Halo: Reach is, by far, the best Halo experience to have been released on the Xbox platform. Halo reach is a top nominee for game of the year with seriously beefed up graphics, great first person game play, and a story which has some serious emotional weight to it.
Bungie created a whole universe with Halo: Halo Reach adds to the story with a view of what went down before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. It tells the tale of Noble Team and their struggle to save humanity from the gloom of the Covenant, an evil race of aliens bent on wiping humans from the face of the galaxy. It’s not a spoiler to say that this game is a prequel. And most people who read the Halo novels know that Noble Team does not succeed in their mission and Reach is lost forever. Still, it is a quality story and something that should be examined. How Noble Team, the last few of the super-soldiers known as Spartans, lost the fight to the covenant and how the infamous Master Chief’s tale began.
The campaign is as you’d expect from a Halo game. On easy, you’ll be blasting the hell out of Covenant scum for 10 missions. On legendary, you’d be wishing you never held that controller you almost slammed on the floor. The difficulty doesn’t let down for anything, and on harder difficulties, the enemies seem almost psychic as to your whereabouts.
The difficulty may be the same, but some of the new features may be exactly what Halo fans have been wanting. There are now assassinations. Instead of a regular one hit assassinations to the back of the head, if the player holds the melee button long enough behind an opponent, an assassination that takes about a few seconds happens. You can’t move during the motion, but it one cool way to catch enemies off-guard. This feature is available to Spartans and the Covenant during multiplayer.
There also small tweaks to the game like switching different bullet types on certain weapons like the brand new Saber, which is a very different flying vehicle we haven’t seen in a Halo game yet, but it’s only available for one short level, which is really saddening seeing as it is one of the most fun levels in the game. All the levels in the game are places where you’d want to be, not like Halo 3 or Halo 2 where some levels just went on for way too long.
The biggest change to Halo: Reach is that you are not Master Chief. Instead, you play as Noble 6, the newest recruit to the Noble Team. He can be customized to the players liking, from armor variations, color, emblems and even gender. Master Chief was a one-liner spitting, bad-ass soldier of few words. Noble 6 is a Spartan trained to kill, but also trained to follow orders and get the job done.
Halo multiplayer has also stayed the same, with a few new modes and tweaks. The new invasion mode has Spartans vs. Elites in a battle for protect and destroy. Forge mode, the map creation tool integrated into Halo 3 has been beefed up to allow new maps to be created for custom multiplayer mayhem. Co-Op has stayed in for the campaign and a future update will allow for more options in that area including online Co-Op.
Firefight mode from Halo: ODST has been added to the mix and has become exactly what it should have been. It has many more levels to play on and enough customization to leave players shooting unlimited rounds from a rocket launcher for hours or playing for an unlimited amount of time seeing who can kill the most covenant.
Halo: Reach may be one of the last Halo games Bungie will make, and even if that may be as sad as the knowledge that the story ends on a rough note, it is still one of the most enjoyable experience Bungie has ever pushed out.
