The last three numbered Halo games hit similar beats, and returning players may struggle to care, not least because the soul-searching accompanies a lot of corridor-crawling.

‘Violence as wacky and infectious as its story is po-faced’ … Halo Infinite. Without the Weapon, Master Chief wouldn’t make it past the first sealed door, and it’s through conversation with her that we explore his awkward romance with Cortana, who isn’t quite a memory. Women are rarely permitted to star in Halo games, but they are central in ways both dramatic and mundane. For Master Chief, this means wrangling with the women who made and guide him – Dr Halsey, his unreachable mother figure Cortana, his first AI soulmate, and the Weapon, this year’s holographic sidekick, who puts in double duty as palm-top comic relief and lock breaker. Halo is part of the great “Daddification” of action gaming, in which long-serving heroes have been reinvented as scarred patriarchs struggling with years of war trauma. The extra space amplifies Halo’s existing brilliance as a martial playground, defined less by reflexes and accuracy than giddy improvisation, but it’s not quite enough to make this backward-glancing game unmissable. It’s the same old story with the same rousing musical motifs, but the geography has changed: main missions are now threaded through a lush open expanse comparable to that of a Far Cry game, where you’ll tackle sidequests such as hostage rescue, and claim bases that let you fast-travel and rearm. Infinite takes place on yet another gorgeous ringworld, where Master Chief teams up with a nervy pilot and a chirpy new AI buddy to battle a renegade group called the Banished. Made infamous by Halo 2’s premature cliffhanger ending, the line is uttered with zero irony at Halo Infinite’s conclusion: it’s become the catchphrase for a series that is travelling in circles, always defaulting to something like the original fable of a craggy supersoldier fighting alien zealots for control of universe-ending Forerunner relics. T wenty years since Halo: Combat Evolved, Master Chief is still “finishing the fight”.

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