Review: Halo: Reach (Unifnished)

Providing you've been over our First Impressions of Halo Reach, you should know that the intial impressions I got from the game were nothing but spectacular. Even only after finishing the first three missions of the campaign, everything about Bungie's latest had proved to live up to it's expectations.It is somewhat scary then that those three missions pale in comparison to the sheer genius that is displayed in the missions after. Bungie have developed a reputation for telling great stories and Halo: Reach is no different. From the first mission to the last, the game does an excellent job of bringing you into the famous Spartan armour of Noble 6. Reach depicts the events directly leading up to Halo: Combat Evolved. The Covenant have landed on the Planet Reach and it is imperative that the human race holds on to this stronghold to maintain any hope of winning the war. Unless you're entirely new to Halo, you should know what happens on Reach, but it is the twists and turns on the way that make Reach great. The crescendo moments, heart-wrenching musical score and excellent story-telling we've come to expect from Bungie's Halo games are on show throughout. On top of this, the game also helps you understand some of the people behind the armour. Your character, although not terribly chatty, still speaks and shows brief sparks of personality. The rest of the Team Noble are heavily humanised, they all have names that are seen above their in-game character and are often seen without their helmets, giving the player a sense of camaraderie between them and their fellow Spartans. Reach introduces "Armour abilities". Little perks you can pick out throughout the levels that unleash the full force of your Spartan armour. At the start of each mission you start out with the rather vanilla, sprint function. You can trade this for other ones dependent on your play style or as the mission allows them. It's unfortunate that you can't choose your ability before the mission starts, as some of the more obscure ones (Like Active Camoflague or the Jetpack) are tough to find or not used often throughout the campaign. Despite the glowing praise, Reach's campaign is not without faults. Aside from the spectacular space flight combat mission, displayed at E3, the game rarely deviates from what you'd expect from a Halo game. There is the occasional vehicle mission, as well as a few short parts within the missions where the player shoots a grenade launcher or a turret out the side of an A.I. controlled vehicle however these moments are often short-lived though and are mere means of getting you back to more shooting. Not to say that the shooting is bad, just that it had been nice to get some variety into the campaign. The multiplayer though, leaves you with more variety than you will even know what to do with. There are a huge variety of game modes available to you from the standard free for alls and team deathmatches to the more crazy fun from Infection (One player is a zombie and must infect the other players until nobody is left) and the new Headhunter. To list them all here would make the amount of modes and their variants bigger than the actual review, so I'll leave it to you to see the variety available. There are a small number of maps, only eight, if you discount Forge World and it's variants (Not sure on this bit) but the sheer number of modes make each of them fresh. One cubby hole might be your doom in Infection, but might be a great spot to sneak in a few sword kills in Slayer. Forge returns, giving you a massive map known as Forge World full ofvarieties of terrain from your flat, closed indoor area to large expanses of land for you to build your own maps upon. The sheer number of options and pieces you can place will have those with creative minds drooling at the mouth, but for those of you who are less-so, you can easily find the best and newest maps from the File Share system to find that remake of Shipment from CoD4 you've been dying to try or the latest version of Grifball. For those of you who do delve in after trying Forge from Halo 3, the improvements made will be instantly noticeable to you. The introduction of physics to certain pieces mean that should you wish to have an object floating in the air, you needn't build it on top of some pieces below and delete the pieces below it; instead, you sift through the item's options and make sure it is set to the "fixed" option. The bottomless pit of options extends itself to the popular Firefight mode too, returning from Halo 3:ODST. The return of Firefight, one of the highlights of ODST, brings forth a few changes. Playing some of the more wacky modes, such as Rocketfight (Everyone has infinite rockets) and Gruntpocalypse (all of the enemies are grunts) with friends is as much fun as the matchmaking or playing the campaign co-operatively. Taking up defensive positions with the odds highly stacked against you can cause some tense moments and some cries of triumph as one man finishes off a fleet of Covenant with no lives left and their team mates down. From the beginning, you know the end. The game's tagline. I can assure you that the game, Reach, won't be falling anytime soon. Graphically very impressive. Scale is incredible, especially seeing Reach fall later in the game. (Kat's death scene, body being carried through a tunnel) Multiplayer: Teamwork is essential Weapons feel just the same as their single player counterparts A team mate quitting is completely catastrophic to your team's chances of winning. As is the influx of n00bs (Will balance out as more people settle into their skill set) Tonnes of fun. Map design is reasonably good, some poor spawn points and points on the map that are great positions, but are held too easily. Firefight, Forge, File Share: File sharing and movie saving are a lot faster and quicker than in 3 Firefight is tonnes of fun, tonnes of new options and customisations mean you can cater to all tastes. Generator defense and other new co-op modes (name them, look it up faggot) Forge's improvements are plenty. Forge World is huge, plenty of varieties of terrain