The Halo Infinite Multiplayer portion definitely feels like a classic arena shooter most of the time, but unfortunately doesn’t come without some technical issues.
After a bit of time with the game and trying out its full multiplayer mode before and after release, I really wanted to put my thoughts and findings into this review.
Read further to see if it’s worth it for you to invest some time and space into the title.
INTRODUCTION
Halo Infinite is the newest mainline Halo title from 343 Industries and Microsoft, and the first game in the series that puts out its multiplayer portion as a free to play mode, seperating it heavily from its singleplayer. Following my trend of only reviewing free to play multiplayer shooters so far, I am also only going to review the multiplayer portion here.
GAMEPLAY
The game orients itself more on the older Halo games with its gameplay and that was definitely a very good decision by 343, however there are some newer elements like sprinting and a small zoom on most weapons in there as well. It plays extremely smooth and nicely, with the movement being very responsive with some exceptions, the vehicle controls have also been updated with the player being able to make sharper turns with the strafe keys, giving you more control over them.
The best thing about the gameplay is that it is consistent every single time. You can always take a good guess on how much health your enemy has without putting big health bars over their head, and the enemy always takes the same amount of shots from the same range, for example you can always bet on the shotgun to take someone out at point blank range with 2 shots and a bit further away than that with 3 shots. That consistency leads to great gunsfights that are a ton of fun.
Screenshot captured on the 9th of December 2021
In Halo Infinite, you don’t piece together some amount of loadouts with weapons from your inventory to go into the fight, instead everyone is going to start with the same gun, and has to pick up equipment on the map. that makes the gameplay as fair as it can get and everyone has the same chance on the maps to win.
There is a lot of weapon variety with some of the weapons having two functions to shoot, making the skill ceiling rather high and makes you want to learn every single one of the guns, at least the ones that appear commonly on the maps.
Other than guns, you can also pick up grenades that you can have a total of 4 of, with 2 different types, some type of gadget like a shield, a barrier, grappling hook and more, and a power up to get an extra shield or make you partially invisible.
this system works mostly great, except for 2 things. You can carry a total of 2 weapons, if you carry those, you need to switch one of them out if you want to pick up a new one, which is done by pressing a button. But if you carry only one weapon which you will start with in some game modes, you also need to pick up a weapon by a button press. That is pretty inconvinient and it would be much easier to pick up the new weapon just by walking over it.
For the gadgets, I can always only barely tell what I picked up. I can tell it on the grappling hook because it puts a yellow dot in the middle of my crosshair, but the other gadgets don’t look like you would expect at all and I have trouble differentiating them, so I always have to look in the corner of my screen to figure out what I just picked up. Your AI also won’t tell you every time.
Weapons are balanced in a way where more powerful weapons spawn much less and on harder positions you need to fight over, and the power ups will mark you with a distinctive glowing trail, so people can see what to expect when fighting you, which is really good.
Screenshot captured on the 16th of November 2021
The players will take a lot of damage, so you won’t die in just a few shots like in most other multiplayer shooters, and I like that a lot, too because it gives you a good chance of fighting back. Winning gunfights depends heavily on having the right weapon in the right situation, having the better aim and better movement so it’s really more of a test of skill instead of a “who shoots first, wins” scenario.
As mentioned before, weapons feel really good to play with, the bullets pretty much always hit where you would except it and are pretty accurate. The guns have a slight amount of kick that is rather smooth to hold against while firing and the feeback is good, too. A bit of blood would have the done the feedback some good however, because currently there is none and i don’t really expect that to change it in the future, so it feels a bit sterile to just shoot at shields and armor, and there are only bullet holes or explosion marks on walls. So the feedback on the environment is really basic.
There are also projectile weapons in the game, but most of the common weapons work with hitscan. Projectile weapons are mostly balanced that they do bigger damage on an enemy hit, but you need to lead your shots, sometimes a shot falls off. But the reload times are really small on those weapons as well. At least on most of them.
On the Big Team Battle playlist and some of the Quickplay playlist maps, vehicles will also get spawned in from time to time, with bigger and more heavily armored and armed vehicles spawning in later in the round and some being flown in by dropships that you need to capture first. Those vehicles work extremely well in the gameplay, too. You can shoot people out of the vehicles, there are weapons designated on countering them, guns as well as melee, and the feedback on shooting them is really good as well, since they start to smoke, go up in flames and parts falling off on some of them.
