Wherever you think the blame lies, Halo Infinite has had a rough time of it. After a much-publicised delay, this living shooter burst onto the scene in late 2021 with original, balanced, and energising action at its core. Yet, it also attracted vocal criticism for its technical instability, copious network latency, and impoverishment of features and unlockables. A particular weak spot was its shallow box of cosmetics. Enthusiasts sucked the Battle Pass dry long before the end of the first season, and then they lost interest in the game or kept playing but firmly demanded more from 343 in future updates. Battle Passes ended up with this short shelf life because the studio almost doubled the length of seasons and bulked up the XP rewards. Increasing players' experience salary was necessary because the game was originally stingy when distributing points.

A tectonic shift has taken place in multiplayer gaming. Where fans once played purely for the immediate joy of the competition, they now have their hearts set on a continuous stream of persistent prizes for their efforts. I generally think you'll be happier if you appreciate a game for what it is in the here and now instead of getting too hung up on the next bauble. It's also worth remembering that filling out wardrobes of armour only has so much utility when you're limited to one piece of clothing per body part. Yet, I can't tell players that they're wrong for expecting greater output from a game for their input. Public-facing unlocks are virtual fashion and badges of honour. They're also little "well done"s from the designers, and in Season One, you soon stopped hearing those "well done"s.

It's not a huge surprise that this eighth mainline Halo struggled to retain players throughout its first season. When its open beta activated in November, 103,000 Steam users flocked to it daily, but the following month, only half that number were playing. By April, the end of the kick-off season, that figure had plummeted to 5,000. Now, the Steam numbers can't tell the whole story; Microsoft positions Halo as an Xbox game first and foremost. Even on the PC, you don't have to boot Infinite through Steam; you can use the dedicated Xbox app. Microsoft also doesn't release exact player figures for their platforms. However, the Xbox website reveals that by April, Infinite had fallen to being the sixteenth most-played game on its US consoles just behind Rocket League, a game from 2015.

It was around April that I began encountering teams with people of wildly different skill levels in the game; a common sign of diminishing player bases. When audiences shrink, matchmaking algorithms have fewer players of equal capability to work with. So, they start roping in participants who don't quite match the requirements to make up the numbers. Keep in mind, Halo is free-to-play, and is a live service game meant to keep its party going for years on end.

Aware of growing unrest among players, the hands at 343 have rallied to revamp and refine their game. And they've seen some success, washing Infinite clean of many of its glitches. Players can now enter Big Team Battles reliably, and the game no longer locks up during BTB matches. It shouldn't have taken seven weeks for the fix to come in, but the gametype ultimately got repaired. There are fewer visual hiccups, and the program almost never crashes to the dashboard. Search times feel generally lower, and when players can slip into a skirmish faster, teams don't have to rely on messy bots for as long.

Still, the errors haven't been fully purged, and sometimes waiting to hook a match still tests my patience. Ping appears to have decreased, but players continue to report lag. I've noticed some of it in my own stand-offs. This is infuriating during melee scuffles and in Tactical Slayer where the difference between gaining or giving up a point is your timing. When you start the program, it still takes an eternity to load your Challenges and avatar. That's a drag when the Challenges you are assigned often determine what playlists you must queue for. Infinite usually opens not with you jumping feet-first into hell but with a trip to the virtual waiting room as you wait for the backend to get itself dressed.

Yet, what most angered the fandom coming out of Season One was that the long wait for the Co-op Campaign only dragged on. After announcing that the feature wouldn't be bundled with the game at launch, 343 said it was targeting March, the start of Season Two, for its addition. Then, when Season One got extended, the new bookmarked date became early May. The studio blew right past May and now expects to hand over online Co-Op in late August and the local version of the mode sometime after October.

I didn't think the multiplayer Campaign was the most grievous omission from Infinite because the story mode was underbaked to begin with. But Co-op Campaign matters to a lot of people. It doesn't help that the operation on the Zeta installation feels designed to be tackled by squads that the players can't form. Most Halo vehicles, like the Warthog, are intended for soldiers acting in synchronicity, and the Forsaken bases are often a slog to tackle alone. However, multiple infiltrators could secure all the objectives in them within a reasonable timeframe. The season inflation also meant that Forge went from a potential release month of June to a soft ship date of November. Although, now 343 are only saying that we'll see a beta for Forge in Season Three, so expect the full mode to drop significantly far into 2023.

With 343's plan of action spotty, communication from them counts for a lot, but the quality of that communication resists cursory summary. Sometimes, the company seems to be on top of keeping its followers informed. They've been exhaustively documenting the gameplay tweaks for Season Two, posted deep dives into their matchmaking and cheat-busting logic, and maintaining a public list of known issues and workarounds. Yet, other times, we've been met with an uneasy silence on the state of Infinite. Creative Director Joe Staten declared a project roadmap would drop in January, but it did not materialise until late April and the developers failed to publish the big update on Infinite within the month it was promised. Certain players feel that responding to potholes in the game with a lack of transparency is adding insult to injury. On this issue, community manager Brian Jarrard wrote, "We understand the community is simply out of patience and frankly, I think understandably tired of words".

