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Halo: Reach (Review)

Halo has always been one of my favorite franchises as far as gaming goes. The balance between fun and competition has always been perfect and it has provided me with countless hours of enjoyment since I picked up my first xbox and Halo: Combat Evolved. I have a couple of thoughts about Bungie’s last hoorah in the Halo universe after getting acquainted with the game for two weeks.

• Armor Abilities change the game. They add a whole new way to go about strategizing and are extremely well balanced. I find myself missing them when I enter the few game types that don’t include any. Jetpacking is always fun. Holograms are great twitchy trigger-finger finders. Sprint and Evade offer more strategy for retreating and counter attacks. Armor-lock are vehicles new worst nightmare. Active Camo adds the extra benefit of a great radar jammer as well as keeping your quite hard to see. You can even be a medic with the new and improved drop shield that restores health while you safely relax under it.
• Campaign is a fun, non-stop, ass-kicking, thrill ride of awesome. You enter the game knowing full well that Reach (the planet where the game takes place) will fall, but it doesn’t stop you from having the time of your life while it lasts. It might not be the longest in the world (I was able to power through it on Heroic in about 9 or 10 hours) but the action never stops for more than a minute to let you catch your breath. I won’t even try to tell you how impossibly challenging Legendary is.
• Firefight is now amazing! Firefight was kind of fun in ODST, but it got stale really fast. In Reach, Bungie has expanded Firefight to be as open and customizable as regular old multiplayer. They have also added playlists to Matchmaking that allow you to group up with random people instead of needing a full group of 4 friends online to play.
• Matchmaking has been overhauled with a lot more game types and Bungie has plans to add a lot more as time goes on and as the community pumps out quality content. Gone are the days of social or ranked status. You now have Arena seasons. Complete at least three games on six separate days in any Arena playlist and be ranked into a division based on your skill. The rest of the playlists are so varied and fun, I often find myself jumping between them quite often.
• Credits are fun! Keeping you in the game is a system that earns you credits for doing pretty much anything in Reach. Kill someone? Credits! Complete a campaign level? Credits! Achieve a new commendation? Credits! Complete a challenge? Credits! You get the idea. Credits can be traded in for new armor so you can customize your character to be truly yours. Some things are quite cheap. Some items are very expensive.
• Challenges give you something to strive for. A challenge system has been added to Reach that gives you a handful of things to accomplish on a daily and weekly basis. Challenges are great ways to boost your credits as there is almost always a daily challenge or two that offer you over 1000. Besides credits, you have obvious bragging rights if you’ve completely more challenges than your friend.
• Bungie.net is AMAZING! Bungie has, since Halo 2, kept improving their stat tracking on bungie.net. Halo: Reach is the biggest improvement yet! The shear amont of data is quite overwhelming. All your kills, deaths, commendations, challenges, medals.. anything you can think of is being tracked for every game you play and available for you to browse and maybe even learn something from. Heat maps of every map let you see where you die the most. Want to know how many times you’ve been splattered by a Revenant? It’s all there.
• ForgeWorld is HUGE. Forge was always a kind of fun thing to play with in Halo 3. It let you edit and create new map variants, but it was not an easy task to make something amazing. ForgeWorld is a gigantic map with LOADS of areas to build in! Bungie has also made it a lot easier to do certain things that you used to need the patience of a saint to accomplish. Phasing objects into each other. Placing things in the sky without needing another object under it. It’s a great step forward and the community is going to do wonderful things with it.

There are plenty of other aspects that I haven’t mentioned that make Halo: Reach the best Halo title to date but I wanted to keep this review (kind of) short. I would recommend Reach to anyone I know. Halo fans will love it as it does an amazing job of taking all the greatness from each Halo title, throwing it in a bowl and mixing it up and then polishing it until it shines. Fans of first person shooters should probably give this a chance even if they were never a huge fan of Halo because I feel like the armor abilities really do change the game quite a bit. Thank you for all the great Halo memories over the last nine years, Bungie. You couldn’t have said goodbye any better than this.