The gameplay of Halo Infinite is therefor some of the best in recent multiplayer shooter games, but the player will definitely have to invest some time into the game to get good because it has a higher learning curve than most other games that have come out recently. And sometimes you can do pretty well in a match and still not have too much fun due to the sterile nature of the game.
QUICKPLAY AND BIG TEAM BATTLE
There are two main “modes” to play in Halo Infinite, which are Quickplay and Big Team Battle. On Quickplay you will always play in 4 versus 4 player matches on smaller maps and modes like capture the flag with a singular flag, oddball, which is about holding a ball to get points towards victory, classic Team Deathmatch, which is called Slayer, Domination and a few other modes. Big Team Battles are 12 vs 12 player battles, where each team is devided into a squad of 4 with team mates marked in green instead of the usual blue, making team play a bit easier. Here you will play some of the same modes as in Quickplay, like capture the flag or Slayer, but there are also other modes oyu won’t find in Quickplay like Stockpile, which is about picking up energy cells and storing them in your base. store 5 cells 3 times in a row and you win.
You will only find vehicles on Quickplay on some selected maps, but you will find them on every Big Team Battle map. Most Quickplay maps are mirrored, except for capture the flag with a singular flag mode, which I will suspect may become a bit boring later on, because no matter what side you play, you will simply always see the same thing and repeat often similar match flows with also the same visuals. I think some variety would do the map pool wonders.
The maps in Quickplay do play largely well, you will be able to go where you expect in most cases, and never get stuck on a dead end. Camping is also not very encouraged on the maps, so almost nobody will do it. There is a lot of verticality, ways to use the gadgets like the grappling hook, and different spots to take and hold in different situations.
While I don’t dislike the map pool at all, it plays rather well in fact, there was no map so far that really stands out to me. They look like tech bases, or a market, or some agriculture plant, but nothing that you would remember like Deck 16 or Facing Worlds from Unreal Tournament for example.
Pickups are also well placed on the maps, but I have rarely seen people fight over them and instead just pick them up on occassion, when it has already spawned and they run by it, except when these things are right in the middle of the map where everyone can see them.
The maps are also designed for just one or two dedicated game modes to play on them, making them well thought out, so there won’t be a domination game on Bazaar, for example. Only Capture the flag and Slayer.
In Big Team Battle, the maps aren’t as many as in Quickplay but they are also a whole lot bigger to accommodate the higher player numbers, but I think having one or two more maps for that mode would do it wonders in its variety. Despite their bigger size they are still well thought out and allow for extremely fun vehicle and infantry combat, and I actually had the most fun in this mode. All of the different situations you can face in it, with all of the things you can experience in the mode that aren’t just set up by the game but happen naturally and the bigger gun fights are extremely fun. I ended up being reminded of Unreal Tournament 2004, and if you don’t know me, that is a very good thing.
Screenshot captured on the 9th of December 2021
One thing you have to think about when playing this mode however, is that the performance will be slightly worse than on Quickplay due to the higher player numbers and bigger maps. I had to turn down the texture quality, because I needed too much video memory, which caused slight stuttering in some situations.
In Big Team Battle, the maps are also definitely more varied and feels as tho they can have more variety in them because they are not mirrored and players seem to use gadgets more frequently. But one thing I found is that in some game modes, the flow can be extremely strange, especially in the Slayer mode you can end up way too near at the enemy and being shot down without having much chance to fight back.
Despite that, I have no major complaints with this mode, and it is definitely my favourite.
RANKED AND CUSTOM MATCHES
The Ranked mode is really nothing special and pretty standard. You will play a set amount of matches to determine your rank, and then climb the ladder up or down depending if you win or lose and how well you do in the ranked matches. You will just be playing Quickplay modes tho, but that makes sense since a 12 versus 12 player ranked match won’t be that competetive, really. but I’m still a bit sad that it is not an option there.
There is a bit of a missleading button in the Ranked matches menu, where you are able to “select a mode”. But you can not actually select the game mode you want to play, it is only there set up a Custom Match with ranked rules faster than making it yourself via the Custom Matches editor.
And that brings me directly to the Custom Matches. You will be able to set up a Custom Match with a huge set of parameters you can change to create and modify your own modes. You can even save your settings to a file to load and share them with other people. There are really a ton of options to edit your mode and its a lot of fun experimenting with it, but there are some limitations. First of all, there are no public Custom Games, you can only play them with your friends, via LAN or entirely offline with bots only. Then there is a limitation on the amount of bots you can have in a Custom Match of a maximum amount of 8 per match. Not per team, per match.
