The second is that Halo’s narrative framework, where there is always a new macguffin to get and a new ancient evil to be discovered, is played out. Broadly, I think there is better character writing in this game than there has been in any previous Halo game. Half of the experience is just learning what actually happened in the six months while Master Chief was free floating in space, and there is a lot of room for characterization of the Banished and Cortana within that discovery process. The first is that the game operates a bit like a murder mystery. Without delving into spoiler territory, I can say some general things about it. It is within this framework of walking and shooting through environs that the game’s narrative plays out. It is not something that feels rewarding to do for 10 or 15 hours. There’s going to be a lot of great footage of it shared on social media. The rest of my play time was spent tooling around the (truly) beautiful vistas of Halo Zeta with a vehicle full of AI-controlled marines and taking out open-world points of interest. The game’s campaign missions, the traditional “meat” of the Halo experience, took up something like 40% of my gameplay time during the review period. I’m starting with this open world, and trying to get it out of the way, because it takes up a lot of literal and metaphorical space in Halo Infinite. And yet what you’re doing, and the number of ways that those fights can shake out in significantly different ways, starts feeling thin fast.

There are many different qualities to that verb, as shooting enemies with a shotgun feels radically different than using a Covenant sniper rifle. This game has a single verb: “shoot.” You perform that verb in a lot of contexts. Like Far Cry, though, a fundamental problem with the way Infinite balances its activities is that there are only so many things to do. This is all perfectly fine, and each of these activities are fun the first few times.

Fun things to do in universe sandbox 2