Spent most of Saturday parked on the couch with a controller because Halo Infinite's multiplayer showed up completely unannounced this past Monday. No preorder, no early access code, nothing, you just went into the Store and there it was, free. Xbox turned 20 that same day (the original console launched November 15, 2001, which is a fact that made me feel genuinely old for about ten minutes), and I guess 343 decided the nicest birthday present they could give everyone was skipping the whole marketing cycle and just dropping the thing six days before Thanksgiving week properly started.
The campaign's still not out till December 8th, so this is multiplayer only, free across Xbox One, Series X/S and PC with full cross-play. I played on PC with my buddy Dave, whose graphics card is older than some of the interns at his job, and even he was getting a steady frame rate on medium settings, which says something considering how rough the last few Halo PC ports have been.
The actual gunplay is really good. The BR feels tight, the grapple hook is stupid fun and I found myself using it to yank enemies toward me mid-fight more than for actual movement, and the sandbox has enough variety that fights don't all feel like the same three seconds on repeat. I'll say that much without hedging: this is the best Halo has controlled in years.
The battle pass thing
Where it falls apart for me is the progression system, and I don't think I'm alone in that. The battle pass is ten dollars, a hundred tiers, doesn't expire at the end of the season which is a genuinely nice touch. But you don't earn XP for playing matches, or for kills, or for winning. You earn it almost entirely from challenges, and the challenges are things like "win a bomb game as attacker" or "get three kills with a Sidekick" in a playlist that doesn't even run those modes half the time.
Dave and I played six matches back to back Saturday. Actual good games, close scores, the kind of session where you feel like you're improving. We came out of it with maybe a fifth of a single tier of progress each. One daily challenge complete, one still sitting there mocking us because it wanted headshots with a weapon neither of us had picked up all afternoon. That's not a minor gripe. It's the entire loop of the game feeling disconnected from the ten bucks you paid for it.
I get that free to play games need some kind of engagement hook, and I'm not naive about how these systems get built around retention numbers instead of fun. But there's a difference between a grind that respects the time you're already spending and one that actively punishes you for playing the way the game wants you to play. Right now Infinite is doing the second thing. People on Twitter and Reddit have been loud about it since Monday, and I wouldn't be shocked if 343 ends up adjusting the XP curve before the season's even a month old. They'd be smart to.
Small unrelated complaint while I'm at it: my phone forced an iOS update in the middle of all this, 15.1.1, which Apple pushed out Wednesday as an emergency patch for a memory corruption bug tied to spyware research out of Citizen Lab. Fine, security patches matter, I'm not against them. But it drained my battery down to 40% mid afternoon and interrupted a photo backup I'd forgotten was even running, which has nothing to do with Halo and everything to do with how these updates always land at the least convenient possible moment.
If you haven't grabbed Infinite yet, it's free, it plays great, and you should go try it regardless of what I just spent four paragraphs complaining about. Just don't expect that battle pass bar to move much this week.