Screenshot captured on the 8th of December 2021
With that limitation, the Big Team Battle maps become unplayable in the offline matches, because they are way too big to only hold 9 total Players and you will have to invite a lot of friends to fill such a game and make it playable. The UI to set up a custom match is also not intuitive at all and you might find yourself starting a match more often than not that you didn’t even want to set up that way. The statistics for Custom Matches also just do not work and load forever when trying to bring them up.
The bots are pretty smart and on higher difficulties a good challenge, but the Custom Matches are, unfortunately, only really valuable for you if you want to try something out on certain maps or just go and explore. Otherwise, it really needs working statistics, public Custom Matches and a 23 bot limit to make the Big Team Battle maps playable. With these limitations in place it is a bit disappointing.
One thing that should also be adressed is, that there is no way of choosing what game mode you want to play. You can only choose if you either want to set up a Custom Match with friends or bots, play in a Ranked playlist, a Big Team Battle or a Quickplay. The game then throws you into a random match where you can’t choose at all what you want to play. Lobbies also get discarded immediately after a game so it is nearly impossible to keep playing with the same people over and over again, except if you play with friends. That destroys a lot of the sense of community and is plain bad and only implemented like this for monetary reasons as you will be able to read in the Cash Shop and Progression section.
GRAPHICS
The graphics are really good, and the game runs well for how it looks. Some textures may be a bit low resolution in the distance, but that doesn’t bother me at all. The character models are also nice and weapon models are very detailed. The environments also looks great, however the environment is sometimes a bit unbelievable. but a game needs to play well before it looks good, and that is definitely the case here.
The graphics also do not distract from the gameplay, and you can still always see where your shots land, and the enemies always stand out from the environment. You can also always read what weapon you are being shot from and what gadget was just being used. The transparency for the partial invisibility also hits a sweet spot between the enemy being detectable and being hidden.
Screenshot captured on the 8th of December 2021
There is a bit of an issue with the standard grenades however, dropped grenades from dead enemies that can be picked up and thrown grenades look extremely similar, making them difficult to distinguish from each other.
Besides all of that, the game looks slightly blurry when looking into the distance on bigger maps. I tried to fix this by turning up the sharpness, but that just made the game look ugly. A more clear background would be much appreciated because it is distracting from time to time looking at a blurry background and that also makes the entire game look unnatural.
SOUNDS
The sounds in the game are really nothing special. Everything sounds as you would expect, you can hear the steps of the enemies, gun sounds can be distinguished easily and the announcer really gets you going on a larger killstreak and its a lot of fun to go on those.
But there are barely any environmental sounds that I noticed, which contributes to the game feeling somewhat sterile, and there is also music missing for the maps, and that is highly disappointing, because sometimes you just want to play maps in older arena first person shooters just becaues of their awesome soundtrack, but that is simply not existing here.
Other than that I haven’t noticed anything broken with the sounds in the game at all, so this part is very standard and nothig special.
TECHNICAL ASPECTS
There are unfortunately quite a few technical issues with the game. The first issue I ran into was a game crash when I tried loading into the tutorial, which is not a good first impression at all.
The second issue came up when trying to look through the settings menus, because those can break and just stop displaying certain lines of text, which makes it impossible to change those options. The menus have to be opened again to fix this. Then there are only Borderless windowed mode or usual windowed mode, Fullscreen is not available and that is just a strange decision.
A friend I played with had reported some mouse input issues that were severe enough to impact gameplay, and they haven’t fully been fixed at the time of launch.
Then, TeamHZ wanted to play Halo Infinite together, but we couldn’t do that because the Minimum System Requirements are not accurate. For example, as a GPU an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti is listed, but Sany owns a GTX 970, which should surpass the 1050, but still couldn’t play the game because it always crashed immediately. Now this isn’t a technical issue, but still worth mentioning that you definitely do need hardware that is quite a bit more powerful than the Minimum Requirements lead you to believe to actually just play the game.
The settings themselves are really well done, and you can change a lot of the graphical options, and the game always tells you how much video memory you will need and what is recommended. Audio and Control settings work well also, but again, the UI here is slightly confusing and could have been done better. I was also told that the widescreen support is really good, too.
Finding a match is also pretty much instantanious and the maps load very quickly as well.
