Review: Halo Infinite's campaign finishes the fight—but arrives in tatters - Ars Technica

To be clear, I enjoyed my time with Halo Infinite's campaign.

That's primarily because the game sees 343 finally nail its own Halo "voice," one whose mechanics, gunplay, and physics feel more rooted in the series' past than ever before.

Halo Infinite may reach new series heights, but its ambition tests the limits of the duct tape keeping the game together.

Xbox Game Studios has wisely split Halo Infinite into two discrete parts, and the online versus-multiplayer suite has been live as a free-to-play game since November 20.

And third, Infinite is currently missing a massive feature: there's no co-op mode yet.

343 Industries opted to sacrifice the series' expected co-op functionality in order to meet a December 2021 launch deadline.

Having played the Infinite campaign to completion, I understand how this situation could have come to be. Progression and quest chains are now blended into an open-world structure, which means the game doesn't work like the menu-driven Halo games of old.

I wonder if co-op will work as a drop-in, drop-out kind of game, with only the "primary" player advancing in terms of unlockables and progress.

On a gameplay level, I couldn't stop thinking about co-op while playing Infinite alone.

The game's best missions and combat include more reasons to invite squadmates and issue battlefield commands than any Halo game in the past, and 343 acknowledges this by giving you AI squadmates as an unlockable perk through the campaign.

That may sound like the Halo series is putting up its version of the Death Star—"we'll build a ring-shaped superweapon again!"—but the game differentiates its environments and plot beats enough to make Infinite's familiar premise work better in practice than on paper.