Before I can delve into this game I need to digress and talk about the previous game, Halo 5: Guardians. Halo Infinite follows that game, although it also picks up characters from the non-shooter game Halo Wars 2.
It can be difficult to talk about what went wrong with Halo 5: Guardians because there's no real consensus from Halo fandom about what the problem was; every Halo fan has a particular hobby horse and they get upset at every. single. game. It becomes tiring to attempt to cut through all the noise and figure out where the real problems lay. But make no mistake, Halo 5: Guardians had problems and Halo Infinite very clearly wants to win back the fans.
So I can only talk about the problems with Halo 5: Guardians from my own perspective; take it with a grain of salt (or whatever cliche you prefer). I felt the multiplayer on Halo 5: Guardians was pretty good - mind you, my favourite mode in multiplayer is Firefight, so I'm atypical. There were changes to the gameplay, most importantly the "Spartan charge" abilities, but they didn't make a real impact on gameplay (the "ground pound" was fun but liable to fail in multiplayer).
The biggest problems with Halo 5: Guardians were in the campaign mode and that's where Halo Infinite works hard to make changes. Part of 5's problem was the massive cast; due to putting the cart before the horse - writing 8 different Spartans into the role of protagonist so regardless of whether players were in 4-player mode or not there would always be 4 Spartans on the screen - cluttered up the game. Frankly, having 3 other Spartans present at all times distracted from the story. How could a player pause to enjoy a nicely-designed visual when immediately one of the Spartans would start yakking about some irrelevant detail? Beyond the Spartans there was also a massive supporting cast (Halsey, Palmer, Lasky, Roland, Arbiter) and that's without getting into the antagonists!
Halo 5: Guardians also frustrated me due to its annoying ad campaign, the "hunt for truth" ads which made it appear that the game's conflict of Master Chief vs. Spartan Locke would involve some differing perspectives, a mystery to uncover. The game kind of flails towards that (there are levels where your only objectives are to find people on the map and listen to their exposition) but virtually everything in the ads was non-canon - the scenes depicted never came close to occurring in the game itself.
Third, there's Spartan Locke himself, who turns out to be the real protagonist of the game (alongside his 'Team Osiris' Spartans). Master Chief is demoted to only about 1/3rd of the game's missions. And the Chief's allies, Blue Team, were given an odd introduction. They were big deals in all the novels written about Halo but this was their first time to appear in the games. If you hadn't read the books, you wouldn't think they were a big deal at all - they just appear with the Chief. Their actual reunion was shown in the comic books instead (and even there it was downplayed).
I think I understand why Spartan Locke was created; if the franchise is going to have a future, there need to be new protagonists to keep the series fresh and expand the universe. On that level, I don't mind Locke. He's bland - that's fine, the Chief barely had a personality beyond 'taciturn' until Halo 3. But to pit him against the Chief - even though their "conflict" only plays out as a single cutscene - is a really bad call if the goal was to make Spartan Locke a new fan favourite. Do not send him to attack the franchise's most beloved character... just... don't, ever. I think that's at the heart of fandom's disdain for Locke.
There are other aspects that might've harmed Halo 5: Guardians -- the Prometheans are uninteresting bullet sponges, but on the other hand we're still fighting the Covenant all these years after they were beaten? - but the last, and I think most fatal blow was that the game reintroduced Cortana (the 2nd most beloved character of the franchise) as a villain. And not just a "agree to disagree" opponent, full-on cackling "my Guardians will destroy Alderaan" super-villain. It wasn't just a heel turn, it was a heel turn which was impossible for Cortana to ever come back to.
My suspicion at the time was that when the next game arrived the Chief would have to put Cortana down (Old Yeller style) and then he, perhaps, would assume responsibility over "the Mantle" in her place, thereby writing him out as the franchise's lead protagonist.
Of course, that didn't happen; that really did not happen.
