Ntruder's Halo Reach Review

Nine years ago, Goldeneye was the competitive multiplayer game of choice. A few friends of mine would occasionally battle out a couple rounds of 4 player Goldeneye in my freshman dorm. I could destroy all of my friends. One day, while trash talking to my friend Mike who was supposed to be awesome at Goldeneye, he told me "dude you need to get Halo." I'm like, "WTF is Halo?" He says "its a futuristic shooter for the Xbox." I'm like, "WTF is an Xbox?" So he swears to me up and down that this is the best game ever and I need to own it. I took his word for it and bought an Xbox without having ever seen it played. Good call Mike.

When I was playing Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001 and 2002, I always had this feeling like "wow, this is simply epic." Something about the giant battles that made you feel like this was really something special. This grand scale of achievement that is felt when you clear out a massive wide open frozen field of Covenant and flood enemies. That feeling of epic awesomeness was largely absent in the 3 Halo releases since, with a few minor exceptions. Well its back in Halo Reach.

In Halo: CE, I was always impressed with the stuff going on in the background. You'd exit a Forerunner structure on a giant bridge and there'd be a war waging on ten stories below you on the ground. This visual effect, for lack of better words, has a dramatic impact on the mood and tone of the game. Contrast this with battles from Halo 2 and most in Halo 3 where your battle is the only one that is being waged as far as you can tell, and the battles feel less epic. In Halo 2, the Covenant just reached Earth and sent invasion forces, yet when you land on the surface to battle them, you're still playing a corridor shooter with small battles between small groups of enemies. There's never anything going on besides your small skirmishes. Its as if there wasn't really an invasion; just a few dropships full of stragglers that are in your way. The same principle was largely present in Halo 3. Bungie attempted to make it seem like there was something else going on, but you really had the feeling that you were the only person alive on the planet.

Halo Reach is all about the Covenant invasion of the human military installation: planet Reach. Bungie has developed a tool that lets them draw objects very far away very cheaply in terms of processing power, and wow what a difference that makes. When you are battling through to your objectives, there is a massive war being waged in the background. I don't mean there's a painted backdrop of fires and ships floating around. I mean there are giant human ships bombing the hell out of Covenant scarabs and Covenant cruisers right there in front of you! These things are actually rendered and they're actually fighting. There were several occasions where I cleared out an area of bad guys only to look up and see this tremendous human frigate raining down gunfire right over my head. My first reaction a few times was to take out my phone to record this stuff just so I could show people how awesome it was. This sense of sheer epicness goes on the entire game. Take the space battle for example: You fly this Sabre (AKA ass kicking attack space ship) out to a giant space station (Reach is littered with these things) and eventually make your way out to this Covenant Corvette, which is a small attack vessel. Excuse me. Its a huge attack vessel, but small compared to the massive Covenant Supercarrier parked nearby. Being a big fan of the Halo books (and all the chapters detailing the space combat), I cannot explain to you how cool this was for me to finally see. An actual human vs covenant space battle played out in front of you. So you're in this giant dogfight in orbit above planet Reach with the most amazing backdrop, bombing the hell out of this giant Covenant Corvette and all these fighters, and then when you get done with your objective, they're like "Ok now go land on that Corvette and go inside." Awesome. Thank you. So now you've docked on the back of this giant ship and you're standing there, in low-G, looking out into space at this giant war that is STILL going on over your head, and you just jump down into this massive ship to go kick some more ass. Epic.

Aside from the amazing atmosphere, you've got the familiar but tweaked, tried and tested Halo combat. The weapons are much better this time around, and you've got awesome armor abilities, which really change up the combat for the better. You've got awesome assassination moves that are REALLY satisfying. And you've got a team of Spartans and usually a bunch of Marines to help you stir up trouble. Like I said, the combat mechanics are very familiar, but minor tweaks make Reach FFFAAAARRRR more satisfying to play. The biggest thing for me was that the force and impact of the weapons and attacks has been ramped up a TON by way of clever animations and amazing sound effects. No longer do the Covenant Drop Ships lob soft balls of pink cotton at you. They launch freakin plasma BOMBS! And you'd better clear the f___ out when they start shooting, because they will wreck you. Not just take off your shields; they make a huge explosion when they hit, they send you flying, and they disrupt your hearing for a few moments. When you are standing next to an explosion in Halo Reach, you feel like you WERE STANDING NEXT TO AN EXPLOSION. When you melee attack someone, no longer do you throw this soft mushy punch, you smack them hard, there's a forceful animation and a loud CRACK. Your DMR (which you will come to love) has a satisfying and deadly kick and your shotgun is... well... powerful and satisfying as ever. The combination of these awesome effects and combat tweaks make Halo Reach by far the most fun Halo game to kill stuff in, because every kill is so satisfying.

What also contributes to this is the degree of difficulty. I've never played a Halo game on Normal (since my first run through the original), and I can pretty much walk through Legendary on any of the Halo titles. But Reach is a challenge. Heroic difficulty only seemed a few steps behind Halo 3 Legendary mode. The Elites do not fuck around. In my first encounter with Elites, you come up on a group of 4 Elites and a handful of grunts, and they killed me probably 3-4 times right off the bat. And I'm a veteran Halo player. You'll get slaughtered if you charge into a battle blindly. Even the grunts will take you down with ease, throwing charged plasma bursts at you and plenty of grenades. You've got to take out the little guys from a distance, pick off a few Elites, then move in to finish them off. A single Spartan wielding a shotgun isn't going to clear a room in 30 seconds like it could in Halo 3.

The story is coherent and easy to understand, especially in the context of the Halo franchise. Bungie is known to tell stories in odd ways... But this campaign flows nicely and naturally up to a very fitting, near perfect ending that really ties the whole series together perfectly and comes full circle: the perfect prequel.

