Halo Infinite opening level goes back to basics with Master Chief shooting aliens on a ship

Halo Infinite
(Image credit: Microsoft)

The first level of the Halo Infinite campaign has been revealed, and it's a direct homage to how our adventures with Master Chief began.

Microsoft and 343 Industries have focused their Halo Infinite gameplay reveals on Zeta Halo itself up to this point, but how exactly does the Chief get there from floating out in space? Well, judging by the first look that Game Informer got at Halo Infinite's opening level, he'll take a detour through a Banished ship first.

Game Informer's video starts with the Chief putting in an honest effort to understand Brute user interfaces before giving up and just punching the screen in. This leads to a rolling combat encounter through the massive ship's interior, with the Chief using his handy new Grappleshot to fling himself up and down across multiple decks.

While this Brute ship has a much more open floor plan than the Pillar of Autumn, the parallels are clear: the Master Chief fights his way through a spaceship full of aliens before making a desperate escape onto the ringworld below, where the game really opens up.

In this case opening up means roaming around a big map, attacking outposts, and teaming up with surviving Marines as you see fit - which also sounds pretty similar to Combat Evolved, come to think of it, though now you get to decide where to go next.

343 dips even further into Halo history with a Halo Infinite trailer that tells the story of two marines on Harvest, the first human world to fall to the Covenant.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.