izigame.me

I've played this game for too long now and have finally uninstalled. The game play itself is incredible, by far my favourite modern FPS game, way less cringe than COD, better movement than CSGO, more technical gunfights than pretty much anything else on the market. Most of the maps have a very distinct style. The weapons and power ups are well-balanced, and you can do creative shit like repulsing rockets and grenades, sticking someone with a plasma and repulsing them off the map, grapplehooking to the top of the map and sniping enemies from the air... and I could go on, there really are a huge amount of possibilities, and I've had so many great memories and exhilirating moments in Infinite. Pulling off sick shots with the S7 sniper is the most dopamine I've ever gotten from a video game, period.
But the game is also a broken piece of shit. The campaign is awful, with a tedious plot, poorly written dialogue, and almost no variation across environments. If you are playing outside of the US or Europe the servers are absolute garbage, even if you do find a game you will load in and then the match will just immediately end (and it's only a bit better within the US and Europe). The monetization of the shop reflects the very worst instincts of modern AAA studios. It took the devs two years to get the game to the point it should have been at at launch, and now the population is pretty much dead and nobody cares. 343 reneged on its promise of seasonality, taking it from a traditional paid game, to a live service, to a game that barely gets any new content. The matchmaking is horrible, you will be punished with unwinnable games and then handed cheap victories. If you get good at the game your teammates will be so useless, especially in 4 v 4s, that you have to solo carry if you want a chance of winning. The more time and effort you put into the game, the more it will punish and disappoint you.
Although they mostly get the blame, I don't think any of this is really 343s fault: Microsoft is a shitty corporation headed by a relentless cunt: they bought up the Halo franchise, drove it into the ground through sheer mismanagement, squeezed as much money as they could out of its corpse, and then turned their attention to the next game, which I'm almost certain will release unfinished and with a very expensive shop attached. They've been buying up and destroying studios across the map, setting a precedent for malpractice that Sony have only been happy to follow.
In short, Infinite represents the very best and worst of modern AAA gaming. The technology and the mechanics are excellent, showcasing the kind of complex interactions that you can get from contemporary game design. But these developments in design are unfortunately tied to selfish, greedy corporations who don't care about creating a sustainable franchise that people will want to return to for decades; all they care about is squeezing as much money out of the player base as quickly as possible. This isn't the kind of game, or the kind of game company, that I want to support with my money or attention anymore.