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Technology

Review: Halo Infinite’s campaign finishes the fight—but arrives in tatters

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Halo Infinite—and not just in the game’s plot or firefights.”/>
Enlarge / Chief and “The Weapon” bond through adversity in Halo Infinite—and not just in the game’s plot or firefights.

Xbox Game Studios / 343 Industries


Halo Infinite is the best campaign-driven entry since 343 Industries took over the series in 2011. It is also the messiest Halo game yet.

To be clear, I enjoyed my time with Halo Infinite‘s campaign. That’s primarily because the game sees 343 finally nail its own Halo “voice,” one whose mechanics, gunplay, and physics feel more rooted in the series’ past than ever before. Meanwhile, 343 uses clever ideas to modernize and go beyond the foundation established by Bungie. And the game delivers story, dialogue, and sci-fi stakes where they count.

But there’s no way to review this title without complaining about the game’s launch state. Halo Infinite may reach new series heights, but its ambition tests the limits of the duct tape keeping the game together.

Before we begin, three housekeeping notes

First, this is a campaign-exclusive review. Xbox Game Studios has wisely split Halo Infinite into two discrete parts, and the online versus-multiplayer suite has been live as a free-to-play game since November 20. It’s quite fun, and I’ll have more to say about it in the near future. For this article’s purposes, “Infinite” refers to the campaign launching on Steam, Windows 10, and Xbox consoles on Wednesday, December 8, not the versus modes.

Second, Ars Technica takes spoilers seriously, so I will avoid talking about significant plot points. I arguably spoil a few things about the game’s progression to make critical points, though. If that’s an issue for you, now’s a good time to stop reading, or you can simply skip to the verdict at the very end of the story.

And third, Infinite is currently missing a massive feature: there’s no co-op mode yet. 343 Industries opted to sacrifice the series’ expected co-op functionality in order to meet a December 2021 launch deadline. Get the single-player done now; add co-op later. (Current estimate: May 2022.)

Demerit for not being cooperative

Infinite campaign, but that’s not the same as “co-op.””>
Enlarge / Master Chief gets an AI companion throughout the Infinite campaign, but that’s not the same as “co-op.”

Having played the Infinite campaign to completion, I understand how this situation could have come to be. Progression and quest chains are now blended into an open-world structure, which means the game doesn’t work like the menu-driven Halo games of old. I wonder if co-op will work as a drop-in, drop-out kind of game, with only the “primary” player advancing in terms of unlockables and progress. (I’ll get to that later.)

Was nixing co-op the right call? Financially, for Microsoft, maybe. On a gameplay level, I couldn’t stop thinking about co-op while playing Infinite alone. The game’s best missions and combat include more reasons to invite squadmates and issue battlefield commands than any Halo game in the past, and 343 acknowledges this by giving you AI squadmates as an unlockable perk through the campaign.

If the absence of co-op is a dealbreaker for you—a likelihood reinforced by the past seven campaigns shipping with the feature—you should wait. Don’t install the campaign. Even if you hate online shooters, I suggest grabbing the free-to-play versus-multiplayer suite, teaming up with friends, and playing together in Infinite‘s handy “versus bots” lobbies. You’ll get all the game’s new weapons and abilities, plus some very solid AI bots to square off against. The mode will tide you over much better than making someone watch you play the campaign by yourself.

“We’ll build a ring-shaped superweapon again!”

Enlarge / Master Chief looks upon Zeta Halo. This in-game shot is angled to make the location look as scenic and pretty as possible. It gets worse from here.

Xbox Game Studios / 343 Industries

With that out of the way, I’ll start with the good news.

Do you want a return to the series’ meaty sci-fi plot stakes, bolstered by trippy scenes and solid acting? Do you want a massive landscape over which you can drive a rumbly, tumbly four-wheeler through an encampment of foes? After that, do you want to nimbly grapple-hook your way into a massive battle that rekindles your love for Halo? You’ll find that stuff here.

Infinite follows the series’ core tenets of providing excellent first-person gunplay, third-person driving, and a slew of familiar military and alien weapons. Unlike in 2015’s Halo 5, we’re back to controlling the character Master Chief the entire time, and he finds himself landing on an unfamiliar, supersized ring planet called Zeta Halo. It has been blasted and partially destroyed, and some very bad monsters have designs on putting it back together—and turning it into a human-killing superweapon.

