The series' sixth mainline installment, Halo Infinite, has its most ambitious campaign yet, but aspects of it harken back to the original, Halo: Combat Evolved. Infinite is ambitiously trying to convert the flagship FPS franchise to a nearly open-world format, and in doing so, may finally realize the full potential hinted at by the series' very first game.
Master Chief taking on the Banished forces in Halo Infinite and gathering scattered UNSC troops on Zeta Halo has a very similar feel to the beginning of Halo CE. At the end of Combat Evolved's tutorial mission aboard the Pillar of Autumn, escape pods crash land on Installation 04, aka Alpha Halo, and the player must rescue UNSC marines fighting against the Covenant in a mission aptly titled "Halo." For the time - released in 2001 for the original Xbox - the scale of such a mission was impressive. There were large open areas to explore, ongoing skirmishes between Marines that survived the escape pod crashes and dozens of Covenant, and an exhilarating sense of being marooned on a mysterious alien superstructure.
The Halo mission in Combat Evolved seems rather quaint by modern standards, and there have certainly been plenty of Halo missions that have dwarfed it in scale, but that fleeting emotion of daunting exploration is something that the series hasn't quite explored in the same way, instead opting to keep the campaigns rather linear. In Halo Infinite, Master Chief will arrive at Zeta Halo to confront the Banished and reunite the scattered forces of the UNSC. The open level design of Infinite can finally deliver on that opportunity to freely explore an Installation that Combat Evolved posited, but was never able to capitalize on.
Halo Infinite Can Evolve Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Combat Evolved had a certain magic to it that's hard to recapture, especially in its early levels. The game was massively influential in the FPS genre, and it did a wonderful job of showing the player what it meant to be a Spartan super soldier in a short amount of time. Master Chief is the only one who survives from his escape pod, and the rest of the mission is spent saving Marines from the Covenant and driving around with them in a Warthog. The UNSC troops are in a particularly dire situation at the beginning of Combat Evolved, one that is acutely mirrored by Master Chief's arrival on Zeta Halo.
Master Chief is no stranger to saving the day - or all of humanity, for that matter - but there's something refreshingly simple in Infinite's setup. Just like in Combat Evolved's second mission, Infinite's premise can be boiled down to arrive on the Halo, save the desperate UNSC forces, and destroy the enemy. In reality, the story is much more complicated than that, thanks to two decades of accumulated Halo lore and narratives, but the premises are so similar that Infinite is evoking similar emotions as the original game. Halo Infinite's new story trailer even has Chief picking up some Marines in a Warthog and recklessly driving off of a cliff. Final judgment on the quality of the Halo Infinite campaign will have to wait until its release, but it's a comforting feeling that early looks are seemingly emulating Halo: Combat Evolved and the series' earliest roots.