Halo: Reach

Halo Reach is by far the second best Halo game behind the original, Halo: Combat Evolved.

This time Bungie have taken you to the plant of Reach. The UNSC’s last resort before Earth. The main training ground for the UNSC’s troops and the birth place of the Spartans.

Halo Reach sets you off in the eyes of Noble Six. The newest recruit for the most hardcore of the hardcore squads of Spartans. To begin with it sees you go and investigate a lost squad of Spartans. That’s all I am going to say about the plot but I will say that the story is very good, driven and you feel connected to the characters.

To make the final Halo game that Bungie would do they completely re-made their game engine which makes Halo Reach look and sound absolutely amazing. With Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST they used the same engine and it showed but Bungie wanted to something different to come out of this and it did.

A new addition to the Halo series is the Armour Abilities. These consist of Sprint, Armour Lock, Jetpack, Hologram, Drop Shield, Evade (Elite only), Active Camo. Sprint is exactly what it says and is the first time it has made it into a Halo game. Armour lock is another new addition to the Halo franchise. Armour lock makes you become invincible for a short amount of time and when you come out of it, it fires out a short range EMP blast that destroys anyone’s shields nearby. Jetpack, well, a jetpack. Hologram, you can send a hologram of yourself into a place where you tell it, it can be very handy at times. Drop Shield, exactly the same as Halo 3 but also different, instead of it being an item it is instead an armour ability.

Back to the single player. Like I said before, you are Noble Six, a member of the Spartan group Noble and you are stationed in planet Reach. Bungie have decided to take a more human approach to the characters for Reach so this time you actually get to see some peoples faces other than the troops who are not important to the story and their for the sake of it and Sgt. Major Johnson. You get to see the faces of all of the squad you are fighting along side of but sadly not your own. Although this helps the characters feel believable it still makes you feel as if you are kind of left out.

The single player campaign on normal difficulty will take you any time between 7-10 hours and obviously will take you longer on the harder difficulties. A plus side to this is that you can go through the campaign with 3 of your friend co-op and kill the covenant yourself. Another co-op mode is firefight which is a wave based survival/elimination mode.

Firefight debuted it ODST and was quite good but could have been a lot better. They realised this and developed it to be the best that they could make it. This time around you get to customise the settings to how you like it. There is now the option to pick what enemies you want to face in a round, what damage they take, what damage you take, what damage you can deal etc. Overall, it is a vast improvement from ODST.

Now the multiplayer, pretty much the same as Halo 3 but with the new guns, armour abilities and maps. Repetitive? I think not. The multiplayer was and still is great on Halo 3 and Bungie new the thing that they needed to do is to update it and ad a few things. That is exactly what they did and well, it paid off. I would say the best thing that they changed was the XP system. On Halo 3 it was admittedly a bit rubbish. You had to be on the winning side or the top 3 to score 1XP which isn’t a lot when you need about 1000XP to rank up after about 20 ranks up. But they changed it for credits and it awarded you them for headshots, kills, winning or losing. You can use the credits you earn to buy cooler looking armour, special heads that do cool stuff in game, firefight voices etc.

There are still two more modes for you to use, yeah, I know.


First of the last two are Custom Game. This gives you the option to create a game type of your liking, be it a normal slayer match or a cool funky one like Spartan Jenga. To use this game mode to your full advantage first I have to explain the other one. It is called Forge. Forge is a create ‘whatever you feel like it’ mode. If it is a base, a giant ‘thing’, whatever you want to build you can do. Now, what does that have to do with custom game? You can create the map for your custom game mode. As I said about Spartan Jenga. You can create a Jenga tower for the people to spawn on and the objects for the elite to fire at the Spartans to knock them off with.

At the beginning of this review I said about Bungie updating their in-game engine and it has definitely made this game feel a lot better. If they had of used their old engine that they used for Halo 3 then I feel the game would have felt outdated and old but because of the update made it better.

Overall, this game is great. Probably the best of 2010 and a must have if you own a Xbox 360.

I would have to give Halo: Reach a…..

10/10

A Must Buy!