Halo: Campaign Evolved mengingatkan saya bahwa Halo Infinite sebenarnya hebat,

Halo: Combat Evolved is 25 years old now, so it's a marvel that playing its most recent remake, Halo: Campaign Evolved, is still as fun as it is. Everything from the weight of the weaponry, the ambiance of the Halo installation, the screams of fleeing grunts, and the grin-inducing sound of a plasma grenade exploding on an unfortunate target are all here to remind you (or introduce you) to the most important franchise in Xbox history. It's a series that has struggled in recent times, and it's easy to see this reminder of Halo's roots as critical to its future. So why do I keep wanting to go back to its flawed, latest entry instead?

Halo Infinite was always going to miss the mark in some way. It was a victim of troubled development, responsible for selling a console that struggled out of the gate, and tasked with being both an end to the tired tale from previous entries as well as the start of a wholly new one. Infinite was pitched as Halo's future; a platform that could be built upon for years to come, telling an evolving tale as new chapters were added to it over a decade or more. None of that came to pass. Halo Infinite did a lot of things, but it wasn't enough to pull the series out of the ditch it found itself in. So instead of committing to it long-term, 343 Industries reformed into Halo Studios, shut down its in-house Slipspace engine in favor of the ubiquitous Unreal Engine 5, and did what was once unthinkable: It brought Master Chief to PlayStation.

Yet none of that should overshadow just how much Halo Infinite did to drive forward the fundamental gameplay loop that made its original so captivating in 2001. Halo: Combat Evolved has an incredibly strong opening, thrusting you into the chaos of its intergalactic war and wasting no time introducing you to its striking setting on the surface of the Halo installation. Having wide-open areas to explore as enemies drop in from the horizon was as novel then as it is today. It's a little easier to pick apart the loop--drive to a spot in the world, survive a few waves of enemies, move on and do it again--especially in those opening sections. But it's a rhythm that Combat Evolved, and by extension Campaign Evolved, uses to great effect across its brief adventure, at least by today's standards.

Halo Infinite took this idea, one that had been mostly abandoned since Halo 3, and completely modernised it. You're on yet another installation, but this time the map isn't just wide--it's open. Enemies are littered around its landscapes, occupying fortified bases for you to break into, suppressing small squads of lost UNSC soldiers, and patrolling the valleys with vehicles just waiting to be hijacked. You were finally given the freedom to explore and engage with the world in a way that was only simulated in previous games, letting you approach skirmishes in the ways that you saw fit with new weapons and tools that encouraged creativity.

The hookshot, Infinite's version of a wrist-mounted grappling hook, was smartly given to you from the start. It's Infinite's single best addition to its combat loop, letting you move in a way that made Master Chief an even greater force to be reckoned with. Reeling yourself into enemies to deliver that crunching, final melee blow, pulling explosives towards you so that you could fling them into a group of unsuspecting enemies, and throwing yourself around corners and into the air for a surprise attack are just a few examples of how this tool added new layers to the two-decades-old formula that had strayed too far from its roots. It stripped things back to the fundamentals and accentuated them rather than trying to replace them with gimmicky, hero-like abilities that felt at odds with the shooter they were attempting to integrate with.

Halo Infinite was not without its flaws. Its opening is drawn out and takes too long to unleash you into its open world. The larger, explorable space comes at the expense of the varied locales previous games allowed you to hop between, begging for the variety that chapters like The Silent Cartographer, set against sandy beaches and towering cliff faces, are so fondly remembered for. Its story is almost incomprehensible if you hadn't kept up with the narrative beats conveyed through other expanded-universe Halo media that takes place after the events of Halo 5, particularly regarding what happened to Cortana. It muddies its many gameplay enhancements behind a game that was disinterested with new fans, despite its requirement to act as a platform for its immediate future.

It's easy to see why, then, that Halo Studios saw fit to start over--to remind people why Halo was important, what its core fundamentals are, and reestablish a new future. But it would be a massive shame if this comes at the expense of the first real refinement that this original formula received just a handful of years ago. Halo Infinite is flawed, but it's also the most interesting campaign the series has delivered since the culmination of the Master Chief's initial story under the stewardship of Bungie. And if Halo Studios seeks to reclaim some of the glory of those days, it needs to take lessons from both its recent and distant past.