A Journey in Halo

So how are y'all enjoying Halo Infinite? I've been too busy to complete it yet, but I think I'm in the home stretch, and so far, there's lots of things I really love about it. I don't think the sandbox has ever been this strong. The combination of enemy types, vehicles, equipment, weapons, and ways to approach objectives is fantastic, and the peak of any Halo game, even including the all-time greats, which is quite the achievement.

I revisited the original gameplay reveal, one of the few cases where the final game looks so much better than what was previewed. Not only is that a massive positive, what struck me is how there were fewer enemies on screen, and they didn't seem to talk too much.

One of the major positives about Halo Infinite I noticed from the earliest combat encounters was the dialogue… it's genuinely hilarious at times. Just now, a friend and I were giggling over the best lines we heard in our time playing.

It feels great to talk about Halo this way again, it's been a long time…

That's not to say though, I don't have my complaints, though I wouldn’t classify the following topic as a criticism, more an observation.

Halo Infinite's easily the biggest Halo game ever made. There's not really much of a contest. This game's open-world is far beyond even the biggest levels in Halo CE, Reach, and Guardians, probably the three games that previously tried to wow us in terms of a level's scale.

Having played tons of open-world games I was surprised that even I was surprised at times by how far I could travel in the game. These are easily the longest Banshee trips I've ever done, which I don’t mind. It's kind of refreshing to have air travel serve as quiet time in a Halo game. However…

It's interesting to play a game that's objectively so much bigger than every previous entry. Most especially Halo 4, it's tiny shoebox T-square linear levels pale in comparison to Infinite's grandest outposts.

Yet Halo 4 felt like more of a journey…

There was repetition sure, but most of that repetition was contained within a specific stage. You're clearing forerunner Hallways and Towers in Shutdown because that's what the environment holds… but you then didn't spend the rest of the game repeating what you did in Shutdown.

You stole a Covenant Ship, witnessing Cortana's increasing rampancy, mowed down enemies in detailed industrial ship hallways, held off swarms of them in a Mantis, survived the game's most violent sequence, and initiated the final stage in a Broadsword through the game's most spectacular backdrops.

You weren't just travelling through a large variety of locations, you participated in very unique gameplay moments unique to one level, or sometimes, one section of a level.

Halo Infinite doesn't really have this…

It's got a brilliant sandbox, as said, perhaps the best one in the series. The environments it does have are absolutely gorgeous. The Forerunner's hallways have never been so beautiful. Even the storytelling is superb, with arguably the best voice acting and characterization in the series to date.

It's just that's… all, there is.

I'm playing an album with 15 songs that are each a variation of two songs. It's not that I don't like those two songs, it's for the sake of being sold on that this is a journey, I've learned that fantasy relies more on variety than scale.