The friendly AI is all around pretty good; a definite improvement over the previous games, but still not perfect. It seemed like sometimes your Spartan allies would do a good deal of killing, but sometimes if you sat and watched them, they'd exchange fire with a few grunts for 3 minutes until you join in. So they definitely help, but they won't clear out an area without you. I'm not sure if I'd want that any different... Just something I noticed. The AI gunners in your warthogs have certainly improved. They'll actually shoot stuff without you having to drive up and point out the targets, which is nice.

The campaign suffers from one flaw; its a little too awesome for the Xbox to handle. I noticed that during some of the larger scale battles, the framerate would dip a hair. It wasn't crippling or anything, but you'll probably notice. Understandable considering there are 30 Covenant enemies, 2 dropships, 6 Spartans, and a half dozen marines all fighting while a Human Frigate fires a barrage of rounds onto a fleet of tanks in a canyon right next to you. This isn't present at all in multiplayer. The entire competitive multiplayer experience is silky smooth.

I've already briefly touched on sound. The sound is a major factor in this game's awesomeness. The score is amazing, as always. Marty O'Donnel delivers another gem. But the sound effects have taken a major step forward. Only a few games have nailed the sound disruption effect that (apparently) occurs when a large explosion goes off right next to you: Half Life 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company. When something really loud happens near your ears, it screws up your ears for a moment in Halo Reach. Again, this fuels the intensity and impact of the weapons and attacks, and makes the combat that much more fun. The voice acting is great, as always. Some familiar voices make a special appearance, including Katherine Halsey, the mother of the Spartan program and creator of Cortana.

The graphics are a cut above the Halo franchise at this point. They are no longer the cutting edge of graphics technology, but Reach has a lot of small details that you wouldn't think to look at. Reach is perhaps the best looking game up close that I've ever seen. For example, if you look closely at a Spartan when they're shields are flickering, you see this amazing layer of shielding that has this wild shimmer effect, along with the spectacular bump mapping on the character models. There is really a sick amount of detail on these character models. Which seems like a strange use of resources, because there are so many other graphical effects and tricks they could have used to make it stand out more. (see Killzone 2) But regardless, I was very satisfied with the graphics level of Reach. I didn't notice the aliasing like I did in Halo 3. The detail is spectacular, and the effects are great. Overall a very spectacular looking game.

All this and I haven't even touched on the multiplayer yet. Well, the multiplayer is as close to perfect as I can imagine in a video game. The setup is spectacular; you pick a playlist then vote on 1 out of 3 possible gametypes. Gone is that phony sense of punishment for the good players and welfare for the idiots who are rewarded upon death with a fresh Assault Rifle, AKA star destroyer. In Halo Reach, you actually have to work for your kills. The spawning weapons are powerful, but they're not game winners. Halo 3 turned into an AR whoring orgy. 5 bullets from an AR plus a melee would kill a fully shielded Spartan, which means there's basically no reason to use anything else. The power weapons were gimped which means that good players being 18-2 due to superior map and weapon control was virtually impossible. Every time you kill someone, you die almost instantly because of shitty melee and AR rules. Well all this nonsense is gone in Halo Reach. The good players are free to kick ass, and the stupid players aren't given a free lunch. That's not to say its not noob friendly; the game has competitive Arena matches and ranked multiplayer, so you'll play with like-skilled players, but the goal of multiplayer isn't to make everyone get a 1-1 kill-death ratio.

The maps are great; some old favorites are back. And a few cool new ones. Slightly lacking on the multiplayer map suite, considering a handful are remakes, but DLC and Forge variants will be around soon. Oh yeah, Forge 2.0. The robust map editor from Halo 3 just got 100x more robust. That's all I'm going to say about Forge. Also back are save films, file sharing, and picture/video uploads. All in all, this is the most robust, feature packed game ever created, bar none. And I haven't even mentioned the online cooperative campaign or Firefight mode, which pits you and 3 friends up against waves of covenant assaults in a survival mode type of game that is now built into matchmaking. Yeah... There's a lot to do in Halo Reach. This will be topping the charts for years.

I kept saying "this is the best game I've ever played" while I was trucking through campaign. After completing it and playing a good chunk of multiplayer, I'm sure of it. This game is going to re-ignite my online multiplayer bug. My old Halo 2 online crew is already gearing up for another 3+ years of late nights.

Presentation:
10/10

More features than have ever been packaged in a $60 game. All of them outstanding. Outstanding game battles and backdrops, outstanding sense of setting and emergence into the war, outstanding everything.

Gameplay & Mechanics:
10/10

Best aiming mechanics of any game period. This is the reference for how shooters should function. Couple that with that tried and tested Halo gameplay with some minor tweaks that result in major gameplay improvements, and you've got a leap above what was already outstanding.

Graphics:
9.9/10

This number is only decreased from a perfect 10 because it doesn't all run perfectly. This is the best looking Halo game by a mile. Its not the graphical champion of gaming, but it does way more at once than say, Killzone 2 (which I'd consider the sheer graphical leader). The character models are a whole generation ahead of Halo 3, the backdrops are the best I've ever witnessed, and the graphical effects are very impressive with tremendous detail. If it all ran perfect all the time, this would be a perfect 10.

Sound:
10/10

This takes the cake away from Battlefield Bad Company 2 and is the new title holder for best game sound. The sound makes the combat that much more awesome, and the score is really outstanding. Play this game loud with subwoofers on a nice surround sound system and you're in for a treat.

Longevity:
10/10

Do I even need to justify this? I already said there's more content than any game ever. Bungie supports their products more than just about any other developer short of Blizzard, and it has the best multiplayer suite of any game yet. I have no doubt I will log 10,000 games of multiplayer by the time I'm done.

Overall
10/10

Best game I've ever played, period.