With the reviews dropping for Halo Infinite earlier this morning, Eurogamer's Digital Foundry also chipped in with their tech review of the game, highly praising the campaign, but also pointing out a few issues.

The gameplay is described as "great, combat is the best it's been in years and audio is sublime", while the outlet also says it far exceeds Halo 4 and 5 "in terms of design and in nailing the 'combat sandbox' experience."

However, while the quality mode (60fps) is said to run well on Xbox Series X, the performance mode (120fps) is a lot less stable, with the potential to drop below 1080p at times, and often failing to hit that 120 frames-per-second target.

"Performance mode aims for 120fps with a max resolution of 1440p but minimums can drop beneath 1080p when things get heated. With the exception of occasional frame-drops, the quality mode is fine running at 60fps, but performance is far more variable in performance mode.

Normally, the system's variable refresh rate support would handle any resulting stutter but in my experience, it doesn't work with Halo Infinite - something that needs addressing."

Digital Foundry also highlights some other problems, such as drawbacks with the lighting system and shadows in particular, and facial animations in cutscenes appearing to run at half-rate in both quality and performance mode, "creating a serious visual continuity". Fortunately, 343 says it'll be fixing the latter in a post-launch patch.

"The shadow map cascade distance is relatively aggressive so as you move away from objects, you'll see shadows disappearing and there's no fall back for anything other than large scale distance shadows. Compare and contrast with, say, Red Dead Redemption 2's open world and the difference is vast."

"Other issues? I wonder if there are some memory management problems 343 need to address. Several time during my gameplay experience, Halo Infinite would freeze for a short while for seemingly no reason. It looks and feels like a crash, only the game comes back and works just fine several second later."

Ultimately though, the outlet stresses that Halo Infinite is still a great experience regardless of these issues at launch, and once they're fixed, "we're looking at a Halo game for the ages". The review is also very positive about the audio, accessibility options, animation and AI work, "beautifully designed missions" and more.

The vast majority of reviews we've seen so far today have been extremely complimentary of the game, and it's already one of the top-rated Xbox titles of the year. The campaign officially launches this Wednesday, December 6th (release times have been revealed already), so it won't be long until you can finally get stuck in with Xbox Game Pass.

What do you make of this analysis from Digital Foundry? Let us know down in the comments.

[source eurogamer.net]