Okay Geek Farm
Xbox 360 Review: Halo: Reach
Alex TretropStory: A prequel to the Halo Trilogy, Halo: Reach places you in the shoes of Noble Team, a Spartan-III unit built to fight head on with a seemingly impossible mission. It’s a depressing tale from start to finish, and while we don’t want to spoil it for you, the very first scene the game starts with does hint at the fact that the battle on Reach doesn’t exactly end in humanity’s favor. But without getting into too many specifics, it’s safe for us to say that it all climaxes into an excellent ending that wraps up the existing franchise in a superb way and feels like an appropriate end to Bungie’s work on the series.
Gameplay: Bungie has refined, polished, and improved the gameplay of the series to a mirror shine. The First Person gameplay you know and love is back in full force, and with new weapons like the Focus Rifle and the Plasma Launcher you won’t soon forget it. Halo’s excellent, grenade-dodging enemy AI returns, tweaked to make the fight that much more tougher. Multiplayer, as with every Halo title, gets a strong focus and it all comes together like no other game in the series has before. Firefight is hectic, kicking the competition level up a notch from your usual slayer match. Surviving and racking up as many points as possible before your opponent makes Halo nights with friends that much more enjoyable! And with a more robust matchmaking feature, you’ll finally be able to play the mode with anyone in the world. But let’s not forget about our usual competitive game modes; such as Team Battle, Infection, and Juggernaut, which are just as tense and frantic as you remember them. Also joining the fray are the newly added Invasion, Rally, and Headhunter modes, which are Spartan vs. Covenant, ATV races, and Skull collecting modes, respectively. Needless to say, with all these different types of games included I have a feeling you’ll be playing Reach for a long, long time. Oh yeah…. Forge mode!
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Visuals/Audio: Another achievement of Reach is its fantastic sense of scale. The vistas are huge and breathtaking, and the environnments you visit are varied and large enough to make even the baddest Spartan feel like an ant. Add in the fact that, especially as the story progresses, you feel more like one single person in the war than a walking battle tank - just one single cog in a much bigger machine! Gaze off into the distance and you’ll see Warthogs and Tanks battling just out of reach (Haha, see what I did there? Oh nevermind…) or perhaps a heated air battle overhead between banshees and hornets as you’re attacking a covenant base below. It really brings the Halo lore to life in a way we’ve never experienced it, and it’s by far the best looking game in the series!
Reach also pulls from a talented cast of voice actors to play your very diverse squad. They all lend their voices effectively to the game, and even when the story starts to drag on, the voice actors all keep the emotion running high. The score is epic, from the traditional Halo themes and the upbeat and powerful symphonies, to the guitar riffs that now accompany Elites on the attack.
Difficulty: The battle of Reach is a much more difficult mission than those seen in past Halo games. Since the team is not built of Spartan-II’s, like Master Chief, these Spartan-III’s have to use their joint efforts to manhandle their way to the next area. This translates into the gameplay, since you will NOT be able to walk into an area and take everyone out the way you might have before in previous Halo’s. The difficulty is multiplied when you go into higher difficulty settings. To better take on the new trials, it’s advised to connect with your friends over Xbox Live for 2, 3 or the much preferred, 4 player Co-Op campaign.
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Opinion: Everything in Halo: Reach is refined, polished, and set in a glass case for all to admire. But what stood out most to me was how easy it is to play with your friends. There’s a persistent menu on the right side of the lobby screen that displays what your friends are doing. You can press literally two buttons and you’re in on their game. It’s a fantastic feature that other developers of multiplayer focused games, perhaps like Call of Duty, should implement. Not to mention that every mode can finally be done in Matchmaking, ensuring that you’ll always have someone to Firefight with or to play through a particularly tough Campaign mission. During my continuous play of Halo: Reach the one word I would describe it as would be “fun”. If Bungie was trying to send the series off with a bang, they definitely did it here.
Play or Pass: Is their any doubt in my mind? Nope. Halo: Reach is the pinnacle of what Halo stands for, and as the final entry in the Bungie-Era, Reach meets all expectations and then even improves on them. You should absolutely pick this up, especially if you want a multiplayer shooter that is worth the value of your monetary investment - meaning it’s guaranteed to suck up all of your spare, especially with the newly added Forge mode. Unless you hate the Halo series in general, Reach is a fantastic game that is absolutely worth your money. In short, Master Chief would be proud!