Halo Infinite retreats quite a few paces from Halo 5: Guardians. Many of the changes seemed designed to win back fans - to change the Chief's armour to something more like the earlier games (fans always complain about the armour even though they only have to see it during cutscenes). They brought back Joseph Staten, who wrote the stories for the games the fans now think they love (at the time they complained about his stuff; fans never change).
But to the problems I noted about Halo 5: Guardians: instead of 8 protagonists there's just one: Master Chief. His supporting cast? Echo-216 and the Weapon - and that's it. The ad campaign? Totally up front, to the point that I was surprised when I saw the trailers I'd missed that they spoiled a lot of things I assumed were meant to be surprises (such as the Weapon). Spartan Locke is gone (they might've even killed him off-screen, a blood/pixel sacrifice to placate the capricious fans).
But the story - the story in Halo Infinite is such an improvement. It's set on a Halo ring, which is nice (they haven't been the scene of any games since Halo 3). At times, Halo has felt like an artifact title. Trying to explain to someone why a few of the games have 'Halo' in the title makes you sound ridiculous ("Well, we visited them in earlier games... and one appears for about 3 seconds in this game during a cutscene...")
Cortana is gone - dead. She's still not absent as the story of Halo Infinite follows the mystery of how she died (a genuine mystery unlike Halo 5: Guardians), but having committed to killing her off the game has no problem ramping up her super-villainy (she blows up a planet mainly because she has no idea how diplomacy works). But, as we learn, she also owned up to her mistakes and sought to make amends before her destruction. It's still frustrating that this is how Cortana's story ends, but a lot is mitigatedd by the presence of the Weapon.
I found the Weapon to be absolutely perfect - precisely what the franchise needed. A naive newcomer who doesn't really understand what's going on and has to be guided by the Chief - a reversal of his relationship with Cortana. Indeed, Weapon is characterized as being younger and more child-like than Cortana - she doesn't have the ridiculously sexy body of Cortana, instead garbed in a modest UNSC uniform (the camera also seems careful not to linger on her anatomy in ways that previous games did on Cortana). Hints are dropped throughout that although she claims to have been programmed to "imitate" Cortana, there's more than mere physical resemblance - and, indeed, she proves to be a copy of Cortana. This way we end up with Cortana as a continuing character, yet she doesn't have to bear the burden of responsibility for all the terrible things Cortana did.
The Weapon and Echo-216 both have character development - the Weapon going from exuberant to resentful after the Chief tries to delete her and finally coming to terms with what she is; Echo-216 begins mostly irate and irritable but in time he becomes the Chief's best buddy (even hugging him at the climax). And through their character development, the Chief is allowed to progress a little as well. It's a hard thing to make the Chief develop as a character without breaking what makes him work (that is, making him relatable all players, for which he needs to be a bit of a cipher). I think working out his character issues through his relationships with the Weapon and Echo-216 was a clever way to make it work.
Something also has to be said for the Banished, villains who were introduced in Halo Wars 2. Fans never warmed up to the Prometheans but the Banished have the advantage of being comprised of Covenant races but not actually being Covenant themselves. It's a bit of a step back yet also a step forward. They're familiar foes, but their goals are different and they even have a few new abilities and weapons.
Weirdly, this is the first time I'm going to talk like a real Halo fan -- that is, I hate the changes to the weapons! It's a bit of a problem in the campaign but something I really noticed in multiplayer: vehicles can't take as much damage as they used to; the Needler doesn't seem to kill as quickly as before; the Banished sniper rifles don't seem to be as powerful (or easy to wield) as the Covenant beam rifle. On and on... maybe I just need to work out my old expectations and stop thinking the current versions of the weapons will work like the old ones, but the learning curve has been a bit steep for me (Halo Infinite does have a training mode for testing weapons but it's one thing to use them on stationary targets - another against a moving opponent).
But in all, I'm very pleased with Halo Infinite. The open world exploration in campaign mode offers a lot to do after the story is finished. I'm very pleased with the character work done with Master Chief, the Weapon and Echo-216. I have yet to play a Halo I dislike, but this one in particular I enjoyed more than the other 343 Industries games.
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