Halo released in 2001 with a bunch of cool ideas, or so I'm told. The problem is that it's stuck with them forever.

Halo is forever bound to its core gameplay: Two weapons, regenerating shields, the combat triangle of guns-melee-grenades, backsmack instakills, and vehicles, all within the name of arena-shooter fare.

Halo 2 found room for innovation in (1) vehicle hijacking, (2) dual wielding, (3) new weapons and maps, and (4) game-breaking bugs. This was highly controversial and alienated old time Halo CE fans, but they were outnumbered by all the players who were introduced to the series with Halo 2.

The series would go on with a similar pattern: Add new mechanics, and provide a different set of weapons and maps.

Halo 3 was the last time the series had domination of Xbox multiplayer shooters. It added single-use equipment, a hyped campaign, and the Forge level editor. The Forge editor as a big deal: It kept the game alive, it drew creativity, but it was pretty underpowered. People had to abuse glitches to make maps. Each successive Halo game would provide a stronger, better Forge.

Halo Reach added controversial "armor abilities" (reusable equipment) and added the health mechanic back from CE, which was a non-recharging pool of health under your shields, while removing dual wielding (which was useless). My favorite addition from Reach was that grenades now had a trail behind them. (Before, grenades were practically invisible for being small, fast-moving orbs.)

Halo 4 refined the gameplay in Reach with a different set of armor abilities, added a killstreak mechanic, and a whole host of QoL features: They started recording assists and rewarding players for contributions other than securing kills, they added weapon countdown timers, and they added hitmarkers. They also significantly expanded the sandbox with new, "hardlight" weapons.

Halo 5... Well, I didn't have an Xbox One, so I can't say.

Halo Infinite continued the same iterative trend: New weapons, new maps, better Forge, etc. It returned to equipment, a-la Halo 3, where pickups would have one to five charges. It has the best iteration of the equipment / armor abilities IMO, and as a bonus, you can pick up and throw exploding barrels, and you can even catch them.

But Infinite finally fixed a 20 year curse on the Halo franchise. Before Infinite, most of the guns in Halo were useless, outside the power weapons and one or two starter weapons. In CE, the pistol dominated. In 2 and 3, it was the battle rifle. In Reach, it was the DMR. In 4, it was the DMR plus the boltshot. You would never want to use CE's plasma pistol, or Halo 3's brute spiker, etc.

But in Infinite, every gun is just fantastic. Outside the human guns, all the others are packed with utility that allows you to make really creative decisions on starting and ending encounters, provided you have the timing, decisionmaking, and mechanical skill to do it.

The bonus? Almost nobody knows about it. Nobody knows that the plasma pistol retains charge when you use equipment or clamber. Nobody knows that the ravager will cook and explode grenades in it's area-of-effect. Nobody knows that the shock weapons can chain across metal and nearby Spartans. Nobody knows that hardlight weapons penetrate vehicles or remove the grace period before its detonation. Nobody knows that the Commando has the fastest TTK, or that the Bandit has no descope. And everybody knows that you can aim the cindershot, but nobody knows how to do it.

The effect is that (1) twenty years of playing games and not having friends and (2) a little bit of reading on the effects of the weapons, is that I am now very very good at Halo Infinite. Combined with the matchmaking vying for a 50/50 game, I am regularly topping the leaderboard. Even if I lose, I regularly have more points than the rest of my team combined.

I am very very lonely, but Halo Infinite is good. "I am your friend," Master Chief tells me, "Let's play Halo."