Halo Infinite

Halo Infinite Campaign spoilers, including Cortana's fate. Feature information checked November 1, 2026. Halo Infinite starts by letting you know that things have gone very badly. The Infinity has been attacked, the Banished have the upper hand, and Chief ends up floating in space until a pilot finds him. Then you have to start putting together what happened. The campaign released in December 2021, after the multiplayer arrived that November. Chief is on Zeta Halo, the ring is damaged, the UNSC forces are scattered, and the people still alive have had to survive without him. It’s a pretty rough starting point for a game about taking ground back. The pilot gives that situation a very human reaction. He wants to get out. He’s frightened, exhausted, and suddenly traveling with a man who keeps heading toward the next fight. Chief has work to do, but the person flying him around has reasons of his own for not wanting to stay here. Then the Weapon joins them, and Chief has another relationship to work through. She resembles someone who meant an enormous amount to him, but she has her own personality and her own understanding of what’s going on. Their conversations can be funny, awkward or difficult depending on how much of that history is hanging over the moment. I love Cortana, so there’s a lot in that situation to think about. The Weapon needs room to be herself. Chief has reasons to be cautious. Neither of those things makes the other one disappear. But before we even get deeper into the story, there’s the Grappleshot. That thing changes so much about moving around and fighting. You can pull yourself toward a surface, reach a position that would otherwise take much longer to get to, grab a dropped weapon, or bring an explosive coil into your hands. It encourages you to keep looking around the fight. Something useful might be above you, behind the enemy, or just far enough away that walking over to collect it would be a bad idea. And Zeta Halo gives you space to use it. The campaign has larger areas to explore between its more directed missions. You can go after a Banished outpost, help Marines, hunt down a target, search for collectibles, or move toward the next story objective. Capturing a Forward Operating Base gives you a place to work from and reveals more information on the map. Helping people and completing objectives builds Valor, which opens up more support options. There’s a connection between what you’re doing out in the world and what becomes available when you return to a base. The equipment upgrades give exploration another purpose. Spartan Cores can improve the Grappleshot, shields and the other equipment Chief unlocks. A collectible route can actually change what you’re able to do in the next encounter, rather than only increasing a completion percentage. There are also the audio logs. Some fill in what happened before Chief returned, while others tell you more about the people fighting on the ring. The wreckage and abandoned positions have a history behind them. Those recordings help explain it. The Banished give the campaign some very direct threats. Escharum wants his confrontation with Chief, and the bosses force you to deal with specific problems instead of only clearing another group of enemies. Movement, cover, equipment and the weapons available nearby all become important when someone is strong enough to punish the same approach repeatedly. At the same time, the story keeps returning to Cortana. Chief is piecing together her actions and what happened on Zeta Halo. Her final sacrifice doesn’t erase the harm she caused, but it does leave him with another part of her story to understand. The Weapon learning more about that history makes their own conversations harder too. A guide written today also needs to describe the game as it works today. Infinite has campaign network co-op for up to four players and Mission Replay. Those arrived in the November 2022 Winter Update. If you missed a mission collectible, an old launch guide telling you that you can never go back may send you in completely the wrong direction. That co-op is online. It should not be advertised as a built-in local split-screen campaign. And the free multiplayer and the campaign are separate offerings, so a new player needs to know which part a guide is discussing. Beyond the campaign, there’s multiplayer and Forge, including community-built experiences that have expanded what people can do with the game. Those deserve their own coverage instead of being squeezed into the end of a campaign walkthrough. Infinite gives us a lot of useful starting points: equipment builds, collectible routes, boss strategies, outpost approaches, co-op and mission cleanup. And underneath all of it, you’ve got Chief trying to help people on a broken ring while finding out what happened to somebody he cared about. There’s plenty to get into with this one.