Welcome back to Firefight! The classic Firefight experience returns to Halo Infinite, alongside the King of the Hill variant. Dropping out of slipspace in tandem with the launch of Operation: Blue Team, the PvE fight begins come March 11.
Firefight Through Time
Firefight was first introduced way back in 2009 with Halo 3: ODST. You and up to three of your buddies could squad up and put your skills to the test surviving round after round of Covenant hordes attacking your position.
Through the years, Firefight has seen various iterations and has evolved in many ways. In Halo: Reach, you had armor abilities and additional customization. Halo 5 saw the introduction of Warzone Firefight that pitted a team of eight against Covenant and Promethean forces. Even Halo Wars 2 brought in a tower defense-inspired variant, Terminus Firefight.
The latest, Halo Infinite’s Firefight: King of the Hill, has you and your squad capturing and defending hills against incoming Banished forces.
But now it’s time to return to the classic.
Current Objective: Survive
It’s the formula we all know and love. You and three squadmates versus the endless waves of enemies with one thing running through your mind:
Survive.
In KOTH, it’s easy to know when you’ve won or lost because you are either in the hill at the end of the round, or not (or MIA I suppose), but Classic comes with waves, rounds, and sets. Let’s break it down.
One Round is comprised of five Waves of enemies
Wave 1 is an easy wave
Waves 2-4 are mid-tier difficulties
Wave 5 is a boss round
Three Rounds (plus a Bonus Round) comprise a Set
This is a total of 15 waves
Did we mention this mode is endless? The game keeps going as long as you keep surviving so stock up on snacks and water if you’re in this for the long haul.
Bonus rounds are little mini-breaks between sets. All Skulls are on, enemies are on Easy mode, no lives are lost, and the stakes are low. And speaking of the stakes, let’s talk lives.
I Will Survive
At the start of each match, you’ll have 7 lives in your team’s life pool. These are shared amongst the four of you, so if someone is charging forward willy-nilly you’ll quickly find yourself looking at the Post-Game Carnage Report. If you play well and stay alive, you’ll preserve your life pool for the later, harder rounds.
But sometimes, deaths happen—we’ve all been there. At the end of each set your team will earn an extra life. Additionally, you’ll gain a life for each 1,000 points earned during the bonus round. So if you turn around and find yourself face to face with a Grunt rushing you with plasma grenades, don’t sweat it too much – you can always make it up later.
We Need to Evac
New to Halo Infinite, you’ll now be able to choose to end your match at the end of a set. Before the next round begins, you’ll see a zone pop up that says, “Complete the mission.” If at least two of you hop into the zone, you’ll be extracted from the mission and the match will end. If you don’t get in the zone before the next round, you’ll be committed until you either:
Run out of lives
Make it to the end of the next set
If you’ve survived, congratulations! The next round is about to begin. Each set has a new set of Skulls that will activate. You’ll see a new Skull activate on rounds two and three, adding an extra layer of difficulty to the firefight.
If you’re running low on ammo, don’t fret—you’ll get a resupply between each round.
The Maps
You can bookmark the mode created by Artifice7285 here:
Perhaps the most quintessential map from Halo 3: ODST returns so secure those zones.
We’re very excited to have this mode available in matchmaking and we know you are looking forward to jumping in. How long you survive the waves of enemies is up to you.
Play smart, help each other out, and watch those lives!
For those that have played Fiescalation in MCC or other gun games in another popular shooter, Hot Swap should be fairly familiar. If not, it’s okay—we got you covered!
Swap It Like It's Hot
Overall, this is a very straightforward and simple mode. It’s your team vs the enemy team and everyone has the same weapons and equipment. Yes, everyone. In other versions of this mode, you often find your weapons/loadouts advancing to the next tier after each kill but in Hot Swap, you’ll keep those loadouts for 30 seconds at a time. After that, the proverbial dice are rolled and everyone is gifted a new combo. Hone your skill and stay flexible – things can change on a dime.
