Halo Reach Review

Sit down and strap yourselves in as we are about to venture into one of the most explosive games of the year. Halo Reach puts you in the boots of an unnamed Spartan soldier who has been reassigned to Noble team, a team of highly skilled Spartan troops who you will spend teaching the Covenant a lesson in war that they will never forget with.  Halo Reach is the prequel to Halo: CE (you know the first Halo game) and depicts the epic battle between the Human race and the Covenant on the UNSC’s biggest military hub, the planet Reach.

Straight of the bat the first thing you notice is the fact that Halo: Reach takes itself a whole lot more seriously than any of the past Halo games. The AI has been reworked, making the elites bugger hard to kill, the weapons look, sound and feel more deadly and the graphics are nothing short of stunning!

The campaign takes you through the fall of Reach, from the very beginning to the planets utter demise. The story line may not be particularly detailed or the characters may not be that strong, but this can be excused because you probably wouldn’t get to know somebody’s likes and don’t likes in the middle of an epic war such as this.

However, the game itself is incredibly gritty and offers the player an intense battle experience that stands out in this series of games.

Anyway, enough about the story line, the real question that your probably wondering right now is:

How does the game handle?

My answer to that question, is like all Halo games, very well. It is at its core an incredibly robust and well designed shooter and as for mentioned the AI has been reworked to make the game much more team centric and generally challenging. What I mean by this is that you won’t get very far if you try to solo the game, you need to rely on your squad and even some UNSC soldiers to help you deal with the very powerful covenant forces on the ground.

Your squad mates will generally try to keep close by you in the battlefield and support you but if you do decide to make a mad dash at the enemy, you will most likely be on your own. The only real issue with the AI is that it still sucks at driving, yes I am more than aware of how hard it must be to programme driving AI in a rapidly changing, open environment which is continuously exploding. However, this is one of those things that you would have thought Bungie would have sorted out, because they have made five Halo games now and this has been a criticism in ALL of their games.

Never the less, the campaign levels are incredibly well designed, which will continuously throw diverse objectives at you and will feature everything from holding of countless enemies to breath taking space battles!

On another note, the online multiplayer can deliver some priceless moments! Yes the matchmaking system can at times be slow and infuriating, it might not be as fast as the CoD style game finding but it still does the trick (it’s all to do with the fact that CoD lets players drop in and out of games, whilst halo teams are fixed, for better or for worse). However, as always the online game modes of Halo are nothing short of brilliant! You have the old school slayer and team slayer, accompanied by capture the flag and king of the hill but you also have new game modes such as invasion (a personal favourite!). Each game mode offers something different which will keep you occupied and entertained throughout the time you spend playing it.

Also, if you remember my Halo 3: ODST review? Where I said that they introduced the new Firefight mode? Whilst I liked it, I hated the fact that they offered no match making service, well in Halo Reach they have fixed that! Not only can you now get a Firefight game set up with the maximum number of players with ease but Bungie have also introduced a very nice twist to the usual game, to spice things up a bit. In one version of Firefight, one player can play alongside the waves of enemy forces to add additional difficulty to the defending side.

In short, if Halo Reach is indeed Bungie’s last addition to the Halo series, then they sure have given it one hell of a send off! It’s campaign delivers a breath taking and intense experience that we have all come to expect from Halo whilst its multiplayer offers an updated version of the brilliant Bungie online formula with a bit of flare and spice that will surely keep halo near the top of your games pile for some time to come. If you do not own Halo Reach yet, then you are missing out on one hell of a gaming experience!

Rating 4.7/5

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