Sounds like a very solid outing but not
quite the God of War 2018 uplift for the IP it
probably needed to be.
I guess it will come down to, do you think Halo just needs to be "fine quality" and good ol' fun, or do something in a big enough way to be considered a leader and inspiring gameplay and narrative design of other games of its ilk, in order to be truly a "marquee" franchise.
Because for me marquee games tend to set standards in one way or another whether it be graphics, animations, game design, story/narrative, even music etc. where they have a clear lead over other games in their genre (if not industry-wide) in that specific area. And every major platform holder past and present has had at least one, if not several, games of that status, such as:
-Nintendo with Super Mario Bros., Mario 64, Zelda OoT
-Sony with Gran Turismo, Parappa the Rapper, TLOU Part 2 (animations)
-Sega with Virtua Fighter 3 (graphics & mechanical depth), Panzer Dragoon, Outrun
-Microsoft with Halo 1, Flight Simulator
...then of course 3P companies like Capcom with Street Fighter 2, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4 or Namco with Tekken 3 (PS1 home version), iD Software with DOOM and DOOM 3, etc. Not all of those necessarily started new genres, copycat trends or wildly massive shifts to game design, but they led in certain areas for their time and were often also the biggest productions of their time in their respective genres as well, coinciding with being prestige IPs for their owners, hence marquee.
Halo Infinite's campaign sounds like it's quality fun but will it set any precedents for others to be inspired to model off of going forward? From some of these reviews it doesn't sound like it; that combined with these scores (which are quite good to be perfectly honest; not
amazing but very solid) it just maybe seems like it's not enough of an innovation with the campaign to reinvigorate the IP long-term with more casual fans (or expand its reach to people outside of the Halo community the way something like 2018 GoW did for its IP)?
I'm guessing what I'm
really saying is it seems like Halo: Infinite is the Halo equivalent to R&C: Rift Apart. A perfectly fine entry in the IP but nothing that does anything too beyond what previous installments already did, and maybe it'll just "feel" more special due to absence of stronger competition? Granted I haven't played the campaign, but I was thinking it'd score at least in the 88 - 91 MC range. And yes MC doesn't mean everything, it never has. But considering we've pointed to the MC when looking at the general praise for stuff like Flight Sim and FH5, it's only fair to give it that same weight when looking at the still-fine-just-not-as-strong praise for Halo Infinite campaign.
Curious if these reviews will get updated when new story content for the campaign comes along; that should probably be the case but depending on the time gap between initial release and that new content it's hard to ask reviewers to retrofit old articles with new info in a way that feels like a whole, naturally cohesive review.