FIRST-
PERSON
SHOOTER© MICROSOFTWhat’s up, Chief?
Halo Infinite
HALO’S RELATIONSHIP with the PC has
always been rocky. We had to wait for
2019’s Master Chief Collection to finally
bring the Xbox games (which began life on
the Mac) to Windows, but even then they
were slowly drip-fed to PC users over the
course of a year. It’s a lot to expect Halo
Infinite to make up for these 18 years
waiting for a proper Halo PC launch, but
this is a darned good attempt.
The Halo story has become convoluted
across the last six or so games, but the
basics are that a war between the religious
collective known as the Covenant and
humanity ended up including mysterious
ringworlds that were built as a doomsday
weapon system to wipe out a voracious
species known as the Flood. The fact this
means wiping out all sentient life in the
galaxy doesn’t seem to have sounded like
such a bad thing to the weapon’s creators.
Some idiot kept a sample of the Flood
on one of the ringworlds, but somehow
it got loose, setting off the three-way
battles of the first games. The Covenant’s
defeat led to it splintering and huge hybridFinally, a Halo game launching
on PC alongside Xbox.It’s not until you end up on a
ringworld’s surface that the promise of a
more open, though not completely open-
world, Halo can be delivered upon. And
make no mistake, this is a huge move
for the series. It’s always looked like the
ringworlds and planet-set levels might be
more open than the spaceship corridors,
but they’re merely wider. You’re always
funneled through a narrow entrance point
to a killing arena in which the series’
vaunted 30 seconds of fun can be played
out and looped. It fits because Halo has
always been a kind of sandbox, allowing
you to approach fights in different ways,
even if that merely boils down to whom
you shoot first, or whether you sit in the
driver or gunner seat of a Warthog.
Also new is Master Chief’s grappling
hook, which the space-based opening
does a decent job of introducing, having
you use it to bounce through wrecked
sections of a ship as you move to and from
a Pelican dropship piloted by another
innovation—a human character you'll
actually care for. The grapple hook canape/bear creatures known as Brutes
took command. However, the war with
humanity continues and, given its nature,
further outbreaks of the Flood cannot be
ruled out. While they don’t actually appear
in the campaign, they would seem perfect
for a horde mode.
Due to a slow start, you see rather more
of the Brutes early on in the campaign
than you might expect to. In fact, the
game begins with you being dropped out
of a spaceship by one of these Brutes, who
then follows you around like some giant
ranting holographic projection.
Halo’s early enemies are the comic
relief, the Grunts that spout amusing
soundbites (the fact Infinite introduces
new ways to blow them up is almost worth
the price of the game on its own), and the
Jackals who harass you from a distance
and hide behind energy shields. With no
shielded Elites, at least not to begin with,
the endless space corridors you initially
explore do little but funnel you from arena
to arena, where you encounter yet more of
the hairy beasts.in the lab
90 MAXIMU MPC MAR 2022