![]() Indoor levels occasionally recall the glory days of Halos past but generally lean too hard on underwhelming, copy-and-pasted architecture.The new Zeta Halo open-world environment is alarmingly tiny, which makes its lack of biome diversity even harder to comprehend.That awful feeling of steering a four-wheeler or tank into a tiny tree and having your movement screech to a halt.That inimitable feeling of leaping over a massive hill on a Warthog four-wheeler, then landing with Halo's classic bounciness.Master Chief and his new AI assistant shine in their vocal performances, and they breathe life into a compelling, intrigue-filled story.Grappling hook adds speed, precision, exploration, and fun to Master Chief's core ability suite without feeling as gimmicky or annoying as other games' experiments.There's hardly a stinker in the game's variety of old guns and new, both human and alien.Open-world level design resembles and expands upon the best ideas in the original trilogy's "wide linear" outdoor zones.The series' modern handlers at 343 Industries have finally nailed a balance between reverence for classic Halo mechanics and smart ideas to push the game into new adventuring heights.Until then, I'll comfort myself with the parts of Halo Infinite I genuinely enjoyed, along with the post-campaign whimsy of combing the game's unseemly, low-detail edges in search of fun combat and reasons to zip around with this spiffy new grappling hook. If you gave me more of this-larger worlds, more biome diversity, more enemy types, better ground vehicle traversal, co-op integration, and the bread-and-butter Halo-ness that this game generally understands-I'd be set. I found myself compelled to finish side quests not because of an experience-point promise but because I expected (and usually found) a fun firefight in each. I loved seeing the series' tried-and-true mechanics applied to emergent, open-world mission discovery. I found myself losing late-night hours to the campaign because I was caught up in an urge to explore or because I got sucked into one of the 90-minute mission chains marked by epic firefights, solid bosses, and chemistry-filled cut scenes. Somehow, Infinite proves that the Halo series still has the capacity to astound and surprise. Because despite how broken and rushed this title appears at times, it nails the foundation that I'd love to see 343 return to-with all the last-gen hardware shackles released. At this point, I'd love for 343 to backtrack on that original promise and announce Halo 7, Halo More Infinite-er, or some other entirely new game.
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