How ‘Halo Infinite”s grapple-shot makes it the best sandbox shooter in the series

On the face of it, it seems ridiculous to add a grappling hook into Halo.
Master Chief is many things, strong, stalwart, green. But one adjective I
wouldn’t use to describe him is “lithe”. As a fighter, Master Chief is
essentially a walking tank, seven feet of dinted Mjolnir armour who plods
relentlessly forward in combat, able to turn a Covenant’s insides into jelly
with a single elbow strike. He is not Spider-Man, leaping about the
battlefield with acrobatic grace, uttering cocky-one liners as he dispatches
his foes.

More broadly, Halo is not a game that appears to need a grappling hook.
Before Infinite launched, if any shooter seemed like a natural fit for going
open-world, it’s Halo. It already had the vehicles, the expansive outdoor
battlefields, the sandbox-like combat scenarios driven by dynamic AI
rather than scripted sequences. It has everything an open-world game
apparently needs. Adding a grappling hook seems needlessly gimmicky,
like pouring a packet of popping candy over a wedding cake.
Yet far from feeling superfluous or kitsch, Halo Infinite’s grapple-shot
proves crucial to making the game work at all. As it turns out, Halo didn’t
have all the ingredients needed to make an enjoyable open-world, and
like a newly fledged FPS protagonist picking up their first shotgun,
sometimes you don’t know what you’ve been missing until you have it in
your hands.

traverse an open world, they’re only useful until they inevitably get blown
up by a fuel rod cannon or a rogue plasma grenade. Even in the earlier
games, being stuck on foot in one of the larger combat sandboxes was
always frustrating (and usually fatal). This problem is compounded by a
large, contiguous open world where you could be stranded miles from the
nearest FOB.

fast. But this couldn’t be something that rendered the series’ existing
vehicles redundant, like a jetpack or a teleportation device. A grappling
hook, therefore, is the logical choice to solve this design problem. It lets
Master Chief move quickly over short distances, and can be utilised for
longer journeys. But it doesn’t directly convey you from A to B like a
vehicle does, and also requires a greater level of player-skill to use
effectively.

Logical, perhaps. But is a grappling hook fitting? At a fundamental level,
Master Chief does not seem like a character who should be zipping nimbly
through the air. However, 343 Industries massages this ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ through how
it implements the grapple-shot. It’s true that Master Chief shouldn’t move
like Spider-Man, so 343 ensure he doesn’t. Instead, in Halo Infinite, Master
Chief moves like a cruise missile, with his substantial bulk negated by the
sheer power of his momentum.

343’s approach to designing the grapple-shot ensures you always feel this
weight and momentum. When you fire the grapple, you hear the metallic
‘thunk’ as it embeds itself into a surface, and the intense whine as it reels
Master Chief forward with sufficient force to propel him through the air. As
he travels, his momentum builds to the point where he can land with
concussive force, able to devastate enemies with a powerful melee attack.

In essence, 343 build the grapple-shot so that it suits Master Chief’s
combat style, making it direct, efficient, and brutally effective. But the
grapple-shot is more than just a useful move-and-attack device, it’s also
designed as an extension of Master Chief’s versatility. Master Chief’s
approach to combat is highly improvisational, able to turn his hand to any
weapon or vehicle and use it to his advantage. 343 design the grapple
shot to literally extend Master Chief’s reach relative to the larger play-
space. He can use it to pluck discarded weapons from the ground, or grab
explosive fusion coils that litter the environment before tossing them at
foes like a grenades. In this way, the grapple-shot increases the
dynamism of Halo’s combat sandbox, meaning there’s nearly always a
solution to any problem at-hand.

In this way, 343 transform what seems like an inappropriate gadget for
Master Chief into arguably the best part of Halo Infinite. Indeed, one could
argue that the grapple-shot rescues what is otherwise a fairly standard
and rather scattershot attempt at open-world design. Although Halo
Infinite’s open world works, it doesn’t do much that we haven’t seen
before. And despite being the largest Halo game yet, its combat never
reaches the scale and spectacle of, say, Halo 3’s twin Scarab fight, and
often reverts into being a linear corridor shooter where Halo has always
been weakest.