One of my optimistic hopes for the first couple of seasons was that the developers might rethink the Challenge system. Currently, these goals incentivise playing gametypes you hate and taking tactical decisions that sandbag you or your team. Another improvement I was looking for was the level cap being removed from Battle Passes, giving you some meta-reward for playing past Level 100. Unfortunately, we've received no such rectifications. On the sunnier side, 343 has been slashing prices for paid cosmetics. And with Season Two, we've gotten a fresh Battle Pass, two new maps, and a couple of original gametypes. This Pass includes some free credits you can spend in the store. This isn't the trick Fortnite pulls where it awards you about half the currency you need to buy an item, hoping you'll purchase the rest. Halo Infinite will provide you with enough cash to nab a whole cosmetics bundle.

The first gametype introduced in Season Two was Last Spartan Standing, which many people have branded the Halo battle royale. Although, it breaks various definitions of the genre. You won't get 100 Master Chiefs parachuting onto an island. The player capacity for a match is 12, and you don't go down in one kill either; you have a pool of lives. While loot does drop around the map, it's now all armour abilities instead of weapons. You start with a humble/crappy Disruptor, but as you rack up kills and assists, you trade in your peashooters for something with a little more oomph.

Arguably, other battle royales have a criminal flaw in that instead of forcing you to throw yourself into the frying pan of combat, they reward you for sitting back and letting players pick each other off. Last Spartan Standing makes cowardly play impractical by tying loadout to score. If you're not slaying from the moment the match starts, then you could find yourself bringing a Magnum to a Commando fight. You can also improve your equipment via XP orbs that drop from eliminated players. They can accelerate you up the ranks, but only if you suspend your movement and shooting for a few seconds. Matches are full of meaningful risk-reward choices in which you must decide whether it's worth getting into a boxing match for the chance at higher survivability.

Unfortunately, when 343 pushed this mode into the hoppers, low connection speeds were rampant, and bugs reverberated throughout the game as a whole. Sometimes you wouldn't be able to collect XP spheres, Challenge progress would fail to register, guns jammed, announcer barks repeated, and grenade animations looped many times over. Randomly dropping power weapons onto maps without marking them also caused unfair imbalances in player firepower, and initially, everyone was consigned to playing on the spaceship graveyard map Breaker.

Breaker offers a unique sight: UNSC vessels ripped open and thrown away like crisp packets. However, its brown monochrome is oppressively drab, and it quickly outwore its welcome, given that it isn't a fraction as spacious as the maps of other battle royales. Remember, this level was designed to accommodate no more than 12 players. Soon enough, though, the glitches got the boot, and the engineers at 343 expanded LSS so that you could play it on any BTB map. Still, the whole debacle left me thinking that you might want to wait a few weeks after a landmark update before engaging Infinite again.

The worse news is that LSS also lets players down the same way that Lone Wolves does: a crucial factor in your kills and deaths is where other players happen to be in relation to you, but you don't have any control over their positioning. It's not unusual to find yourself stuck between two Spartans with no escape route or managing to get the drop on an opponent by sheer happenstance. The issue is not nearly as prevalent in team gametypes in which fewer players on the map are enemies, and you have protectors you can coordinate with. That coordination is more vital in Infinite than in any other Halo due to the speed with which players can mow each other down. The paper-like fragility of any one warrior encourages them to watch each other's backs, but in a free-for-all format like this one, that can't happen.

Sometimes, you also spend the first few minutes of a game looking for competitors and finding no one. Without kills, you don't have the opportunity to upgrade your weapons, and other players overtake you. Matches like to end in anti-climax, ejecting a text popup telling you to quit rather than displaying a score. LSS is also uneasy bedfellows with the Challenge system, as you must wait for everyone to finish the match before you can bank your progress towards the next milestone. When you can only have four active Challenges at a time, it means that the most efficient method for playing the game involves yet more sitting around doing nothing.

Infinite's foray into battle royale isn't a total write-off; it still pulls you in with that seductive possibility that you can always climb the rankings just that bit higher. And kills and deaths matter all the more when lives are an expendable resource. But not every FPS is configured to work in this format. With more robust and well-maintained alternatives like Apex Legends or Call of Duty: Warzone, LSS becomes surplus to requirements. I'm left wishing 343 spent more time fixing up the modes they already have rather than introducing a big new one that only gets halfway to achieving its goals.

We did also see the return of King of the Hill, which is still plenty of madcap fun but requires little explanation. The unexpected hero of the new season is Land Grab. At first, this capture the points mode might appear to be a rote tweak of Strongholds, but a small change in rules can make a big difference in play. Its matches begin with the UI outlining three zones both teams will try to control. When they secure one, it disappears. Only once all those volumes are removed from the map does the computer spawn more, this time in different and unpredictable locations. The first team to secure 11 areas wins.