Screenshot captured on the 9th of December 2021
Ingame I have mostly faced networking issues, sometimes the game displays too many players in the scoreboard that aren’t even playing in the same match as you, sometimes you may be connected to a server that is quite far away and you will have to play with a less than ideal connection and have to fight with constant delay and rubber banding, and trading kills also happens sometimes, which is not good.
It can also happen that the starting game cutscene doesn’t play correctly, and the camera animation is all over the place.
So as a conclusion to the technical issues, I will say that there are quite a lot of problems here and sometimes you won’t run into them but when you do, they can really have a serious impact on your experience with the game.
Another thing that is a bit infuriating is that some players have discovered that if you start the game in offline mode, you will be able to see a lot of content in the game that isn’t actually playable yet. So you will have files downloaded with the game, taking up space on your hard drive that you can not use yet, or potentially never will be able to use.
CASH SHOP AND PROGRESSION
In the cash shop you will fortunately not find any random lootboxes, but you will have to make your purchases via imaginery currency that you first have to buy with real world money, creating a disconnect between the item that you buy and how much money you actually spent for it.
Items are also very expensive. As seen in the screenshot, some gimmick accessoires like the teddy bear and flower will cost you 20€, after that you will only have 500 points of that currency left to either buy something really small and meaningless or having to charge up again.
On top of the high prices, the shop items are in a constant rotation, creating a fear of missing out which will certainly make the one or the other user make some bad purchasing decisions. The currency can also not be earned via gameplay, so the only means of progression as an entirely free user will be the free items from the battle pass.
Screenshot captured on the 9th of December 2021
Suprisingly, the battle pass in Halo Infinite doesn’t create as much a fear of missing out as the cash shop, because the battle passes do not expire. How that will work with progression through the next battle pass while the other isn’t finished yet, I can’t tell because at the time of writing only 1 battle pass is available.
If the premium version of a battle pass can also still be purchased when the next one is already out is also not clear.
The free contents of the battle pass are rather lack luster tho, and of course the things that you really want to have are in the premium slots.
Progressing through the battle pass, which is the only means of progression besides the ranks in the Ranked game mode, has become a rather fast process. While the progress was really slow at first, 343 Industries reacted to the feedback of the players and heavily increased the experience you get by simply completing matches. The other means of getting experience are challenges, which you will have to complete in specific game modes, or make kills with specific weapons and other such things. The problem here is that you can not choose what game mode you want to play, you can either select Big Team Battle or Quickplay, and that’s it. So you may have to play a couple of matches before entering the desired game mode.
This will no doubt lead to players leaving matches early later on in the games life cycle when players just want to progress faster.
You can buy boosters for the battle pass and to change challenges, but that is really not a solution to the problem at all but rather a scheme to make more money to a problem intentionally created.
Despite that, I really don’t mind the progression here, since everything is just cosmetic and you don’t unlock new weapons, or other unfair advantages. And since the gameplay is so good, the game wouldn’t have needed progression at all to keep a very healthy player base because its gameplay would have carried it on its own. But since they chose to have a form of progression in the game, I should talk about it, and it is really not good.
You can customize certain aspectes of your armor, your weapons, vehicles and even change the AI that will talk to you in a match. You will of course only unlock new parts for your armor, an entirely new armor, colors, charms, etc. via the battle pass and the cash shop.
CONCLUSION
Because Halo Infinite has some technical issues and rather high hardware requirements for a free to play title, it can unfortunately not be recommended for people with weaker hardware, which should be one of the target audiences of free to play games.
To also choose to have progression and to only put that behind a rather high pay wall and a battle pass, unless you want the only free stuff which is not very appealing is also quite questionable.
But the gameplay is extremely good, and playing the game is a ton of fun, it definitely revives the feeling of playing an arena shooter, with all the map control, vehicles, weapons and item pickups, it’s just pure fun and I will be coming back to the game just for that over and over again. So I will recommend it for people who are looking for a new solid shooter they can learn and sink some time into, and also for fans of games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 or the older Halo multiplayer modes if you are okay with some of the modern additions.
Halo Infinite Multiplayer is a free to play first person shooter that was developed by 343 Industries and published by Xbox Game Studios.
Halo Infinite Multiplayer was released to the Steam platform on the 15th of Novemeber, 2021.
Every piece of media used in this article was captured by me except another source is given.
Featured Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i86Ckj8xKk 9th of December, 2021, 12:36am