II Mayor Bee II (Adam) and Digby Caesar (Me) - ready for action...

Ok… So I’m finally going to write my Reach review and after 56 hours of it under my belt I feel like I have somewhat of an informed opinion.

This game really should be reviewed in two parts for both the single player and the online multiplayer but because the single player campaign is so mind numbingly boring I’m not even going to bother… Even the co-op campaign wasn’t a lot of fun, although I have currently only gone through it in 2-player co-op on normal, so the experience may differ on a higher difficulty and with the full 4-players. The story still sucked though and you did the same basic thing over and over again, just kill aliens. Then kill some MORE aliens.  Then kill aliens in a spaceship. Then kill EVEN MORE aliens. And so on…

You definitely need to be playing with other people for this game to be fun and heck what great fun it is! The matchmaking system from Halo:3 has been tweaked in Reach to almost be perfect. You can now customise certain criteria to get the perfect match for your play style. Don’t want any loud mouth 12 year olds chatting shit all the time? Just search for quiet games. Have a BT homehub, or just a generally crappy internet connection? Search for games with the best connection for you, which works surprisingly well as I don’t always have the best connection myself.  Left untouched the default matchmaking  setting will prioritise connection speed and skill level over anything else.

You have a plethora of different game types to choose from, the most popular being Team Slayer, which is just 4v4 deathmatch and is always good fun, although I do find myself just using this to warm up before jumping into any objective based games. I usually play with my co-blogger, Adam and we tend to alternate between multi-team and invasion as our preferred game modes.

II Mayor Bee II (Adam) and Digby Caesar (Me - dead) sniping/getting sniped

Multi-team pits 6 teams of 2 against each other in various game modes. King of the Hill, Rocket Race and Oddball are definitely my personal favourites. King of The Hill sets a point on the map that you must capture and defend for as long as possible. It’s hectic and tense as once you capture the zone you are set upon by every other team and usually don’t last very long. This makes for an almost always close competition.

Rocket Race puts you and your buddy on a Mongoose (quad bike) and arms you with rocket launchers  and is every bit as fun as that sounds! One of you drives and one of you fires and you must hit the designated checkpoints before anyone else. When you are on the Mongoose you are invincible, so you have to do everything you can to stay on as rockets fly at you from all directions. This is definitely one of the less serious game types and is good for a couple of rounds of mayhem to warm down with.

In Oddball you must grab the skull that is usually placed in the centre of the map and keep it for as long as possible. Kind of like King of The Hill but only one person from the team can hold the skull and it’s mobile, so you can grab it and run to a hiding place while your team-mate holds back the opposing forces.

The other match mode I mentioned was Invasion. This is two teams of 6 against each other in a constantly changing battle. One team attacks and another defends, basically. There are three separate “events” that happen during a whole match of Invasion. The first event is usually just attacking and defending two zones, then if these zones are captured successfully the map opens up and you must capture and defend the next set of zones, if these are also captured then there is an item that must be picked up and taken to a specific point on the map and then the game is over. This item is usually a flag or a power core. So it combines king of the hill and capture the flag into one huge skirmish.

These game types are just a few of the many, many more you can choose from and you can begin to see, with the right friends to play with, how you can waste hours and hours and hours with this game! I haven’t even mentioned the actual gameplay yet, which is definitely the best part of the whole package. It’s just fun to play, in terms of running and jumping around and the physics and all the pretty colours and shapes and very exciting! However, one thing that does bug me, and it bugged me in other Halo games also, is how weak most of the weapons feel. You really have to put a lot of bullets into someone before they die, which was hard to get used to at first, especially as the last FPS I spent a lot of time with was Modern Warfare 2. Once you get used to it though it’s really not noticeable and I guess they did it to stop people getting too frustrated with constantly dying from just a couple of shots? If this is the reason then fair enough, but it’s only slightly less annoying than someone with the same weapon as you firing at you as you fire back and knowing you are going to die simply because he started firing before you did. This often ends in me deciding I’m fighting a losing battle and dropping a grenade so we just both die anyway (this happens a lot).

Armor Lock vs Banshee (Armor Lock wins)

The key additions to Reach have to be the power-ups. These can drastically vary the tactics used and personally I think they are the main reason this game is so much fun! They come in six different flavours;

Drop Shield – This is the bubble shield from previous Halo games.

Jet Pack – You can FLY. (for a limited time)

Sprint/Evade – RUN! (for Humans) and a quick roll (for Elites)

Armor Lock – Possibly my favourite. You are immobilised but invincible for a brief time and when you come out of the lockup you set off an EMP, which knocks players shields off and can disable nearby vehicles. Also, if someone is trying to run you down with a covenant vehicle and they hit you whilst in the lock – THEY EXPLODE. Brilliant.

Hologram – This sends an identical holographic image of you running to wherever you choose. It works surprisingly well, although they can only run in a straight line. Makes for some great sneack attacks though.

Stealth – This cloaks the player and jams nearby radars (including your own)

As well as the armor abilities, they have added assassination kills, which are activated by getting behind someone and holding down the melee button. This activates a short 1-2 second animation of you assassinating your target with a melee weapon. They look pretty cool, but they can be stopped and you are vulnerable for the couple of seconds it takes to run the animation. You may also have your assassination stolen by a team-mate if they kill the guy before you finish the kill, which prompts a “yoink!” icon to come up.

Knife vs YOUR GUTS (knife always wins)

All these little ingredients blend together very well to make a delicious gaming soup that’ll keep you full for hours! Soup metaphors aside, it really is such a well-balanced multiplayer game that is near perfect as an online experience. Reach has so many things to offer other FPS titles that should and do learn from it. I see that the soon to be released Black Ops has added a replay theatre feature, which looks exactly the same as the Halo one. I honestly feel that this feature should be in EVERY game. It’s a no brainer! Think of how many times in a game and I mean in ANY game, where you have had something random happen to you that was so completely unique and so rare that made you want to go back and watch it again and share the video with friends? Video games are the only medium where these moments happen and they happen a lot. They have been a feature in sports games for years and I know they added one to the PC version of GTA:IV, so I don’t see why they can’t do it with all games. Imagine one in a cinematic game such as Red Dead Redemption! It would be awesome! Anyway, I’ve gone off topic a bit but I suppose it highlights how much effort Bungie put into this franchise in terms of online features, anyway. They really work hard to keep you playing the game, even if you are just messing around with the video editor or checking stats and other people’s screenshots and clips at Bungie.net, it can keep you in their world for hours. A part of me does think that they could have spent less time tweaking the online to work on the campaign mode and make it a bit more epic and much less repetitive. You’d think they’d take a leaf out of Infinity Wards book and try to include some wicked set-pieces. From what I gather, they tried to make it more of an open-world experience and less of an on-rails shooter like the COD games are, but they didn’t really allow you enough freedom for that either. Also, they could have focused more on the co-op campaign and perhaps allowed the cut-scenes to have featured all players that were taking part, as opposed to just getting rid of all but one, it really took you out of the experience and felt a little tacky.

In summary, I’d say if you were looking for your next big Xbox Live multiplayer experience then definitely pick up Halo: Reach. If, however you have a shitty connection or don’t have a gold account (why wouldn’t you?!) then give it a miss, as the solo campaign isn’t really good enough when compared to other single player games out there.

Overall I give this 9 flaming skulls out of 10