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Multiplayer maps from Halos’ past had a devotion to fairness of steps, the premise that every step I take toward the giant laser cannon should equal one step you take toward the same brutal death tube. Halo Infinite abides by this age-old rule, at least judging by the recent public test.
These cards are classic Master Chief party houses, true to the supremacy of abstract forms, with clarity at every corner and a clean art style that makes a brief glance appear at an enemy in a doorway. Pick-ups bask on catwalks exposed like sparkling sirens. Isolated platforms provide gravity hammers, surrounded by a smiling void. These are arenas that feel both dangerous and fair. But they are also something else. They are players.
I mean this purely in a navigation way. Live Fire is arguably the simplest of all the cards we’ve seen so far. A three-lane firing range with a strategic tower that imperfectly overlooks the three approaches. But it has my favorite piece of all the cards. The middle lane (often occupied by explosions thanks to the powerful weapons that spawn there) has a nice little bolt hole that you can escape in the blink of an eye. It’s the easiest and sweetest getaway. Of course, you can also throw grenades down this chute if you see someone on the radar below you. It’s a fireplace and you are Santa Claus. The gift is murder.
Bazaar is a mirror image of murder with raised walkways and bullets flying above a cross-shaped crash of market stalls. But it has a less used passage on one side that falls to the lowest point of the map, a dark chamber where the shotgun lives. It’s cool and all, but bring a gappleshot with you down that cramped passage and it becomes a flanking vent, opening on the opposite side. I’ve never met another player crouching on the way to this sneaky crawl space, but I can easily imagine the panic of this one.
These are just the two clearest examples of an otherwise subtle game. In fact, it might disappoint anyone who remembers the more interactive quirks of previous Halo maps. Waterworks’ pullable icicles that fall and crush anyone below, the swaying slab of Headlong’s unfinished road, Relic’s unlockable teleporter. Such silliness is absent from the smaller cards Infinite has shown so far. But that leaves me hungry and hoping for actionable buttons in Big Team Battle maps.
Luckily, one of these cards will be playable in the next public test. It’s a classic mix of rock and greenery called Fragmentation, and developers 343 Industries have already shown that there will be some sort of “loot cave” in the middle of this large killzone. You have to start hacking it and then stay alive long enough for the door to open.
It’s nice. I love my safes in Apex Legends. But what I really want is something big, an unlockable door in a crucial overhang, like the Longshore in Halo 3, or a Terminal-type bullet train to block critical shots at just the right time, a annoying wind turbine raised from Zanzibar. Not those exact things, I mean, just similar big concept moving parts that lead to happy chaos. Hopefully 343 holds us up. I would be surprised if something like this didn’t show up. But if it’s too difficult to implement, too disruptive for those sacrosanct fair starts, well, there’s always the post-launch Forge Level Editor (delayed, but not forgotten). If 343 Industries doesn’t build me a deadly windmill, I will.
“What I really want is something big, an unlockable door in a crucial overhang, like the Longshore in Halo 3 … let’s hope 343 holds us up.”
Of course, your old Big Team Battle is Halo’s real home for many bloodshot trigger presses. Players got a taste of bigger maps with Behemoth, a symmetrical desert map with a Warthog, Ghost, and Mongoose quads. This isn’t a real Big Team Battle, but rather a mid-sized Capture The Flag map. Halo devotees will recognize the omnipresent shiny metallic arrows and see Sandtrap in its sinking dunes. But it’s a great job on its own. The circular outer edge encourages smooth Warthoggery, but you’ll have to dig deep into the rocky interior of the map to dodge the fire, that’s where the traditional embarrassing flip of the car will occur. Desperate falls into the central pit of the card are inevitable, as the flow of the card pulls the conductors down like a big hole. A brave jump to a central bridge in this pit is tempting, but even if you do that jeepy jump, you’ll find yourself in the tight bowels of the structure, a big grenade magnet. Hope you like to explode.
It was also on Behemoth that the skewer, a new weapon, revealed its hilarious brutality. It’s a formidable instakill harpoon rifle, but it needs to be reloaded with every shot, making it a risky brute (it doesn’t automatically reload when empty if you zoom in – what gives?) More importantly , the Skewer can pierce vehicles and send them flying. Add in the grappling hook and formidable Repulsor boop (a device that repels players, vehicles, and even rockets), and Behemoth quickly becomes a lethal playground. Large overhangs and metal constructions give you plenty of swing possibilities. Ceilings are important in level design, but you rarely see why until you have a fun device that makes you look up.
Again, the Forge Mode lag is a shame, in part because these shiny locations really make an amateur mapper blood pump. But also because there are going to be some really silly game modes invented in Halo Infinite, if the new toys and already wacky realms of the Master Chief Collection are any indication. You haven’t known the real Halo until you’ve stormed the impossible towers of Castle Wars, until you’ve cruised the crazy highways of Ice Road Truckers while zombies attack from underneath all of them. Angles. Imagine the wacky homebrew modes we’ll have with grappleshots. It’s going to come off the metaphorical and literal hook.
But let me take off my rose-colored card-loving glasses for a moment for a real conversation. There were a few bugs in this preview. Some players have found a way to fight endlessly. Some have accidentally spawned a delicate Warthoglet. One of these bugs is good and the other is not. More concerning is the free-to-play’s insistence on earning XP purely through challenges (getting three pistol kills, getting three repulsor kills, etc.), alongside other free-to-play shenanigans. play too tedious to be discussed here. It remains to be seen how players will react to the presence of these elements in a game that many will buy for £ 50-60. But here’s my guess: not good.
OK, I need to get my rose-colored glasses back. 343 Industries might have some free rejigging to do, but they’ve nailed the feel and weight of the movement through a bunch of fun angles. The metrics of your imposing armourboi, its steps, its speed, the distance it can jump, the limits of its rough climbing. It’s perfect. I like how “silent” cards are. Some might look at Bazaar and complain about CODifying. I find it closer to CS: GO or Valorant in terms of cleanliness (Bazaar does not have one but two double doors that open at an inviting angle). Still, Halo’s own ledge hopping traditions couldn’t be clearer once you actually start moving from place to place, jumping from air conditioner to awning to windowsill. . It’s not quite Titanfall’s freewheeling destruct-o-hopping. But it might just be Titanfall’s heavy-footed cousin.
Even Recharge, initially my least favorite map of the bunch, revealed its true intelligence in Strongholds mode, where teams compete against each other to control three areas. Team Slayer is great, but you don’t see the benefit of an underpass or the vulnerability of a balcony until there’s a goal to think about. Four small pillars on this map change height at various times because the hydroelectric generator below them is sagging. And one of the checkpoints is right there among these pillars. There is also a giant reef around the Gravity Hammer on this map, where a lot of repulsor booping occurs. Looks like 343 gained enlightenment from the Nepalese level of Overwatch and a wise warrior called Lucio.
Basically I’m impressed. There is clarity and focus in these hostile racetracks that I have missed over the years of royal combat. As much as I admire the expanses of Apex and Warzone, they are occupied environments by nature. Halo Infinite seems ready to give me something else. The playful obstacle courses that I can learn by heart and map in my head. Now, if they just put a bullet train in it …
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