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“Star Wars” but more militaristic in its mix of fantasy and sci-fi is the easy cultural comparison, as “Halo” turned the Xbox game consoles into a powerhouse and is as much a vital video game text as “Super Mario Bros.”Īs those who have been able to secure a next-generation Xbox console will be happy to hear, “Halo Infinite” is indeed a showcase for the new Xbox Series X/S. The Microsoft-owned “Halo” franchise itself has for the past 20 years come to symbolize the modern video game shooter - less frantic than “Doom,” lacking the self-seriousness of “Call of Duty” and striving to balance complex storytelling with an over-reliance at times on space lore better left for 30 or so books that attempt to make sense of this universe. As an interactive text it is still primarily a celebration of shooting with a variety of space guns, but even as someone who doesn’t often gravitate to the so-called “shooter” genre, “Halo Infinite” exemplifies the category at its approachable best.
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Return to form, reboot - whatever descriptor one wants to use - “Halo Infinite” plays as a bit of a “Halo” greatest hits, merging the Master Chief narrative existentialism of the very fine “Halo 4" with the early games’ patient level design, silliness and sci-fi slickness. So far, every minute I’ve played of the “Halo Infinite” campaign takes flight.
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But when “Halo” embraces itself as sci-fi gobbledygook - wrapping a warm hug around its cheesy dialogue and reveling in the weirdness of its core storyline of one man’s relationships with artificially intelligent female holograms - it soars as pulpy, timeless, space opera fantasy. There are times “Halo” tries to be serious, though those moments are best left at the tip of an eye roll. The whole of “Halo Infinite” is somewhat ridiculous. It’s hard, after all, to put down a controller in frustration when, after watching the man-turned-war-machine Master Chief get slain by an unseen alien brute with a pulsating blue sword, a squealy voiced rodent-like-reptile creature yowls, “I got dibs on the helmet, guys!” No one is as gleefully brain-dead going into battle as the creatures in the “Halo” franchise - and especially those in the campaign of “Halo Infinite,” a sort of reset for the massive sci-fi franchise after 2015’s bonanza of impenetrable intergalactic war threads that was “Halo 5: Guardians.”