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Season 5 of Halo Infinite has made some major additions to the game, and a new mid-season update is bringing one of the most interesting ones with the introduction of Firefight: King of the Hill. This co-op PvE mode finally adds a classic horde experience to Halo Infinite, serving as the latest in a long series of features that have helped improve a game that felt fun but flimsy at launch. Online shooters often feel like they stray from their core strong points over time, so it’s particularly refreshing to see one hone and expand its appealing qualities.
Firefight only ever appeared in Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach, but those two showings were enough for the game mode to earn a post-launch port into The Master Chief Collection and a perennial spot on the list of common requests for subsequent entries. The core concept is simple, based on tossing players onto campaign maps to fight hordes of enemies, but it’s effective in a way that many PvE alternatives aren’t. Firefight: King of the Hill maintains the basic principle while orienting it around a king of the hill function, forcing localized and especially deadly frays.
Halo Infinite Season 5 – New Maps, Modes, & Forge Updates
Season 5: Reckoning offers some major new additions to Halo Infinite, both in terms of multiplayer possibilities and custom level creation.
Firefight: King of the Hill Is Straightforward Fun
A preview gameplay session of Halo Infinite‘s Firefight: King of the Hill demoed two different maps and difficulties for the mode, providing a decent sense of how it looks and feels in practice. The king of the hill mechanic should feel immediately familiar to anyone who’s played the PvP version in Halo Infinite, giving a team of four players a meter to fill up while occupying an area and awarding a point to the side that manages it first. The first “hill” of a round is set to a consistent location in Firefight, while the subsequent rotation comes in random order.
There’s nothing fundamentally new about the ingredients of Firefight: King of the Hill, but it makes for an appealing cocktail. Halo‘s single-player pedigree has long been elevated by enemies that are actually interesting to gun down, which legitimizes the fun of throwing grunts at a tightly bounded area and forcing players to cope. As far as self-defense goes, the standard-issue MA40 AR is accompanied by Season 5’s new Bandit Evo, with various pickup locations for alternative firepower located around the maps.
Interesting Risks And Challenges
Running off to get a sniper rifle or a SPNKR is one of several interesting risk/reward elements in Firefight: King of the Hill, with the most central being the ability to revive fallen comrades. In the middle of an enemy push or a boss, this frequently leads to nail-biting situations and makes successful revives feel exhilarating. The system shines on Heroic difficulty, which cranks up the respawn time and generates the engaging capacity to ride the narrow line between party wipes and successful rounds. Both Normal and Heroic feel as well-balanced as a couple of rounds can reveal, with either likely being a viable option for the average player.
Firefight: King of the Hill’s difficulty generally comes in fits and starts, with occasional dead time between waves suddenly giving way to life-threatening situations. Cover is a critical tool for survival, and picking up weapons that can deal area damage is often the best method of turning the tide. On Normal, an unlimited supply of the Grappleshot makes repositioning easy, while Heroic forces players to rely on the Thruster instead. Legendary tosses out the whole “infinite” thing for inventoried use of abilities like other Halo Infinite modes. Running out of ammo is a real threat on any difficulty, incentivizing weapon swapping even when the pickup isn’t particularly appealing.
A Good Addition To Halo Infinite
Firefight: King of the Hill definitely doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and more transformative PvE additions to Halo Infinite could certainly be thought up. The big thing, though, is that it feels good to play, and it fills a gap that’s been yawning ever since the launch of the game. What could give the mode real longevity is its incorporation with the newly improved Forge, allowing custom maps and enemy spawns to shake things up. Firefight: King of the Hill launches December 5 in Halo Infinite, and anyone interested in PvE should feel comfortable being excited about it.
Halo Infinite‘s Firefight: King of the Hill launches December 5th on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. Screen Rant attended a virtual gameplay event for the purpose of this preview.
Halo Infinite
- Franchise:
- Halo
- Platform(s):
- Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, PC
- Released:
- 2021-12-08
- Developer(s):
- 343 Industries, Certain Affinity, SkyBox Labs
- Publisher(s):
- Xbox Game Studios
- Genre(s):
- Shooter
- Multiplayer:
- Local Multiplayer, Online Co-Op, Online Multiplayer
- ESRB:
- M
- Summary:
- Halo Infinite is the sixth entry in the core Halo franchise. It puts players back solely into the Mjolnir power armor of Master Chief after the fifth game’s decision to split his time in the campaign with another protagonist. In the game’s campaign, players will enter the open world of Zeta Halo as they battle to stop a faction of foes known as the Banished, who now have control of the installation. The multiplayer mode revives the frantic first-person shooting combat and pits players in free-for-alls or team-based combat, where they complete objectives and earn currency to customize their Spartan soldier the way they want.
- How Long To Beat:
- 11 hours
- Prequel:
- Halo 5: Guardians
