HALO INFINITE

After six years, is 343 ready to finish the fight?

Developer 343 Industries

Publisher Xbox Game Studios

Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Origin US

Release Q4

They say you can’t go home again, that if you return somewhere after a long time away, it’s never how you remember it. As we rack up the first of many Killing Sprees in Halo Infinite’s first technical preview, however, we’re not so sure that’s true. The territory might be new – Live Fire, a tangle of ramps, towers and gangways wrapped in drab training-facility theming – but everything else feels like home. The crunch of a melee hit connecting with the armour plate of an opponent. The lazy, tumbling trajectory of a frag grenade. The precise number of Needler shards you need to embed beneath someone’s skin before they’ll explode in a cloud of pink. All of this imprinted onto our brain by endless hours of practice, the intervening decade apparently having done little to shift them from our muscle memory.

This familiarity should be a criticism. At a time when we often lament the lack of chances being taken by developers, surely it is hypocritical to celebrate Infinite for so perfectly imitating its predecessors? But the difference here, we’d contend – somewhat guiltily, as if caught with fingers in the plasma-grenade jar – is that nothing else out there feels quite like Halo. Including, arguably, the previous two Halo games.