New Campaign Overview for Halo Infinite

If there’s any game I’ve been looking forward to with a mix of excitement and hesitant anticipation, it’s Halo Infinite. I never owned an Xbox console growing up, but I played a lot of multiplayer and campaigns of the Halo series at many friends’ homes. I’m not the best by far, but playing Halo has rarely left me feeling like I’m not having fun. The only one I’ve missed out on is Halo 5: Guardians, which I’ve heard from many features decent multiplayer and a terrible campaign. Considering that the Halo 4 campaign wasn’t the most well-received either, that is one reason for hesitation.

You might argue that’s not too strong of a reason to lose hope, and I would agree with you. The more important issue is that Halo Infinite has seemingly had a lot of problems, between a delay, key staff leaving, reports of much outsourcing, and a mixed reaction at best to a gameplay showing last year. I do believe that the game should take as much time in the oven as it needs, but it is a little worrisome when this is the flagship Microsoft series.

After watching the new campaign overview, I’m happy to say that my hesitation has dialed back, and I’m the most optimistic I’ve ever been about the next entry. The first thing to notice here is that the visuals have been greatly updated. Gone is the perfect clean look of Master Chief’s armor and the outside of buildings have plenty of scruff and grime. Facial designs have also greatly improved with The Banished in particular looking fantastically intimidating and no longer meme-worthy.

Something that helps tremendously with the visuals is the lighting. We previously saw everything look so clean and bright that it all nearly looked like plastic, but this time around the lighting is used in a much more versatile way. Large structures reflect light, but don’t overpower any accents they have, while the insides of buildings are dark and illuminated by different colors. The outside environments look pretty varied in design alone and the lighting with the day/night cycle elevates that variance even more.

A taste of the gameplay was already experienced after the successful beta, but the campaign is a whole different beast. While not as large as an open-world title, the overview did show the advantages of the larger scale in providing for the aforementioned difference in environments. An emphasis was also placed on the larger degree of choice in tackling objectives, in comparison to most missions in the previous games.

Some of the bigger gameplay highlights that I found during the overview were the skill tree that can be upgraded on the fly, as well as the ability to call in vehicles at certain spots. As cinematic as they made the gameplay look, I also had a big smile on my face when they showed Master Chief giving his best Battlefield impersonation by ejecting out of a Banshee in mid-air, destroying another, and hijacking a whole other one with the grapple shot.

There were some tidbits given for the story but not too much. Considering the direction taken by the story of the previous game, it feels like 343 Industries is keeping the story for this one a bit closer to the chest. The focus will be on Master Chief trying to figure out what happened to Cortana, with help from a new Cortana-like A.I. known as “The Weapon”. The latter’s naive nature is bound to make for some good juxtaposition with The Banished and Cortana, of course.

We did finally get to see Jega ‘Rdomnai, who was revealed in art last year and is now officially shown to be wielding dual red energy swords. I’m probably the most excited for him because he looks like the Halo version of a sith lord. There were a couple of new enemies shown as well, but I don’t want to go over every minute detail from this overview. It’s not too long and I assure you it all looks better than how I’m describing it anyway!

All in all, it does look like the game has benefitted greatly from the delays. I’d like to keep my expectations in check, especially when Forge mode and Co-Op campaigns were delayed until after launch (although leaks for the former look incredible), but I can’t help but be excited for this. Halo Infinite is set to be released on December 8th, as well as day one on Game Pass, so I’ll certainly be giving it a try.