The Reach Report

I'm writing just over two weeks from my purchase of 'this year's most anticipated game', Halo Reach. The anticipation isn't exactly surprising, what with Halo 3 being easily the most successful and most played Xbox 360 game all the way up to Modern Warfare 2's release, but whether or not Bungie have truly delivered in their final Halo outing is another thing.

Most importantly, this isn't just Halo 3 with a few new things added. No, strangely for a sequel, the game takes us back to just before the beginning of the saga, literally days before the beginning of Halo: CE. As any Halo veteran will tell you, this was set just after the obliteration of the human colony Reach and, as you'd expect, the game takes this massacre pretty seriously. I can't really knock them for this - something would probably feel a little off if we were sauntering through a brightly coloured forest with grunts comically yelling 'I'LL KILL YOU, DEMON' in their 6-year-old voices - but it comes to question whether Halo can really function in this environment. A virtually invincible superhero's quest in the 3 original games can be taken with a pinch of salt, but surrounded by millions of innocent being glassed by the oncoming Convenant horde, I felt somewhat out of place. Just one title back in the series, I was having a laugh blasting through this with my friends, crashing into each other with warthogs, finding amusing little easters eggs and, despite having a great time, could never think of it as much more than a bit of sci-fi silliness. Now I almost feel guilty laughing.

My issue, I think, is this. I can have a lot of fun in Halo games, and put a lot of work into them multiplayer-wise, and I'm also aware of the huge hardcore audience, but at the end of the day Halo is really a casual game. The first game of its trilogy did a lot for the FPS genre, but it's also easy to pick up, play, and put down just as easily. Suddenly when I'm being shown brutes tearing civilians to ribbons, however, it's almost shocking. The soundtrack is also particularly unforgiving on the ears, replacing the trilogy's bouncy piano-based theme with a determined, military feel. Sure, it's well-composed as always by Mr O'Donnell, but what I want is mindless explosive fun, not Call of Duty in space.

The multiplayer, as always, is a different matter. Fear not, though; if you liked Halo 3 this will definitely suffice. Playlists have vastly improved, things like the daily challenges keep things fresh every single day and show Bungie's unrelenting service to the fans. As soon as I'd finished the story, I was hooked from the word 'go' for about three days... until I started noticing problems. Firstly, the ranking system has changed from Halo 3's combination of Highest Skill and EXP to just experience points, or 'credits' which can also be used to buy new armour parts. I can't deny that previously multiplayer was littered with boosters, to the point where there would be at least one literally every day, but nonetheless I still believe that Halo 3 had the best ranking system of all time. With just two types of stats, it defined what game types you played most, how competitive you were and, most importantly, how good you truly were. Now, Halo seems to have fallen in line behind every other multiplayer game by having an oh-so-simple experience system where you can only gain and never lose points, meaning in theory anyone can reach General with enough play. Maps are also a definite problem, and anyone who has played with me will have heard me groan 'Pinnacle... again', 'Reflection... again' or ' Countdown... again'. There are 9 maps for competitive multiplayer, even fewer than the previous 11. One of these is Forge World and, it being big enough to be a whole campaign mission, it has been split into 5 different smaller maps, but really they all strongly resemble each other and it's hard to count them as separate. All the maps are also cut-and-pasted directly from campaign missions so don't expect any new dazzling environments. The main problem is that they're all very heavily gametype-restricted, and with such a small number in the first place this limits variety hugely. 2 of the 9, for example, are only playable in Big Team or Invasion. Another 2 are remakes from Halo 2. We waited three years for this?

I can never bring myself to say any Halo game is badly made, because they're all very highly polished, and considering the package you get for standard price it's very impressive: campaign, matchmaking, firefight, forge and theater. However, I also think that it wasn't a very smart move for Bungie to go into a new direction for Halo in their last game, and until we get some map packs, matchmaking doesn't have a great deal of lasting factor either. If you like the previous games, go ahead and buy it because you will like it, but think twice before believing it will be the best in the series.