Halo Infinite Flight Review

We finally got to play Halo Infinite on Friday (or Thursday if you stayed up for a while) through Monday. The flight covered human players vs bots in a 4v4 setting. We got to try out several new weapons and look at three maps. On the customization side of things we got to look at the battle pass and a piece of the store.

Gameplay

Gameplay feels pretty solid and is a more return to form after Halo 5. A few abilities such as sprint and slide still exist but they have been improved from the last game. Slide is longer making it more useful and sprint is less necessary as it is slower. You can also recharge shields while sprinting another change from Halo 5. Equipment is back after being thrown out for armor abilities and I felt like I used it more than in Halo 3. The grappleshot is a good edition even with the concerns that it wouldn’t work. Of course on certain maps it doesn’t work perfectly but on some it is fantastic to use. Gunplay feels pretty solid there could be a problem sometimes when things got chaotic but considering I’m on an Xbox One S and that this is a few months behind where the team is now I can understand. The DMR being replaced by the Commando (at least to our knowledge) is a bit sad but as the pistol and BR are pretty good I do understand the need to have something different even if the Commando is still similar. The Gravity Hammer seems pretty powerful but it doesn’t seem to actually effect gravity like it did in every other game. The Bulldog is not an adequate replacement for the original but the new Covenant weapons are pretty cool.

Maps.

Unfortunately, I forgot to get any first person screenshots of the maps so there will only be cinematic shots. The first map we played in the flight was Live Fire. Live Fire is a basic three lane map with a few power positions. It’s a good map and will probably become one of the maps people think of when they think of Halo Infinite. The second map we played was Recharge and it reminded me a lot of Plaza from Halo 5. Lots of verticality and movement. Another good map overall but not the best but certainly a good map. The finally map that was in the flight was Bazaar which is a three lane map much like Live Fire but it has more height than Live Fire. Some people seem to think this map is to much like a Call of Duty map because its set in a middle eastern town but I disagree Halo 2 had plenty of maps that were set in New Mombasa just like Bazzar is and Halo 2 came out three years before Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare. Again a pretty good map though I wasn’t able to play it as much as the others.

Customization

With the introduction of armor coatings and the removal of red vs blue (which is quite sad and was probably done to bring in more money rather than give the player more customization) many people were worried about the customization. The armors customization is pretty good it’s not quite on the level with Reach but is a step in the right direction. Thankfully most standard colors were free and not in a battle pass or store so that should help though I do want to know if this is in the base game. Weapon skins are pretty standard for Halo and other games nothing changed to much there.

I have been pretty impressed so far with flight besides a few bugs with matchmaking and some questionable customization decisions I have enjoyed the Halo Infinite flight not to mention I have been surprised but glad how well the game has improved over a year. Hopefully we’ll get player vs player next flight along with maybe one 8v8 map.