To be honest, after playing Halo 3: ODST I was skeptical when I saw the first teaser trailer and saw it was a Halo game once again based around a group of soldiers of various ethnical backgrounds with the main character's player never speaking and never taking of his helmet. I only started getting excited when I saw the first multiplayer trailer and saw how Bungie was going to mix up their iconic online experience. Well, enougth gabbing out of me, here's how the game is.
Campaign: Halo: Reach's campaign is, in my opinion, the best of the Halo series. The characters are interesting, the skyboxes are awesome, and the gameplay is, well, Halo gameplay. You shoot for a while, then you hop in a vehicle, then their's a setpiece moment, then you're sniping at night, never allowing it to last too long to get old. The story is told in the same way all serious military games do now days, in that it tells you some of the information, and then expects you to fill in the blanks. Oh, and if any of you have read the Halo books (and to the rest of you, yes they made books about Halo) then I should warn you that Halo: Reach doesn't seem to follow the canon set up by Halo: The Fall of Reach and Halo: Ghosts of Onyx. So don't try to connect the events in the book to the game or you might go mad. Some problems I had were that, while the use of motion capture makes the cinematics play out great, the engine can't always keep up. Bungie gutted it's game engine for Reach and it seems that it has a few problems left because in some cinematics the framerate drops which is the most notable time for that to happen.
Oh, and there's an achievement for playing through the entire campaign on Legendary, alone. I have gotten it and, yes, it will make you cry blood.
Multiplayer: The campaign is nice and all, but as always the multiplayer is where it's at in a Halo game. Even for seasoned Halo veterans Reach is going to take some adjustment time. Bungie has remade their multiplayer from the ground up with things like armor abilities (which grant you certain abilities that you can switch out every respawn), to a finite health bar among uthers. Some will cry foul while others (like me) will welcome this refreshing change to a system that was starting to get stale. There are 13 maps included on the disc and while they are fun, I'm already waiting for a DLC map pack. Or you could always make your own maps in forge...
Forge: For the uninitiated Forge is a mode that allows players to change superficial elements of any multiplayer map (except firefight). In Halo 3 forge worked in the same way a car with a missing shift lever technically runs. In Reach the system has removed many of the problems from the old system and makes map-making a breaze. You can phase objects into one another, you can leave an item floating in space, and you can move objects by infentesmal amounts for precision placement. However the system as a whole seems rough and unpolished. When you bring up the property menu for an object you will find junk options that don't affect that object at all. It makes the menu a bit taxing as you find what you can edit about the object and what you cannot. Also there are several annoying bugs that will probably get patched soon (I hope).
Firefight: For me firefight mode was the best thing in ODST and in Reach it is given the trademark of Bungie, customization. You can change an obsurd number of details to make each firefight match different. Want to fight off only hunters with Sniper rifles with infinite ammo? Done. Want to be invincible and mow down legions of grunts? Done. My only gripe is that the menus are too expansive. When you want to customize the enemies you fight you have to manually change each wave, for every round, for every set. It's a pain but I guess they expect you to save the varients you make so you only have to go through it once.
Online Experience: As well as the multiplayer you will also be able to matchmake firefight and (coming soon) campaign coop. Instead of the two devisions of caual and ranked games, bungie has done something different. Now 95% of the matchmaking games don't give you a rank number but earn you credits that gain you rank and can be used to buy armor parts for your spartain, PLEASE NOTE that these parts are purely cosmetic and don't give you any kind of advantages. For the competition junkies out there there's an arena system that should suit their needs. The fileshare system is back and now you can search through the archive through the game or just find the best of the week. However, if you have a great clip or movie you want to show your party you're out of luck. Theater mode in Reach is restricted to one person at a time, so your friends have to download the clip off your fileshare and watch it by themselves. Bungie said it didn't have the time or resources to make it viewable by a party but it's still the most glaring flaw of the game.
One Last Thing: I feel the need to mention something that most would probably overlook but to me is one of the best parts of Reach. In Reach, the spartain you create in multiplayer is brought over when you play firefight and campaign, even in cinematics. Now in past Halo games I controlled the Master Chief but it never felt like I was the MC just following him around, same goes for "The Rookie". But when I first booted up Halo: Reach my friends were in a game and invited me in. I rushed through the cusomization options and chose a reddish-orange color for my spartain, intending to change it later. I then went through the campaign and about 3/4 the way through I earned enough credits to buy a shiny new helmet I had my eye on. But when I was about to press "Buy" I hesitated. I knew my Noble 6 by the old helmet, and changing that seemed like changing the spartain I had fought with for the last 6 hours. I then realized that I had never thought to change his garrish orange color because it seemed like making him any other color would be "wrong". In one week and one game I have a stronger connection to my orange spartan than I have ever had to the Master Chief through three games, and that is where Reach shines, despite some bugs and glitches and a puzzling story with some of the pieces missing, Reach does what Bungie has been trying to do all along, make you emphisize with the people fighting, and it does it well.
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