: About 1/3rd of the way through. Having a blast zipping around Zeta Halo like
: an electrified Spider-Man—unfortunately, I don't think the surface has
: enough easy vehicle paths, which discourages me from running around in
: vehicles everywhere (which is a shame, because I love the Marines in this
: game.) There's stuff in the overworld but I think not too _much_ stuff,
: since I don't want it to take me 40 hours of collectible hunting to
: artificially inflate the playtime.

I’m still fairly early on (played for maybe 4 hours or so).

My very early, not well thought out first impressions are:

• Controlling Chief is a joy. I love the movement, abilities, and (some) of the gunplay.

• The game is gorgeous, both technically and in terms of art direction.

Ok, now the really big question I’m wrestling with:

• so far, and I stress that I’m still early on, I’m struggling to appreciate the move to an open-world format. I always loved Halo campaigns for how wonderfully well crafted and curated they felt. Areas of missions were completely tailored around a specific gameplay experience. To your point, if you found a warthog in previous Halo games, you could be darn sure there was a pathway well-suited to driving just ahead of you. That’s not at all the case in Infinite. It’s very much up to the player where to go and how to get there, which leaves lots of room for sub-optimal experiences.

So far, Infinite feels very much like every Ubisoft game released in the past 12 years, but with Halo’s sandbox. That’s not a bad thing at all. In some ways, it’s fantastic! But it’s just not what I want out of a Halo game, if that makes sense.

• I keep wishing I could be playing this game in co-op mode. That’s often where these Farcry-style sandbox games really come to life. I look forward to playing it that way when the feature is added.

Anyway, I’m trying to enjoy it for what it is, which may just take some time. It really is fundamentally different from any previous Halo games. I can appreciate the bold change. Excellent as it is in many ways, I’m just a bit unsure whether or not it will click with me in the long run.