Halo Infinite

Haven't played a Halo in forever. Seems like they've CoD-ified it a bit, but to be fair, it plays pretty well still from a quick blast. I think I'm most impressed by the menus on PC! They are actually intuitive, clean and not plastered with F2P stuff. Designers need a pat on the back there.

I could really do without the comedy banter from the little guys. Never liked that part of Halo.

Apart from that I'm really liking it. Never been a massive Halo fan but it really suits being more open world.

Just been playing a bit this evening, now that I've actually been able to download the campaign. Very enjoyable so far. I don't have a huge amount of experience with the Halo series, only really recently playing a couple of them in the MCC and not finding them hugely interesting (played about half the first one and some of, I think Reach).

This is feeling much nicer to play than those so far and I haven't found myself needing to switch away from the mouse and keyboard as I ended up doing with the older games. The grappling hook in particular is lovely addition, really allowing you to swing around the place and get out of (and into) sticky situations. I didn't have too much of an issue with the movement speed in multiplayer, but I do miss the slightly pacier feel of something like DOOM. It certainly isn't a deal-breaker though.

Just reached the surface and was surprised at just how crowded it was up there with enemies. Not sure if that is going to be indicative of what combat encounters will regularly be like, but it was pretty intense. Finding the difficulty just about right on heroic. A little easy against some of the regular enemies, but big crowds and a few tougher enemies feel satisfying to fight against without being frustrating. Same goes for the first boss.

Not gone out into the open world yet, so can't comment on how well that is implemented, but first impressions are pretty good.

Someone mentioned PC performance issues. Not experienced any myself. Do have a pretty good system (Ryzen 5800x, Geforce 2080 Super, 16 GB RAM), but running flawlessly at near ultra (just texture quality at high and AA on low) at ultra-wide 1440p. Not done any actual frame rate measuring, but seems to be steady.

The menus are nice, which is much a rarity. Only oddity is the countdown when starting the campaign and they stick quit in the options menu, which lots of games do and never makes any sense.

That’s the one. I arrived there with hydra rockets and the lightning gun so spent a while trying to kill him with those before I realised there were other weapons. I did take a while of trial and error but as soon as I picked up the plasma rifle to wear his shield down and the shotgun to kill him, he went down ok.

But, like I say, I found it 100% more difficult than anything previously.

Oh yeah, I got that. It just seems to do absolutely no damage.

Its one of the reasons the tower boss took longer than it should have. I hadnt actually used it up until that point and assumed that the guy was basically unkillable because, y'know, a rocket launcher...

Nah, that guy just has tons of health no matter what.

I'm in a bit of a conundrum: I find all the FOBs and rescue missions and etc. to be too much like busy work, and I wouldn't mind just zipping through the story instead, old school Halo-style. But the upgrades look pretty important to, you know, not die all the time later on. So I'm compelled to comb the the map anyway, to sweep up those spartan cores.

I like the banter. Grunts are consistently funny. There's more variety than usual, too.

But the propaganda towers make no sense in the setting, and feel like they are only there because Ubisoft games have them.

That's probably the case, but I'm still worried because I'm on legendary and the devs mentioned that you'd need to use pretty much all of the equipment to survive. Can't say it's been true so far, as I've also only ever used the grapple. But things might change.

I'm on the second island now, and almost done with the FOBs and stuff. Maybe I'll try another main mission next.

The plasma coils lying around take the shield out with fairly minimum effort and knock him back. Then any gun will take out the health which will already be quite low.

The upgraded thruster makes you invisible... That could be handy for difficult situations!

I am enjoying wandering about on foot with some marine mates, which I enjoy giving the best weapons I can find . In between massacres, I enjoy listening to the birds.

Is there any expected date for other MP modes/maps in the regular playlist?

I'm enjoying playing (despite being awful) but it's getting a bit tiring playing CTF on 2 different maps when none of my teammates seem interested in playing the objective.

Yeah, cleared all of them.

The third boss (big hammer dude) was even worse than the second one. But I eventually found a safe way to cheese him. Hopefully there will be other such methods in the future, because trying to take him on fairly would have been a massive pain. After that, there was a mini-boss presented as two Brute Chieftains. They really didn't want to give me any breaks.

But... if this is the extent of the difficulty spikes, I can handle them. Probably. For now.