The gunplay is very good, but it does lack the same distinct physicality of Bungie’s work. In Halo Infinite you’re playing as Master Chief all the time and while you’re technically not fighting the Covenant the alien species are the same as the original games, with only one rarely seen, and not especially interesting, addition.

Of course, that is largely the point maybe not in terms of the low-tech visuals but while this is not a soft reboot in terms of story it is when it comes to the back-to-basics gameplay.

As such, you only get to return to the open world again after you’ve beaten the story (at which point everything has become trivially easy and you’re ticking off icons from the map in a manner that makes the worst Ubisoft games seem organic and unpredictable). What they’re getting at is that after the two intro levels the game becomes fully open world until about the halfway point in the plot and then goes back to being just straight, linear levels right up until the very end. Although developer 343 Industries has been careful not to describe the campaign as open world, we think most people assumed that was just meant in the same manner as Sony’s insistence that God Of War wasn’t fully open world either. Halo Infinite won’t be winning any storytelling awards, but the strange inaccessibility of the plot is nothing compared to the peculiar structure of the campaign itself. The laconic Master Chief has always been something of a blank slate but this time round his AI companion is literally that, which means the only individual with any proper characterisation is an annoying pilot who is clearly meant to be sympathetic and, unlike the other two leads, very human, but he just comes across as an annoying whiner.

Given Halo 5 was six years ago the lack of context, or even something as simple as a ‘Previously on Halo’ summary, is absolutely bizarre. There’s no clue as to who or what Master Chief is, who he’s fighting and what they want, who Cortana was and what she did, what a Halo is or… anything really.

While the multiplayer has a whole separate section dedicated to explaining every element of its design, the campaign makes zero attempt to explain anything.

Halo 1 grunt