Halo: Reach

On the Halo: Reach box is written: "From the beginning, you know the end".

Those of you who've played Halo 3 will know what they're going on about.

It's kinda like watching The Titanic for the first time. You're sitting there thinking "I know the ship sinks, so why am I bothering?"

You know what's going on in the Halo universe, you know how things end... so is it worth buying Reach?

Read on.

Story
The Halo back-story has always been kinda lost on me. As much as I love sci-fi epics I felt I needed to read the Halo books as well as play the games to get the full story and a proper understanding of what's going on.
The cut-scenes are there people like me, but they honestly seem to create more questions than provide answers. It was very reminiscent of watching Lost; "Who's he? How'd he get here? Which side is he on? etc".
Players who've read the books will probably love Reachs' back-story but for me, I was more than happy to just sit through the cutscenes and enjoy the CGI.

Visuals
The Halo engine has been revamped for Reach, and it shows pretty much instantly. The environments are much larger than previous titles and they're extremely detailed as well. Textures are all high-resolution and everything looks superb. Especially if you're on a High Definition tv. I didn't witness any texture-popping or artefacts suddenly appearing in my field of view but I did notice a few frame-rate drops towards the end of the game. Apparently the newer consoles with their improved CPU's don't suffer from this problem. I'm going to let this slide because 1: It's pretty rare and 2: when it does happen, it's because there's a hell of a lot going on. (NPC's fighting each other whilst hundreds of explosions go off in the same area.)

Sound
Sound is great. The weapons and vehicles have their own distinct sounds and easy to identify who's doing what and where. The only problem I had with the games audio was some of the character voices doing cut-scenes. I honestly couldn't understand Kat when she was using the radio to transmit to the rest of the team. It was a bizarre situation considering everyone else was crystal clear. Luckily, after she was doing speaking a waypoint would appear on your HUD and you'd be fine using just that. Marty O'Donnell returns to do the musical score and whilst not as memorable as other Halo titles, it's still good and creates a mood of finality.

Campaign Mode
I managed to get through the entire campaign on the Normal difficulty in about 8 hours. There's a few moments where tanks and turrets will block your path with an annoying degree of efficiency, forcing you to rethink your path and tactics. But other than that, it's all very good and sets the stage for Halo 1 and the Master Chief nicely. There's plenty of Achievements in single player if you're into that kind of thing. And there's also the awesome option of replaying the campaign with 3 other friends. Doing so will scale up the amount of enemies you have to fight greatly to compensate for you bringing friends along for the ride.

Multi-player Modes
The multi-player is where the majority of people will invest their hours. There's lots of Achievements, lots of armour to unlock, ranks to achieve, and lots of different game-modes.
Game-modes range from standard free-for-all deathmatch to my personal favourite Firefight.
Firefight sees a team of 4 players fight off wave after wave of enemies. Each wave gets progressively harder as the numbers increase and the enemies drop get better weaponry and eventually change form. From the suicidal Grunts to the heavily armoured Hunters.
If players wish to progress to the end, they'll have to work together closely and vary their weaponry to compensate for what each wave consists of. (Anti-tank, infantry, snipers etc.)
At the beginning of Firefight mode, players will be able to choose a loadout. Certains loadouts allow you to use the next tech in the game, such as the jet-pack and the armour-lock. There's not a lot of a variety in the load-outs but they fulfil their role and fulfil it well.


Here's me, in Firefight mode, fighting off a wave of Grunts. (Right-click the image to view full-size.)

Bungie encourage you to save replays of games played and share them with friends/the Halo community. There's also the Forge and Theatre modes that allow you to set-up your own maps, game-modes, capture footage and take screenshots. (That you can then upload to a page provided free by Bungie.)


Value for money
If you're a regular to Xbox Live and have a gold account then Halo: Reach is definitely worth picking up. The online ranking system is oddly addictive and it's so damn popular on Xbox Live that finding a game with a bunch of complete strangers only takes 2 minutes.
If you're only interesting in the single-player than I recommend a weekend rental.
If you're after 1000 Achievement points then you'll get a nice amount of variety from Reach. Roughly 50% of them are in single-player and the rest in multi. Around 60% are easy to get but the rest will require both time and skill to unlock.

Overall
When I ordered my copy of Reach, I wondered weather I'd made the right choice. There were no reviews online because of a NDA that sites like Kotaku and GameSpot have to adhere to in order to get their review copies. My fears were that Reach was a re-hash of a dying series, Bungie and Microsoft's last chance to beat some cash out of the franchise.... luckily I was very wrong.
Everything about Reach; I've enjoyed and I find myself inching for "one more game" of Firefight because I love co-operative gaming. There's plenty of challenge and the Halo: Waypoint program on Xbox Live unlocks even more goodies for dedicated Halo players.
So, in summary, Halo Reach is an excellent title and well worth a try if you're into your First Person Shooters and co-op gaming. Hopefully Bungie will release some map-packs a few months down the line to keep the online experience fresh, but for the meantime... it's great fun.