Let me slap you with advance warning. Halo InfiniteAt its best, it’s the open world, through which you can swing like a metal Tarzan honking his horn and do a sweet Warthog jump from the cliffs. But the best of it level, the most satisfying A-to-B gun avenue, arriving late in the campaign (vandals ahead). The House Of Reckoning is a series of rooms where man-made battlefields are built inside an alien fortress. Abstractly, they are human structures surrounded by sand, as if your extraterrestrial enemies are playing house but believe a gay man’s house looks exactly like a Normandy beach segment circa 1944. The narrative reasoning behind this level is absurd. But the battles that happen inside are amazing.
The idea is this. Your ape-faced antagonist, Escharum, has ordered these rooms to be built as a stadium for bloody sport. They are arenas to showcase human captives, who must rummage through the dust for guns and fend off waves of nagging, jackal snipers, roughs, and workmen. color paint hunt. As you storm the last castle to confront the brute, it’s your turn to run his deadly trap.
It’s elaborate. It’s ironic. That the principal of the Banished, a group of aliens known for picking up burnt wheels from jeeps, will drain their dwindling resources into pouring concrete into a murderous playground built specifically to Ultrasonic masturbation to kill him is a move by LuDoNaRriTiVe DiSsoNanCe that even the most bullet-hungry of the Master Chief puppeteers can’t ignore.
Why not simply truss where to blow? Why not send your army as a giant super weapon, instead of controllable waves? It is the stupidity of the Bond villain that spans both the plausibility of the setting and the plausibility of the motives. A super cliché is often used explicitly to create an interesting space to capture content.
But to appreciate rationality in a superhero shooter set in a 10,000 km circular world suspended in space not to mention a lot of light from planet Earth is a bit like complaining about an Australian accent. in Netflix’s Arcane. (“They totally broke the dip, man”). Anyway, it’s hard to maintain your vital ability when there are so many explosive grenades. Forgiveness quickly came to the game designers, who provided a high-pressure kill zone.
It is the stupidity of the Bond villain that spans both the plausibility of the setting and the plausibility of the motives. A super cliché is often used explicitly to create an interesting space to capture content.
And House Of Reckoning is just that. Two of the rooms you’ll enter have a central, raised “stage”, where guns are scattered around a single structure, along with very handy explosive tubes. There are turrets on several sides of each defensible garrison. The door sounds a red siren when a new wave of enemies is about to flood the death box. Attackers come from all angles and the factory floors of these huge hangars are littered with visors for them, while your hiding place is limited to a few metal plates, columns concrete and bullet holes. These death courses are small prototypes of the Halo shootenanny. You fire, dash, and more scarcely to find a new angle while your shield recharges, only to hear the “WAAAH” of another door full of xeno jerking open. You can find A full gameplay of the level is here, if you want to see it in action.
They are tight and tidy micro-columns. A calculated microcosm of everything that makes Trading Halo a blast. Like one day, a certain bored meeting designer at 343 Industries, carelessly tossed his scribbles into a basket of scraps of paper, and stopped midway when they thought, “Hmm, I don’t know. Master Chief has how many rooms. Actually demand? ”
As much of the game offers wide swaths of rock and grassland, House Of Reckoning is a lucky, necessary diversion of an outstanding battle zone that does things with the opposite approach. It’s like being scaled down to the size of a Lego man and put in your mate’s Warhammer diorama, or having a gunfight inside. that famous Halo commercial with little drawings. Besides all that, it was a quiet, handsome nod to Fire mode of Halo: Reach and ODST. The biggest sadness is that you can’t play any of these things in Legendary with a co-op partner yet, because this sequence will definitely sing under those conditions.
The transformation comes with the third and final room. It was another huge hangar. But instead of a model battle theater designed by what we can only guess was Escharum’s personal level designer, we’re faced with a giant green shell from a shipwreck. UNSC. A large dark egg that we entered with the feel of our boss, not itchy as much as fully burned. Sure enough, the only cloaked elite to appear in cinematic form, was the right-hand man of old man Ape McBadguy’s Spartan killer.
This final fight will take place in an equally small space. But unlike the previous rooms, you will have an opponent. And unlike other hangars, which have a spacious, airy feel even as they encourage you to stick to the “stage,” this brawl is more of a cage match. The walls are against you. It was a dark, naked container, pierced by thin beams and dark, crimson lights. It’s like going to an abandoned warehouse to talk three o’clock early and get into a fight with a vandal.
Infinite’s boss battles aren’t the highlight of the game for me (bosses belong to Mario and Dark Souls, get out of my range) but this clash with a beefy ghost assassin has a scary backdrop and enough funny jokes to earn my respect. It was a good finale, contrasting with the fighting of the previous rooms. Escharum confronts you right after that to close the level in a much easier way. But don’t mind that. We will always have Club Cloak ‘n’ Dagger.
Like a beat in an already fraught plot, House Of Reckoning is a hilarious misstep into the familiar act of a bad guy who, unable to kill himself, is the only person who has ruined his life. ta. Having said that, Escharum is a classic “I’d love to have a strong opponent”. But when his final bastion turns into a quirky barricade, it’s a step too far for Saturday morning cartoons.
However, the barricades themselves are spot on. Halo Infinite may have proven that old shooters can learn new open world tricks. But its penultimate level shows that Halo still knows how to execute a toy that has the ability to chew bullets in a confined space.
