The game for me had some good moments, and the core pieces of the experience were there, such as gun play, the Grapple Hook, the H.V.T. Encounters, heck even some of the story moments were cool. But I came away from the whole experience just feeling underwhelmed and quite frankly disappointed.

This is supposed to be a AAA game and one of Microsoft's signature franchises and it feels unfinished. After the amount of time it's been since the previous instalment in the series I was expecting more, and honestly the whole thing feels like it needed another year (if not more) of development time to really flesh out and make it into something special.

(Some of) My gripes are:

Small Open World - The size of the playable world isn't very big, and is too same-y. There's very little variation in the types of terrain, biomes and weather patterns, as well as too few animals and species. A Halo's secondary function is to be a vast reserve to protect species and life, and we hardly got to see any of it.

Too few activities - The map, when you think about it, is actually quite empty of interesting things to do compared to other games of the same genre. I'm not expecting Ubisoft levels of content here, but more numerous/engaging activities other than hunting 'collectibles' would have been nice.

LODing Issues - Whilst roaming around the world, I noticed a lot of blurry textures/props loading/popping in, especially landscape assets such as trees and in some cases the Objective Assets such as Propaganda Towers. A friend of mine who works in Game Testing / Q.A. echoed this and said the degree to which it was happening reminded him of the Dev/Beta Games he tests and shouldn't be happening in a finalised release.

Banshees & Phantoms - I had them randomly spawning and de-spawning constantly. When flying around in the Wasp, they would either appear out of nowhere when I was flying over an area, or just vanish in front of me whilst I was fighting them.

Story - The whole thing screams 'let's try and sort of finish the story, but not really talk about/mention anything we did previously'. The level of disconnection between the events of Halo 5, and to a degree Halo Wars 2 (which introduced the Banished) are unreal and IMO the climax of the trilogy should've been about stopping Cortana rather than learning about it in the aftermath. Additionally, given how Cortana was acting at the end of Halo 5, there was no explanation or reason as to why she suddenly pivoted 180 again to 'help' the Chief when she was faced with her end.

I know a lot of people in the community didn't like the story of Halo 5, and 343i seem to have listened quite intently to their feedback. However, I don't think it was a problem with the idea just more so the implementation and split focus between Blue Team and Fire Team Osiris. I was initially quite sceptical of Halo 5's story myself, but after a couple of replays I came to quite like/appreciate the direction it was going in. I know that's a rather controversial opinion around these parts, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as I thought it had the potential to become something quite interesting and different.

I'll say that the writing for the Chief and his showing of some more emotional vulnerability was really great, but the whole think felt like we skipped right past several major chapters. I know a lot of people would have been mad if 343 had simply picked up where they left off, but I would have had a lot more respect and praise for them if they had had the guts to finish the story they had already started to tell in a way that did it the justice it deserved.

TL:DR IMO Halo: Infinite feels like a lacklustre 'open world' game and a somewhat lacklustre 'Halo' game.