Halo Infinite and Halo Guardians were both controversial in their release amongst the Halo community. While there is a lot to love from both games, there are also a lot of annoying plot elements or development decisions made by 343 that make the games so inconsistent. When it comes to 343 Halo, many members of the player base just want to see a marked improvement game after game.
Infinite and Guardians are the easiest way to compare and contrast in this way, since they’re the most recent two Halo entries. Both of these games hold pros and cons over the other, but which has the best campaign? While there are single-player campaign fixes needed for Infinite, it still has been able to stand up to Guardians in terms of the overall experience it offers players.
5 Halo Guardians Has Greater Scope
The narrative of Halo Guardians deals with Cortana taking over the Guardians, huge robotic-police creations made by the Forerunners eons ago. This obviously affects all of the universe and its inhabitants, so the scope of the game was definitely huge. Halo Infinite, meanwhile is largely self-contained to the struggle of the humans versus the Banished, a faction of Brutes. Halo Infinite adds to the lore in many ways, but its scale is much smaller. It’s a shame that Halo Infinite went a completely different route, deciding not to deal with the aftermath of the Halo 5 cliffhanger.
When comparing the two games, Halo Guardians definitely felt like a more important event in terms of how it affected the entire universe. New players should avoid the mistake of thinking Infinite follows on from Guardians.
4 Halo Guardians Features Better Voice Acting
Halo Guardians saw the Master Chief working with lots of different Spartans, and coming into contact with others that were trying to arrest him. Considering this plot, there was a greater need for voice acting and a more cinematic feel to the game’s scenes. Infinite, meanwhile, sees Chief alone on one of the Halo rings, barely speaking to anyone except for a villain.
For this reason, Halo Guardians has the best voice acting, mostly because its storyline required drawn-out sequences of dialogue more than Halo Infinite did. There was Blue Team and Spartan Locke’s team, and the developers made a habit of humanizing Locke and his crew by giving them many more talking scenes. What’s more, Chief got more lines in Halo Guardians than he had during the original run of games, so 343 still kept up with trying to humanize his character more.
3 Halo Infinite Has Higher Replayability
Halo Infinite switched up the status quo of Halo games by giving the game an open world, abandoning the linear, instance-based campaigns the series had been known for up until that point. This leads to it having lots of replayability over Guardians. Players can progress with side missions or the main mission, and then look around the vast Halo ring afterward for collectibles. While Halo Infinite’s multiplayer does need fixes, the single-player experience is pretty satisfactory, and just needs more content to flesh it out.
Older Halos have long had lots of replayability, with Skulls, Par Scores, and Par Times paving the way for multiple attempts at one level. Halo Infinite, though, manages to up the ante when it comes to replayability. It gives players a whole world to explore long after they’ve beaten the main story, with the potential to add in DLC content at a later date. And with Halo Infinite’s multiple bosses, players can replay beating certain bosses, experiencing the thrill all over again.
2 Halo Infinite Has A More Coherent Structure
Despite priding itself on being non-linear, Halo Infinite’s campaign actually has more structure than Halo Guardians did. Guardians seems to wade from one storyline to the next, originally sticking with a “bit of Chief, bit of Agent Locke” structure — before eventually just abandoning Chief and sticking to Locke.
Infinite feels much more cohesive. The general structure is “go there, do this” with main missions available to the player at a moment’s notice, slowly upgrading all of Master Chief’s tools. It also allows the player’s Chief to investigate the ring’s mysteries, giving the player a feeling of slowly establishing a foothold there over time. This is all down to the structure of the campaign.
1 Halo Infinite Has A More Engaging Plot
While Halo Guardians and Halo Infinite both resulted in some disappointment for abandoning the plotlines of their preceding games, Halo Infinite has the better overall plot. It feels like the start of a new chapter, while Guardians felt like a middle-game that kind of got away from itself and what it was meant to focus on. Halo Infinite confirmed some rumors, while also successfully going in its own direction.
Halo Infinite was similarly meant to have focused on something completely different (the Halo Guardians cliffhanger, for instance), but it does manage to be slightly more convincing with the story it’s trying to tell. It’s a story of shattered factions duking it out over a Halo ring, and that simplicity feels much more compelling than HaloGuardians came across.