The reactive nature of Land Grab means that forethought and planning have less of a place here than they do in Strongholds. The priority is on quick thinking and improvisation. A single map can tease out innumerable different strategies because the hotspots on that map are in constant flux. The volatile demands of the play are constantly pulling on the cohesion of your team, begging you to split even the most tight-knit group to cope with unexpected new objective layouts. However, the mode avoids the random chaos of LSS or Lone Wolves by marking territory locations long before they spawn.

You can play Land Grab and a bushel of other modes on the new map Catalyst. For Catalyst, there is no such thing as too many entrances into one area. It balances that access against a jumble of columns and ramps, which rewards the spatially aware player by letting them break line of sight at the first sign of danger. At least, that's what happens if you're on the outskirts of the environment. The setting attempts to occasionally bait you into the open by dispensing a power-up on or near a long and exposed ground-level walkway.

Another concourse bridges the upper floor, providing an express line to the enemy base. The downside of taking that shortcut is that you walk a tightrope on which you become an easy target for anyone in the opposite HQ. Visually, Catalyst is a Forerunner facility gently daubed with foliage. Its metal ramps, neat automatic doors, and coat of moss summon nostalgia for the installation interiors from Halo: Combat Evolved and Guardian, a memorable map from Halo 3.

So, TL;DR, should you play Halo Infinite? Well, if you aren't, it depends on why you're not already doing so. For me, entertaining shooter play is about the guns feeling weighty without being immovable, there always being plenty of tactical options available, and those options being distinct and meaningful. If that's what you're looking for, that's still Halo Infinite, and the game remains familiar enough to be recognisable without resting on its laurels. If you were scared off by Infinite's technical teething pains, know that it's over the worst of them. But if it's a deal-breaker to wait through long matchmaking queues or encounter some imbalanced playlists, I can't recommend going into business with Infinite. Furthermore, if you were waiting for an overhaul of the Challenge or Battle Pass systems or for Halo to fully stock its feature set, keep waiting.

I hate to point it out, but this isn't the first time we've been left twisting in the wind by 343 Industries. I say this as someone who thought Halo 4 was an acute tuning of the series' multiplayer and who was a loud defender of Halo 5, wearing out my disc well into its old age. Yet, I remember looking at Halo 4 in 2012 and thinking, "this is technically well-produced, but 343 hasn't found its voice yet". I remember in 2014 when The Master Chief Collection shambled on for weeks without a functioning multiplayer. I remember in 2020 when 343 announced that they were delaying Infinite for a year because it still wasn't up to scratch. I remember in 2021 when the game launched, and they said that stable networking and classic modes were still in the pipeline. Now, it's mid-2022, and there's still no definite date when the developer will close on their promises.

At the risk of plagiarising Jeff Gerstmann, now and then, I stand back from all the booming grenades and ear-splitting rifle fire and remember this is Halo. Flagship console games don't exist today the way they did when the Pillar of Autumn took its maiden voyage in 2001. Platform holders are dividing their eggs between a greater quantity of baskets. They're attempting to cater to more audiences, and therefore, more wallets than ever. But the Master Chief is still the closest thing Microsoft has to a mascot. Whether you're a series veteran or someone who just knows they like shooting targets on a computer, Halo is meant to be the game you can boot up on your Xbox to feel elated and dazzled and in awe of the system's technical power. This is the first product that perhaps the most famous software company in the world wants you to see when you walk through its platform's door. It is made by an expert team with more than a decade of experience, and nine months in, it's still meandering and sputtering and hesitating its way towards being a finished package.

Watching Infinite's awkward growth spurts, I get the sense that 343 is spread too thin. I'm not sure there's a game that is expected to be as many things to as many different people as Halo. That is partly because the series has grown countless heads over the years. In an age when most new shooter games have no Campaign component, many players fondly remember blasting their way through Winter Contingency or The Ark with friends, and they want Halo Infinite to house a story mode to compete with that. They expect that mode to amaze them whether they play it with one person or four, in split-screen or online.

Many others want Halo to incorporate not just the classic multiplayer but also the ability to edit maps for that mode with no modding experience. Others want it to have a built-in video editor. More still wish to see the Halo that pioneered Firefight and a dev team that was always forthcoming with fans. At the same time, modern video game story modes implement vast open worlds teeming with optional content, and Halo is expected to keep up with them. Then there's popular PvP play which increasingly rests on battle royales, snappy, immediate action, and new content every few months. That's a lot to ask of one studio. Possibly more than any one studio knows how to answer to.

To meet these lofty expectations, 343 had to take the series apart, but the better part of a year later, still hasn't finished putting it back together. Like most projects that shoot for the Moon, Infinite is coming together piece by piece, month by month, and maybe one day, all its components will find their place, and the Halo fans want will emerge. But that day is not today. I'm not confident it even falls within this year. Thanks for reading.