Quick Overview: Halo Reach brought back life to the Halo series, giving new and interesting game modes, coupled with new maps, customization options, and new weapons. However, if you weren’t a fan of Halo before, these improvements will not change your mind at all.
Overall:
I give this game a score of 9/10. Now, to be honest, this review is going to be different from others mostly because I am not an Xbox person. No, primarily I’m a Wii person (yes, bring on the insults) and secondarily a PS3 person. I could write a book on my reasons why I choose the Wii and PS3 over the Xbox, but regardless this means that I can review Halo Reach from an objective view; in other words, because I won’t love it to start with, it will have to earn my respect. Now, I played the Reach Beta, which was released in May or June, and I loved it. Since I’m not a Halo fan that must’ve meant it was going to be sweet. Even I could not wait, and I didn’t even own an Xbox! Reach was released September 14th and my brother got it 8 days later (we found a smaller Gamestop that few people visited) without having to wait at all. I believe it was $60, but I may be wrong (it’s my brother’s so I didn’t bother looking at the price tag). Anyways, so I sat down and played non-stop with him, hoping to get an idea of how the game works, which I believe I did.
A Brief History:
Basically, Halo Reach takes place a few weeks before the original Halo starts. It takes place in 2552, where there is a war with the alien race Covenant on the human colony of Reach. As a player, you are a part of Noble 6, a part of the super soldier squad (yet not quite as super as Master Chief). You fight a futile war that you will eventually lose no matter how many of those alien guys you slay. Halo: Combat Evolved is the first game, followed by Halo 2, and then Halo 3. I would go into details about the games, but it’s irrelevant to Reach.
First Impressions:
Like I said before, the Beta was just incredible. I nearly went to the dark side and bought an Xbox. I then got the game, and I felt so lost. My lack of experience with Halo games left me so confused and bewildered. I felt like a lost puppy. I simply wanted to set up the game like I had played on the Beta. But I had no idea how! So I used the process of trial and error, and I found out what I was doing wrong and fixed it. Okay, excellent. I got that far and my brother and I played against each other until we decided to play online. I loved the online feature. I got my fair share of headshots, EMP kills, and my favorite part of the game: cinematic assassinations. Again, I could write a book on how much I love doing a cinematic kill; it’s just an incredible feeling of “Ha! I managed to sneak onto your back and brutally stab you when I literally just picked up the controller!” I even went out of my way to get that one cinematic kill. It was so satisfying. Doesn’t get much better than that. So, I then played the campaign which was good, but not great (But that’s just me. I find FPS campaigns to be boring.) So, I didn’t spend much time on that. I mostly played online, which I enjoyed. However, I didn’t get the one thing I really wanted. Hope. That’s right, Hope Infection style. One alpha zombie, versus everybody. Alpha zombie can pick up weapons, but his victims can’t. Also Last Man Standing becomes as fast as the zombies and can kill the zombies in one shot. It was so much fun. I spent hours getting crushed at my friends’ houses. Good times. So basically without getting into anything technical or complex, Halo: Reach is a lot of fun on the surface and I can only begin to imagine the excitement of the Die-Hard Halo fans when they started to play.
Graphics:
The graphics were amazing; however, they were not the greatest graphics ever as many people have tried to convince me. I find that the graphics give a futuristic vibe, which is also expressed through the unique ‘glossiness’ on all the metallic objects in the games. Everything looks as if it had just come out of the factory, which can be an advantage or a disadvantage. This is because while everything might look spick and span, if you’ve been in a war situation your armour isn’t going to be in mint condition. Anyways, the scenery was quite beautiful and I caught myself just looking around at times; however, to be honest I thought a lot of the levels were repetitive and I got increasingly bored throughout the campaign. This is true especially when I compare it to previous Halo campaigns (Halo: Combat Evolved being my favorite, followed closely by Halo 3). I played those campaigns through the night when I got the chance, but the Reach campaign didn’t have that particular addictive quality. But this is not to say it wasn’t well done. The story was very well told, and the cut-scenes were breathtaking. Honestly, Bungie did an extraordinary job with the cut-scenes; I once watched them on YouTube again just to see the amazing attention to detail and just how lifelike the characters were. The creators took an unrealistic idea, and combined it with amazingly realistic graphics to give it new life.
