I had originally intended to do one single post reviewing Halo: Reach, but there’s a lot there. So there will be two, perhaps three posts. This first part will deal with the campaign and is about as spoiler-sanitized as the average Bungie Weekly Update, so if you haven’t picked up the game, there’s no need to click the Back button just yet.
First, the usual disclaimer: I am not much of a gamer. I’m not particularly skilled and I’m not particularly competitive. I always played Halo for the story first; the multiplayer aspect is generally something I only play with my friends. I can’t speak to how hard the game is on Legendary (my bet: very hard) or even what it’s like to play on Heroic (my bet: slightly less hard). Now that we’ve established that, onto the review!
Halo: Reach is Bungie’s prequel to the Halo trilogy. Unlike last year’s ODST it’s a standalone game, not an expansion, and it is in many ways their setup for the events in Halo. If you’re like me and you’ve read Fall of Reach, you should know that this is not a game adaptation of the book (if only). Instead, Bungie finesses some of their canon to fit in a new cast of characters who are tasked with defending Reach in the middle of the massive Covenant invasion prior to the events in Halo. From the beginning, you know how the story ends, much in the same way that the duel in Episode III between Anakin and Obi-Wan or the Emperor and Yoda was anything but a nail-biter.
Despite knowing the end from the very beginning, the story behind Reach is quite possibly one of the best single-story campaigns in the series since Halo 1. Part of that is the fact that the plot is forced to stand on its own and can’t rely on a sequel to tie up loose ends; this is an entirely self-contained adventure, much like the story in ODST, although unlike ODST’s fractured method of storytelling, you remain the same person and run on a series of missions in a linear fashion. Even though I beat the campaign in about 7 hours the first time, on normal, and I beat it with my little brother last night in five and a half hours, this campaign does not feel anywhere near that short. By the end of the last mission you are happy to see the credits roll, although if the last levels were not kind to you, you will not enjoy what comes after that.
Reach, ultimately, felt like a reunion tour; fighting Elites for the first time again fills you with a sense of nostalgia, and fighting Brutes for the first time in the game feels at once natural and unnatural; only once before at the tail end of Halo 2 do you find yourself fighting both races at once, and these are not the same Brutes from Halo 2. That said, they also certainly are not the same Brutes from Halo 3; these beasts are not damage sponges and their hammer-wielding leaders are far less terrifying. Throughout the game you run across characters from other games, and each encounter feels like meeting an old friend. It’s incredibly fun and does a great job of providing a feeling of closure; at the end you don’t feel like anything was left out.
Finally, there was the one thing that took some getting used to in Reach, and that was the world. Bungie did some major work on the game engine and the graphics engine, and it shows. For the first time they can justifiably show human soldiers and Spartans unmasked and it doesn’t look terrible; these are the best looking faces I’ve ever seen in Halo game. The graphics are in fact so good that on an older Xbox 360 you may find your hardware struggling to keep up with the engine; I noticed some odd stutter on a few cutscenes and some downright ugly texture cache issues at other points. The whole game looks grittier and dirtier than most Halo games, almost in a Gears of War kind of way. Between that and the redone Grunts, it almost doesn’t feel like a Halo game. In time though, you adjust to this darker Halo experience and come to appreciate it on its own. At first I lamented the way the Grunts growled and hissed rather than cried “No leader! Run!”, but the comedic relief would have felt out of place in a game that is literally about the end of a world.
If you were to buy two video games this year, I’d say get this (and StarCraft II). The campaign alone is definitely worth the $60.
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