until I killed the game process. Vinny mentioned on the Nextlander podcast that he's had several issues with the game as well, including an early rendered cutscene just completely breaking and stopping at one point, forcing him to quit out of the game.

It's a shame because when the game is working I'm enjoying it quite a bit. The shooting is good and the grappling hook is a lot of fun. I don't find the other abilities nearly as fun to use and I find the controls for switching between them to be quite clunky, so I often just stick with the grappling hook. The actual story missions are kinda just okay but I find checking off the various open world side bits to be good. It's a great podcast game.

@goosemunch:

Having a lot of the same issues with gamepass version on pc. Hard crashes repeatedly. There are multiple forums of suggested fixes, but I got sick of trying them with no result. I hope they get a proper patch out, but might just move on.

@justin258: Huh... Yeah, this game probably isn't for me then. Figured I'd at least give this one a shot. I did play through Halo 3 and Reach back in the day as well as some Halo 2 multiplayer. That was over a decade ago now. Thought it was time for me to test the Halo waters again.

I'm only a few hours in, but the same game seems fine so far. The scripted intro was fun. The dialogue is campy. The bosses (I've fought two so far) are memorable. The shooting feels competent. The grappling hook is amusing. The vehicles drive like pool floaties.

I think I'll just walk everywhere.

@besetment: Ghosts are an absolute godsend in this game. You can even boost up through some rougher terrain. The only reason to use a Warthog is to load it up with marines and if you can actually make it to your destination they are surprisingly competent.

The AI is utterly insane, and can often times feel like an original Xbox game

For example:

I was trying to be a LITTLE sneaky in clearing out a base. I grappled to the top of a base with a sniper rifle and tried to pick off a few enemies. I shot my first shot, and before I'd even HIT the enemy with the shot, the entire base turned around, knew my EXACT location, and just peppered me with shots.

Are they some sort of ultra intelligent hivemind?

@therealturk: Dang man. You gotta unistall this game. Not every game is for everyone and this is not for you lol. Just delete it and play a fps you may like thats more open and has a story you enjoy. I suggest deus ex, forstory and do what you want open world but super detailed hand placed.

If anyone has trouble of launching this on Game Pass PC - launcher, try other launchers. My GPL shows that game needs update, but wont launch said update or the game (even if it can launch other games and their updates). I can however launch the game trough Geforce Experience.

If you read the books, you'd know that on page 257 of the third book of the sixth trilogy set in the Halo universe, a single line of dialogue between two unnamed UNSC enlisted personnel suggests that they are, in fact, a hivemind. Clearly the way the AI was designed in this game is a subtle nod to confirming that theory.

I'm joking of course, but this game is utterly up its own ass with story. I 100% agree. You can't be sneaky in this game. It just isn't possible. It makes sniping essentially pointless. When you're fighting a battle in which enemy reinforcements can literally drop in from above and land extremely close to your location, using a gun which only has 4 rounds per magazine seems suicidal.

Finished it on thursday. I kinda grew to hate the bosses, especially the more melee-focused ones, even while playing on PC. Just really didn't enjoy continuously running in circles and trying to fire shots at them. Last boss was easy though, which maybe was a good thing for me in the end.

All in all, it was an okay experience. The story really didn't do much for me and the characters were kinda ok at best. Just about hated Escharum, which maybe was something the devs tried to achieve, but I'm sure it could've been done in much better ways than having waaaay too much of boring hologram taunting to annoy me. The action continued to be the best thing throughout the game, though I was definitely getting some real combat fatigue by the end of it all, having forgotten just how repeating the level structure can get in Halo.

Without trying to sound dismissive, it certainly was worth the Game Pass subscription price. It's hard to say if it would've been worth the asking price of +60€, because I don't think I would've thrown that kind of money at it normally, having never finished Halo 4 & 5.

I really like the game. Halo has always been my franchise of choice and this entry finally feels like 343 made Halo thier own (though 4 deserves the reassessment it seems to be getting). It's not perfect but I appreciate the emotional core of the story and the 3 characters making it. Armed with the knowledge that Infinite will be a Destiny-like platform that will have story content added over time, I think Halo is back in a big, beautiful way. Looking forward to see how this fight finishes.

I'm about 5 hours in and I think I'm already done with it.

There's just NOTHING to it. It's a boring, open world with 3/4 activities which revolve around killing guys or saving guys. The guns have no ammo, so you're CONSTANTLY swapping to a plasma pistol or the mauler. Grenades are pointless cause EVERY enemy leaps away from them nowadays, and the vehicles control like they're made from lego

And don't get me started on the dumb as rocks story.

The deeper I get into it the less I understand the praise for the gunplay. I played a lot of Destiny and agree the gunplay there is top class. Headshots are satisfying and it feels like enemies have an appropriate level of health even though it's a level based shooter. In Infinite when you start regularly encountering shielded baddies it's a chore to take them out since every enemy apart from the basic fodder is such a bullet sponge. If you happen to be in a location without gun pickups and are stuck with some awkward weapon combo then hey, enjoy dumping clip after clip into these guys. Considering all the human weapons are the same set of ballistic guns you've seen in any other video game and that the covenant weapons are mostly gimmicky it's been a rather dull shooter thus far.

This articulates exactly what I feel

@humanity: The game seems extremely based around getting headshots and using the grapple as an attack. Outside of shielded enemies, almost everything goes down in one or two hits to the head and the upgraded grapple punch is good to the point of severely unbalancing the game.

I've found it actually makes the combat really one note. I've rolled with the plasma pistol and human pistol for most of the game and haven't found much reason to move away from that combo. The strategy for about 99% of the encounters is to (a) charged plasma pistol anything with a shield (b) grapple punch that enemy and (c) headshot it with the human pistol if it isn't dead yet.

Given that the ammo refill stations are so plentiful, I've never really been forced to adapt my strategy too much, either. It doesn't help that as you say, most of the weapons feel gimmicky. I think the game is severely lacking a fleshed out third faction like the Flood. When you're just fighting Banished most of the time, a huge chunk of the weapons just don't really have a situational niche.