Here are the set loadouts you should be prepared to work with at any given moment:
Primary
Secondary
Equipment
M41 SPNKr
Ravager
Repulsor
Energy Sword
Gravity Hammer
Shroud Screen
S7 Sniper Rifle
Skewer
Grappleshot
MLRS-2 Hydra
Cindershot
Repulsor
CQS48 Bulldog
Needler
Grappleshot
BR75
VK78 Commando
Threat Sensor
Shock Rifle
Stalker Rifle
Drop Wall
Heatwave
Fuel Rod SPNKr
Thruster
MA40 Assault Rifle
M392 Bandit
Drop Wall
Mangler
MA5K Avenger
Quantum Translocator
Plasma Pistol
Mk50 Sidekick
Thruster
Disruptor
Sentinel Beam
Repair Field
Oddball
None
Thruster
While you may see a repeat loadout, it won’t happen until you’ve cycled through the entire list. Also if you are mid-grapple when things swap, you might find yourself saying, “wow I flew pretty good for a brick!” as your grapple disappears midway through. Good luck.
You’ll be playing on a variety of current Arena maps that should be familiar but there is one new map to check out:
Nemesis
Credits: WAR, I am a Luxury, Certified Champ, Okom1 Bookmark
Focus on the enemy, don’t let the map’s edges become your nemesis.
Hot Swap is available in matchmaking right now so jump in while it's hot and see what you get!
We’ve just pushed through a minor update to the game – see the changes below:
Bug Fixes:
Corrected typo on Witching hour instructions
Resolved an issue with free daily offer Script Shards not refreshing correctly. We’ve temporarily reduced the refresh time of the free offer to every 6 hours to make up for it
Fixed several other small bugs
Thank you for your continued support! Make sure to share any feedback in the Steam Community Hub or the Discord server.
A common piece of feedback we’ve received lately has been regarding issues with NPC dialogues. This issue was caused by a Save/Load problem in the latest update of the demo version, meaning it was related to old save files. While we quickly identified and fixed it, we sincerely apologize to our community for the experience over the past few days.
With less than a month left until the Early Access release, we've decided to focus all our efforts on making the main game richer in content rather than updating the demo. Since we've already gathered enough feedback from the demo, it will no longer be accessible starting tomorrow at 9:00 PM (GMT+3).
A huge thank you to our community for playing the demo and sharing your valuable feedback! We are working tirelessly to ensure that the game reaches you in its best, most polished, and content-rich form by April 4th. Thank you for your patience and understanding. 💙
We’re excited to announce that the Co-Op Update is now live!
This update comes as we celebrate the one-year anniversary of Rail Route’s 1.0 release. To mark the occasion, we’re offering our biggest discount yet – 50% off! It’s the perfect time to invite a friend and play Rail Route together.
Co-Op Multiplayer, Desyncs, and More
We have added co-op multiplayer to all three game modes, so you can now enjoy Rail Route with friends! Adding multiplayer to a finished game like Rail Route was a big challenge, but we found a good way to do it using the lockstep technique.
While we have worked hard to make multiplayer smooth, desynchronization issues can still happen. Our amazing Discord community helped us find and fix many problems, but there might still be a few left. Please be patient as we continue to improve multiplayer.
Curated Map Pack
We believe multiplayer is a great addition to Rail Route, and we hope you enjoy this free update as much as we enjoyed making it!
If you’d like to support our team and future free updates, we’ve released a small optional DLC – the Curated Map Pack. This pack includes carefully selected community-made maps that we think are fun and interesting to play. Each map has been slightly improved and included with the author’s permission to ensure quality and playability. If you don’t want to search for great maps yourself, this pack is for you!
How to check for Desynchronization Issues
If the game desynchronizes, it means that the client and host might see different versions of the game. At first, these differences may be small and hard to notice, but they can grow over time.
If you experience this, we recommend the client reconnects to the host. This refreshes the game state and should fix the problem.
If you want to help us find more desync issues, you can enable the automatic game state checker in the debug panel (F2). This tool checks the game every 2 minutes and reports any differences. If you find an issue, please send us the logs from all players involved so we can investigate!
This has been a beefy one peeps. So thank you for sticking with us. We lost a bit of support along the way but we aim to keep chugging along as we got a lot to showcase. This update alone will keep you busy!
