In stark contrast to 1000x, I enjoyed this series back in the day; I love a big world with some big ideas in it, I love a good shooter/space-opera, and it was all of that once.
ODST and Reach were the high water marks, exercises in distilling down to personal and political; illuminating possible futures that were ultimately abandoned to brand expediency and sales, and I guess you can’t step onto the same galaxy-scale-superweapon bioterrorized ringworld twice.
After a bad breakup, a middle aged man meets a much younger woman who, though inexperienced and often naive, bears a striking resemblance to his estranged ex-wife. They go on a road trip, have a lot of fun hijinx together, and when they ultimately run into his ex near the end of it, she forgives him, blesses this new relationship, they part amicably and everything’s fine.
Tell me, is this:
- a terrible book by the creepiest, Vladimir-Nabokovviest English professor you know, or
- the literal storyline, and I am not joking at all, of Halo Infinite?
I still enjoy wandering the mission-desolate spaces of “completed” open worlds, though, I suppose a weird loner’s habit. And on a last spite-replay Infinite, I was surprised to find myself feeling a fair bit of sympathy, wondering about what the writing experience must have been like. All the parts of a decent story are there, even after the less-said-about-it-the-better 4 and the we-will-never-speak-of-this-again 5 narratives didn’t leave anyone much to work with. But they’re all scattered, mismatched and disorganized, like somebody gave you a scrapyard when you wanted a car.
We open with the Chief getting beaten down by some guy we’ve never seen before, but he talked to Cortana except when we come to he’s apparently dead and his underlings are so mad about it that they growl a lot and then build us a bunch of jungle gyms with the help of this other new big bad who’s the victim of some other ancient injustice but who also only shows up like two thirds of the way through and who’s free now and also super mad but then that first dude who beat you up is still alive somehow, and more growly voice I guess?
There’s a place in the world for the Cut-Up technique, but having that done to your story unwillingly so the company can ship a pile of nonsense in time the christmas sales date has got to be a miserable experience.
And that extends to the shape of the whole game. It’s supposedly an open world, but there’s a bunch of places where you just spontaneously blow up if you cross an invisible wall like some sort of suicide-bomber Icarus, other places where huge islands or buildings just sit there empty… It’s a mess. It’s technically impressive, the raw materials of greatness are all there and doesn’t hang together or make a damn bit of sense.
Anyway, I got one good laugh out of it.
Eventually I found the place you can equip the Scorpion Gun; it’s a thing that’s normally on top of a tank, absolutely overpowered nonsense, but there’s a place you can find one in game to carry around. The thing is that it’s invisible; you don’t see it in your hud or hands and for some reason it shoots from very close to the ground, so you basically need to jump to use it at all.
And when I finally got the joke I groaned out loud. Because it is, drumroll please, a massive footgun.
Uuuuugh.
Anyway, apparently they’re making another one. Good luck to them, I guess; it’s hard to imagine there’s more there to say.