With Halo Infinite, Smart Has Become the New Spectacular

Doing Halo better than ever before

Let’s get to it, then: Halo Infinite’s fledgling multiplayer is properly brilliant. It’s all the bang-bang, pew-pew, pop-pop action you’d expect from the daddy of the modern console shooter — one about armoured punks fighting in an arbitrary life-and-death contest with really big guns on some intergalactic real estate.

Source: Microsoft.

You might’ve heard Infinite’s multiplayer is the most Halo-like Halo has been in a decade — that it’s in sniffing distance of the pedestal upon which rests its seminal forebearers. That’s almost true: Infinite feels like a return to form, like a series that’s come to finish the fight with a middle finger and a few mean words.

But Infinite isn’t quite the revolutionary the original was. It looks, sounds, and smells safe. You recognise that gun — or a gun specifically designed to remind you of that other gun. You recognise those drums, and you absolutely recognise those duh-duh-duh-duhs.

Infinite isn’t Combat Evolved — as much as it might try to evoke it. Infinite, then, is really Halo, combat evolved.