© MICROSOFT
Planet-set levels are a little
more open-world than before.Et tu, Brute. These ape/bear
hybrids control the ringworlds.Endless space corridors take
you between combat arenas.Beware of the Grunts with
their amusing soundbites.Halo Infinite
ELITE A new and more
open-world Halo; has a newly-
discovered sense of fun.
GRUNT Repetitive missions; nonsensical
story; po-faced protagonist.
RECOMMENDED SPECS CPU, Ryzen 7
3700X or i7-9700k. RAM, 16GB. GPU,
RX 5700 XT or RTX 2070.
$60, http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/, T-rated8
VERDICTgrab weapons, launch you in and out
of combat, hijack vehicles, and make
surfaces you were unable to climb easily
scalable. But the simple human presence
of the Pelican Pilot in a game full of eight-
foot superhumans in armor makes just as
much difference to the tone.INVITATION TO GO NUTS
With the extra width of the open-world
setting, those combat arenas are now
huge, and enormously inviting to go nuts
in. Tweaks to the weapon-set mean you’re
much less reliant on either the starting
pistol or Covenant heavy weapons than
you have been before.
You could start with a human machine
gun, pick up a plasma pistol or a needler
from a downed Jackal, use it to knock the
armor off the Brute standing at the center
of the chaos, then use the grapple to zoom
away, brawling with a Grunt as you do so
to pick up his supply of plasma grenades.
It all feels rather like the way we
remember Halo combat from when we
used to play the earlier games. It evenmakes use of that hoariest of videogame
tropes, the explosive barrel, recasting it
as a power coil and making it into an easily
throwable bomb.
That’s not to say there aren’t
drawbacks to the new approach. The
game is completely reliant on combat,
though that’s barely a criticism, and is
so stuffed with collectibles and side
missions you start to wonder whether the
development was outsourced to Ubisoft.
It has the traditional slog in the final third
that we’ve seen in almost every Halo
game to date, repetitive objectives, and
a story that poses more questions than
it answers (although as this is apparently
infinite, we’re sure to get more).
With some reasonable minimum
specs reaching back to Haswell-era i5s,
performance is good, though the more
GPU power you can feed it, the better. Part
of this is because it doesn’t attempt to be
a photo-real experience, the cartoonish
leaning of the visuals tempered now by
modern lighting techniques, but still on
the heightened side of realism.It’s not a perfect game by any means,
but it is a ridiculous amount of fun, and
that's even before you crack open the
multiplayer modes, which include a
marvelous free-for-all simply called
Big Team Battle. Previous games in the
series have perhaps forgotten what it
means to be this enjoyable, preferring to
be as stoic as their silent, faceless leading
man. However, with Halo Infinite, the fun
has crept back into the purple-splattered
shooting game, making us incredibly
happy to see it on PC. –IAN EVENDENMAR 2022 MAXIMU MPC 91