For so long the AR has been the designated swap-out fodder in Halo, whichever part of the game you're playing, but the sense of crunching feedback in Infinite makes me oddly reluctant. Evolving sound design is one thing - an area that's been reliably improving with each 343 Industries Halo but reaches a thunderous, superlative pitch here in Infinite - but the effect, intentional or not, is an acute sense of viability. Maybe the best example is the Assault Rifle, Master Chief's trusty default weapon that once seemed to barely tickle enemies with its rounds of fluttering eyelashes, but now positively bellows down at them, each bullet a hammer blow from the gods. Somehow, Halo Infinite's ragdoll deaths feel even ragdollier. The thing they all share is their un-Haloness, the fact that five, ten years ago the Chief wouldn't be seen dead with any one of them, but that now feel like they've been there all along. It's a theme that runs through Halo Infinite: a cascade of little-firsts, mini-revolutions, tiny, barely perceptible tweaks and changes. But it's a fairly radical first for Halo, a series that has for much of its later life been defined by its conservatism. By modern standards, a year and a half after Call of Duty Warzone split off from the annual CoD and several after Fortnite transcended Fortnite, that's nothing new. The Halo Infinite campaign, which Eurogamer's Wesley Yin-Poole mostly loved, is a paid-for thing that stands on its own (although there are a few collectibles that unlock cosmetics in the multiplayer, presumably to help encourage players to try both). If you're unfamiliar, Halo Infinite's multiplayer and its campaign are effectively separate games. But thankfully in most cases you can - and probably should - ignore them. There are some quirks there, some weird choices that threaten to muddy the otherwise pure waters of Halo Infinite's "golden triangle". The only problem is the front end - the meta-game or the UX or whatever that kind of menu-based wrapping of a game is called these days. Digital Foundry's PC tech analysis of Halo Infinite As far as the moment-to-moment of multiplayer shooters goes, it's immaculate. I've spent weeks picking at this game, prodding it and poking it and peeling away at the edges to try and uncover some kind of flaw, and I can't. Not in terms of gunplay, at least - of gunfeel, of the constant cycling between empowerment and disempowerment and the much-harder-than-it-looks balance that so many shooters yearn for, between that immediate, crunchy, punch-feedback satisfaction and Halo's famously slower, big-brain strategy.
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