Graphics: 10/10
Gameplay:
Now, this is often Halo’s defining category, seeing as it is unique to their franchise. Essentially it’s based around having lots of people shoot at each other, wearing their shields down and then coming in to smack them to their death. It’s meant for chaos, which it does an excellent job at providing. Unfortunately, I have found that this style of playing does not necessarily meet my requirements for a FPS. I am a noob when it comes to Halo. Done. It’s out in the open. So naturally what I do is immediately hop into vehicles and either splatter my opponents or shoot at them with huge guns. I love vehicles, but I know that if I were an experienced player up against a noob in a tank and I was getting killed, I would be annoyed. It’s great for players unaware of the grief they cause other players, but for somebody like myself, who, in other games, often resents noobs for their ‘noob-ish’ behavior, I feel their frustration as their dead body flies across the map because of my over-powered tank. I should not feel this guilt in playing an FPS. And this is not implying that they should downgrade the vehicles, merely pointing out one of the more frustrating things for avid players. Now, people always say ‘they’re part of the game, so it’s not noob-ish to use vehicles!’ But that statement is mostly false. Yes, they are a part of the game, but hiding your lack of skill with a huge tank is in fact quite noob-ish. It’s similar to the infamous ‘noob-tubes’ in Call of Duty (grenade launchers). It takes no skill to shoot huge rounds onto a designated area; it does take skill to kill people with a pistol (something I try to do, but I often fail).
Another thing that I find to be a hole in Halo: Reach’s gameplay is how uninviting it is. For a complete noob like myself, going out into battle is a scary thing. My lack of knowledge in terms of Halo was a huge disadvantage, and I’ve tried to get better but it’s so hard. This is because the terms of battle always differ, there’s nearly no single situation. Unless you’re Halo-minded, you can’t possibly adapt. In Call of Duty for example, if somebody’s close to you, you knife him or her. If they’re at a distance, you shoot them. If they run past you, you chase them down. There are always sub-categories, but they’re describable. In Halo, the possibilities for being killed are nearly endless (which, don’t worry, is mostly good), therefore making my job to stay alive a lot harder.
Now the point I just made is also a positive point. There are SO many ways to kill one person if you’re good at it that it’s very enjoyable. This is truly what makes Halo so unique: the endless possibilities during battle. From an experienced player’s viewpoint, it’s exciting exploiting all the possibilities. But it’s impossible to talk about Reach without mentioning one thing, Abilities. The makers introduced Abilities into Reach, and they’re fantastic. You can either have Jetpack, Invisibility (my favorite), Sprint, Roll, Armour Lock, Bubble Shield, or Hologram (these probably aren’t their real names, but that’s what I call them). These really enlivened the gameplay and added a lot of variety which was much needed. This too added to the very long list of ways of getting killed. Now my favorite was Invisibility because I would wait in hallways invisible, and then go in for the cinematic kill. I may only get a couple of kills each round, but I wouldn’t die, and I would get as many cinematic kills as possible. To sum up the game play of Halo: Reach, Hate it or Love it.
7/10
Verdict:
Halo: Reach is a wonderful refresher to the immensely popular Halo franchise, and a much needed one at that. With new abilities, maps, characters and so much more, it really does complete the Halo Saga. That being said, it still didn’t convert me to the Dark Side, because while the makers did, in fact, add lots of new things to the game play, they didn’t make it inviting to newer players and it was more centered towards the already-converted Halo fans. I think, from a software viewpoint, this game deserves a perfect score. However on a human viewpoint, it just isn’t quite there yet because it should be easy to pick up for new players as well as challenging and fun for veteran players.
9/10
