It really was peak Halo.

CE broke ground but there's tons of garbage decisions - if the pistol took just one more shot to kill or was placed as a power weapon, the game would be so much more interesting. So many other guns would become viable.

Halo 2 made some improvements but was kinda rushed. Wasn't fully mature.

Halo 3 was what they were building up to. It's so good.

Halo 4 multiplayer was an excellent game at some point prior to the game being released. The marketing people got really really really fucking anxious about Call of Duty for some bizarre reason. So they removed Slayer from matchmaking, replacing it with a loadout/instaspawn/killstreak game mode. No way to strategize, no way to predict anything, and your enemy would spawn before you could even recharge your fucking shield.

Halo 5 introduced neat movement mechanics and then adjusted all of their maps to require the movement mechanics, meaning that instead of better movement you were actually just disabling your gun all the time, to make the same jumps you had been doing since Halo 2.

Halo Infinite is ok, but it's not Halo 3.