On September 14 Halo: Reach, Bungie's Swan Song to the Halo Universe, was released to the world and recieved much critical and fan acclaim. The Gamers here at STUDENTent. have to agree that this game was definitely worth the wait, after a couple of ball drops on Bungie's part here and there with some of the lackluster experiences in Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST.
Halo has long been known for setting the bar when it comes to console shooter design, and Reach is a culmination of sorts of all of the best features of the franchise so far. Apart from fine tuning the gameplay controls and fixing the equipment debacle from Halo 3 with new armour abilities, the game also includes ginormously (totally a word) polished versions of features that were introduced in Halo 3: Forge and Firefight mode. Players now have an abundance of options when it comes to creating maps with friends, and customising their experience when taking on wave after wave of covenant horde (See what I did there?)
When it comes to the campaign, in terms of emergent gameplay and large scale battles it is the best halo campaign to date. Each level works to help you feel like you are part of a large and hopeless war, with the biggest battles the series has ever accomplished. More AI fit into one battle than any game on the market has been able to do successfully, with battles even being fought out WAY out in the background of Reach's lovely expanded Vista's. Bungie have taken their "30 seconds of fun" mantra and moved it from being a little stale and closed minded to working it on a much larger scale and allowing encounters to feel huge and fluid. The game took me about 10 hours on the heroic difficulty, showing the game to be the longest in the series since Halo: Combat Evolved, and definitely the most difficult since Halo 2 (and a lot more difficult at that). The game now scales in difficulty when you add more players into the fight (up to 4 in co-op) so you wont find yourself breezing through the Legendary difficulty just because you brought three buddies along. With fans and coders having had a chance to explore the game since it's release last week it is also becoming clear that the game has a wealth of Easter Eggs and extra content hidden away.
However, the storyline is where the campaign design falls flat. Where previous halo games have added to the ever expanding halo mythology in exciting and intriguing ways, this game feels like a dull military shooter at times, with objectives boiling down to "protect this" and "activate that", falling well short of the giant Sci-Fi premise of the original game. Even then the missions don't join together cohesively, and at times I wasn't aware of the point of what I was doing at all. The game however has a couple of nice moments for the franchise, namely scenes involving Dr. Halsey (Cortana's creator) and the destruction of a covenant cruiser, which begins with a very refreshing take on space combat. Despite its disregard of Halo Canon, the ending of the game also has a nice feeling to it. I'll forgive Halo: Reach's story for it's shortcomings, as Joseph Staten, story-lead for most of the franchise, is off working on Bungie's new Activision IP. Now THAT is a game to look out for.
STUDENTent. were lucky enough to get our hands on the Legendary edition of the game, so here are some pics from the unraveling (I didn't get any pics of Halsey's Journal, but that is the best piece of Halo fiction I have ever seen, and it's beautifully made. Fans of "Fall of Reach" should definitely try and get their hands on a copy)
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