Review – Halo: Reach

Halo: Reach is a record-breaking hit that needs very little introduction. But is it worthy of being the biggest entertainment launch of 2010 to date?

By Adam Delo at theGamingLiberty.com

Ok, here’s a game that needs no introduction, so I’ll get right to it. What you’ll get out of Halo: Reach depends on what you’re expecting. If you’re after the endlessly customisable multiplayer, it’s all here and intact. But if you’re after an epic campaign to close the Bungie era of the Halo franchise, you may come away slightly disappointed.

So first — the campaign, which lasts around 8-10 hours on ‘normal’ difficulty. The quality of gameplay in the campaign wildly fluctuates somewhat, there are some great moments and set peices to be experienced, but at other times it left me bored and unimpressed. I had expected to be fighting a larger scale battle alongside a team of specialised Spartans with their own unique skills and abilities, this is afterall a huge battle that sees the fall of an entire planet.

Unfortunately your allies don’t really help much more than the regular UNSC grunts from the previous games, they rarely use any such special abilites and the combat and scale of the fights is again around the size of the previous games. One section in particular left me disappointed when the introductory cutscene showed you and a large force of UNSC in Warthogs and Mongooses racing toward an even larger force of Covenant with Banshees raining down fire from above, but by the time you get control and back into the fight, the mission composes of another series of small skirmishes.

This is a real shame, because there were some standout moments, like the much looked forward to Sabre section which was done extremely well and wouldn’t be out of place in any respected space combat game. There are also some amazing vistas to behold throughout, and while the graphics are of the same level as Halo 3 and ODST, there’s a great deal more detail in the environments than there has been previously.

Fiercer

There is however, an improvement to be mentioned in the sound: battles sound fiercer and nearby explosions will cause a loss of hearing, making the game feel more alive that it has been previously and this does add somewhat to the experience. Ultimately though, it falls just short of the epic conflict between humanity and the Covenant that was alluded to so strongly in the trailers and promotional videos.  Perhaps, because of these I expected too much.

Multiplayer is as solid as ever, bringing the customable game modes and Forge from Halo 3 (plus a few extras) and the acclaimed Firefight mode from ODST. The palette of options to create your own game modes has been expanded, now allowing you to create custom class-based modes of play among many other things, and these options have also been added to the Firefight mode – even allowing you to customise which enemies spawn in which waves.

Even considering the majority of the options and modes already existed in the previous games, Bungie has polished them to a blinding shine and there’s no denying there’s a vast amount of game here even without any of the DIY options.

There’s also a huge amount of personalisation options for your Spartan, and a great persistant system of gaining credits through actions in both the single and multiplayer modes, allowing you to change pretty much every individual area of your armour and even different voices and death effects.

The game plays pretty much the same, as you’d expect, but one thing that is does provide a substantial change is the armour abilities that are so underused in the campaign. The ability to soar over your oppenents and rain down death from above, dash from cover to cover, turn an impending splatter death into a surpise kill or stealthily assault and assasinate can really mix up the game and adds further depth to an already impressive multiplayer experience.

Chattiness

One outstanding addition to the matchmaking system is that not only can you specify it to prioritise good connection, same language or similar skill, you can also build a “Psych Profile” to specify your game style – you can specify your chattiness, motivation, the importance of teamwork and whether you’re generally polite or rowdy and the matchmaking system will try to find players that have a similar playstyle. This is a fantastic idea, and I hope it will prove effective when the game is released and there’s millions of people playing it.

Forge has also had a great deal added to it, not only expanding the range of objects that can be manipulated but also the properties of said objects and you can even overlay filters to make the whole game look radically different – like adding an old-school film grain or even making it look like a stylised graphic novel a la Madworld.

Then there’s also Forge World, a massive playing area that you can mess around, play and edit in to your heart’s content – and brilliantly, you can also play games on pre-set subsections of the full map, one of which is a reimagining of the infamous Blood Gulch! With the return of the ability to upload and share custom games modes and map variants over Bungie.Net, I’m looking forward to seeing what the Halo community are going to come up with, as with the previous games in the series and others, the extent of people’s creativity never ceases to amaze me.

It’s a bit of a shame that the campaign didn’t live up to expectations, but that in no way means it not a good, solid shooter – it just could have been so much more. However this slight downfall is more than eclipsed by the most complete and feature-packed multiplayer experience that money can buy and is destined to be played by millions of gamers for years to come.

 

Format: Xbox 360; release date: out now; publisher: Microsoft Games Studios; developer: Bungie

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