: My main take-aways (in no specific order)

: It took 343 a decade, but they finally made a great Halo game. I really,
: really liked it. It was fun. None of the missions felt like a slog. At no
: point did I find myself mocking the story under my breath or rolling my
: eyes.

: -Sci-fi will ALWAYS suffer from the "bigger bad" problem. It just
: does. "Somehow, Palpatine returned" comes to mind lmao. This is
: the world we live in, when things must be a franchise, or die.

: -They did a great job of tying off mistakes from Halo 4\5. I didn't need to
: understand much about what happened in Halo 4\5 or Halo Wars 2 to
: understand the plot. Which is good, because I played the campaign for H5
: exactly once. That said, if you had not played those games, some of the
: "why should I care?" stuff I can tell isn't going to have the
: same impact on the player.

: -They took the best of the Cheif\Cortana relationship from H4, expanding on
: it.
: -They took the best from Chief and his trauma from H5, expanding on it.

: -Art design was good. Finally. Everything looks faithful or a nod to the main
: trilogy.

: -The music was good. Great in some places. It very much felt like a faithful
: evolution to the original trilogy. Very much a "if it ain't broke,
: don't fix it" approach. I think Marty would be happy with it,
: overall.

: -I never got bored of the open world, Destiny\Far Cry\Red Dead\Skyrim type
: gameplay. It really felt like they took some of the fun stuff from Destiny
: and distilled it down to those fun points.

: - You remember when Bungie said about Destiny back in like 2013 that "if
: you see a place you can go there" and it kinda turned out to be crap?
: Well, you can actually do it in Infinite. Like, I would drive, walk, or
: grapple all over the place and it never felt like it took too long. I am
: legit surprised how un-tedious it was.

: -Speaking of cues from other games, the Grapple hook is so game breakingly
: fun. Like, I went all over the goddamn place like some kind of armored,
: unrefined SpiderMan. It was fun for the sake of fun. Much like Doom
: 2016\Eternal did away with re-loading, the Chief just having this thing as
: a form of mobility was a joy.

: -Gun play was OK. I appreciated the smaller sandbox. I still think the
: commando is crap. I ran through maybe 80% of the game with a BR and
: Rockets, but did use other stuffs when I felt like it.

: -Enemies were OK. They brutes get kinda repetitive and die the same way, but
: then when I feel that way those Berserkers that charge you or a freakin
: chieftan will shake me awake again.

: -The grunt banter is both stupid and wonderful. 4th wall breaking in the
: right way. Sometime annoying.

: -Bosses were not bad. Not bad at all. They were not sponges. There is an
: element of figuring out that they each have a weakness (kinda like megaman
: bosses) that makes them interesting.

: I'm sure I'll think of more. For now, there is my brain dump. Looking forward
: to talking about the main story when more of y'all complete it\post about
: it.

: Great Job, 343!
: (I really mean that)

Not quite done yet. I THINK I'm on the final boss fight. (Only because I don't know who would be left after this.) And it's not been fun. Master Chief is a brute force kind of soldier, so having to run and hide and be tactical and think about fight mechanics goes against everything I've ever known in Halo. But also...boss battles. One of the reasons Halo was awesome was because it was one of the first games like that, that DIDN'T have boss battles. Now, I'm not against battles, but....there were a lot of them. Especially at the end. And it wasn't fun.

Otherwise, I still have a lot of open world to discover and I'm excited to traipse about and find all the secrets and collectibles.