That may sound like the Halo series is putting up its version of the Death Star—”we’ll build a ring-shaped superweapon again!”—but the game differentiates its environments and plot beats enough to make Infinite‘s familiar premise work better in practice than on paper. More on that in a bit.

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World

Ten years ago I watched as protesters toppled Egypt’s brutal regime. Now their hopes of a new era of freedom lie in tatters

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A few days after the revolutionary high of the 2011 anti-regime protests in Cairo, demanding the resignation of then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the mood had shifted.

Pro-government thugs were unleashed into the crowds. They started targeting demonstrators, journalists covering the events, and Westerners. Some of them had entered our hotel.

We were told to pack our things, cram into cars and drive from the Hilton, overlooking Tahrir Square, to a relatively safer hotel a few kilometers away.

I shared a car with cameraman Joe Duran, who sat in the passenger seat, and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in the back seat.

On the 6th October Bridge, a mob forced our taxi to stop, and encircled us. They smashed the windows. They threw rocks into the car. The driver, surrounded by the violent attackers, appeared to freeze.

In Arabic, I remember saying: “I will give you $500 for the windows if you keep going.” I plucked that figure out of thin air. I still don’t know why that number in particular came to my mind. When he drove off, I thought we were safe.

We pulled into the entrance of the Marriott in our shattered car. Dazed, we made our way into the lobby and registered at the front desk.

Soon after, the New York Times columnist Nick Kristof told me some journalists were changing the names they checked in with, so that any thugs coming into the hotel demanding guest lists wouldn’t know which rooms the foreign press were in.

My name is Arabic anyway, I thought, so I should be fine. “Does it say CNN anywhere on your form?” I remember Kristof asking me. I wasn’t sure, but I decided to risk it. No point in lingering too long at the reception desk.

That night, we broadcast CNN’s special coverage from the floor of a hotel room. I remember thinking it looked like a hostage video. We would have many more nights like this, including a particularly tense evening barricaded in the CNN Cairo bureau, a sofa wedging the door shut.

I anchored hours of live coverage with our then bureau chief, the legendary Ben Wedeman, and Cooper. We sat huddled on camera equipment boxes, illuminated with as weak a light on our faces as possible, since the offices needed to look unoccupied from the outside.

Hopes for democracy

The government’s pushback against the uprising lasted several days.

The regime and its supporters tried to beat down the popular movement, but the army was not siding with Mubarak. As had been the case for decades in Egypt, it was ultimately the generals that held the reins of power. When they dropped Mubarak, we all knew he wouldn’t last long.

On February 11, 2011, 17 days after the start of the protests, it was over: Hosni Mubarak stepped down. This would mark the beginning of a new era; the hope was that decades of nepotism, corruption, police brutality and repression would give way to something resembling democracy.

A few years later, I covered the 2013 Egyptian presidential election, which led to the victory of a Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi.

But, ultimately, a revived military would crush the Islamists in 2013 and bring the army back to power. They’d been there all along, tolerating what turned out to be only a brief experiment with democracy.

Lost — crushed even — in this tragic story are the original protesters, who dreamed of a democracy that would represent them.

Optimism crushed

In the first few weeks of the uprising, journalists like us shared in their optimism: Could this be really the moment the Arab world would, slowly and painfully, evolve into a system that serves its own people, rather than the unelected autocrats who had drained their countries dry for decades?

Ten years ago, we allowed ourselves to believe it.

Today, many of those who were on the frontlines of the protests are exiled, imprisoned, or worse.

Elsewhere in the region, there were much more tragic outcomes.

In Syria, the regime crushed its own citizens’ cry for democracy with such brutality that peaceful protesters were quickly replaced by extremist rebels, fighting a government backed by outside forces for control of a shattered land.

Today, those of us who covered Egypt in 2011 still feel the intense emotion of those early days deeply.

There were some scary moments but the historic significance of the events we were documenting acted as rocket fuel as we ran from mobs and hunkered down in hotel rooms.

But for the revolutionaries in Egypt and beyond, it wasn’t meant to be.

The Arab world, in many ways worse off than before the Arab Spring, will have to wait for another generation to demand freedom from their leaders. And one can only hope that this time, they will be victorious, if only so that the sacrifices of those who came before them will not have been in vain.

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