FEATURES
-Revamped CPU (The CPU has been recoded and rebalanced)
-New character select menus (Each unique with flair)
-New Events menu (To make things more at home)
-All Easter events now activate automatically every April
-New animation when an cumpletion star is awarded
-Twisted panties has a custom pitgirl image in results
- New Event: Year of the Snake (With lots to unlock!)
-New Lock N' Lewd: Marble Maid 2
-New skin: Kotobuki Shades (Shady Corner)
-New skin: Treasure Hunter Hikaru
-New skin: Yurei (Flambeau's Mansion)
-New skin: Dirty Maid Thief (Marble Maid 2)
-New kart: First Crisis (Dat Game)
-New kart: Wardrobe (Flambeau
-New skin: Snake Detour
- New skin: Punk Warrior Merishya
-New lap easter egg (Just something fun ;)
-New hat: KiraxxxKat Mascot Headware
-New hat: Pan Hat (Flambeau
-New cheat: Alt Shopkeepers
-New cheat: Random music
-New cheat: Smol racers
-3 New achievements (Just to keep you on your toes)
Gallery (Lots of images even for Silvie and Detour)
-Added images 361, 362, 363, 364, 365
-Added images 368, 369, 370
-Added images 366, 367, 374
-Added images 371, 372, 373
-Added image 375
-New category: Yurei
-Updated fanart gallery
Tweaks
-Lock N' Lewd unlocks save instantly instead of when animations play out and menu is exited
-Increased mercy invulnerability time from one second to three in battle modes
- Having any active effect item (paddle, bazooka, pillow) prevents picking another item
-Random waifu pillow weapon will now reroll every use instead of every race
Fixes
-Fixed bug in options menu that reverted minimum volume to old minimum
- Fixed text error in Vie dialogues
-Fixed Steam cloud save bug with unlocks that had the ":" character in their key
-The hurt animation won't play on respawn in Twisted Panties
- The pillow weapon icon is now displayed correctly when in use
-Dave's Emporium shop button area now has proper margins in the button navigation
-Detour character is correctly tagged as "can't use hats"
March is here, and our first update in 2025. Many hours and over 300 Canva assets later, we've made hundreds of little changes across the course of the game that I hope improve the experience.
The biggest of which: I added choices to all four of the character routes, and the solo route. No longer does the game become strictly kinetic as soon as you start the final arc of your playthrough. These are very similar to the choices you'll find in the Common Route - but they're not meant to provide drastic branching paths. You'll still follow the story of the route - the choices (mostly dialogue options, like you'd find in an RPG) are more meant to let you express yourself and 'flavor' your experience. That being said, there *are* a few choices you can make that might straight up bump you from your route - so watch out for those!
All in all, I'm very happy with this update. I think it vastly improves the experience. If you have any questions or encounter any bugs that I missed, please hit me up via email or here in Discussions and I'll get them taken care of ASAP!
Next update, which I'm hoping will drop next month: abbreviated playthroughs and Steam Achievements! That'll be fun - I'll actually have to do a bit of coding for once, so fingers crossed!
All the best!
Elijah
P.S.
You can find the more-or-less complete change list below:
Added approx. 120 choices across the five routes (Mackie, Sovereign, Kai, the General, Solo)
Added 3 new choices to Common Route scenes previously missing choices
Player is now directly informed via an on-screen banner when they've exited the Common Route and started their final route, whatever that happens to be for their playthrough
Player is informed via a direct message and via the Employee Handbook how many Craveability points they need to romance a character (7)
Craveability needed to romance a character is now standardized (7)
Player is informed Monday Morning, Week 1 how to skip through dialogue (Ctrl button)
'Sauce' has been added to the Music Library
Dozens of edits across all routes to remove the most egregiously cringy dialogue I could find (some was left for posterity, and because some of it I find funny)
Tweaks to dialogue when meeting Sovereign and Mackie for the first time
Additional dialogue added to nearly all routes to clarify previously glossed-over narrative issues
Changed New Game+ messaging so it no longer refers to the Express Route as having no player choices
Various minor scene flow changes across all routes