Me and three friends recently played through the campaign of Halo Reach together. Shooters are not my preferred type of game, so I had low expectations going in. Halo Reach has many of the same issues I generally have with shooters, and has a plot I felt could have been better. Despite this, I had a good time with my friends thanks to the nice-feeling controls and the wide array of vehicles that you can control together.
Remember, this review reflects my experience and therefore everyone else’s as well. If you disagree with any point I bring in this post, then you should reflect on your opinion until you agree with me as I am correct and you are wrong. Thank you for reading!
Gameplay
Like I said in the introduction, shooters are not something I ever play. I went into this game expecting to be bad at aiming and hitting things. It was not nearly as bad as I thought, with four players on Heroic mode, there were tons of enemies coming from all different directions and aiming well is not so hard in this game. Even I was able to take some out.
However, like in most shooters, I found that there is very little indication that you are hitting an enemy. Often, they don’t even take any knockback or spill any blood from a frickin’ bullet, so how am I to know if I hit them or if my aim is worse than a drunk bat playing darts. I found it frustrating to have no idea how close an enemy was to dead, especially when it was driving a vehicle I wanted.
Otherwise, the wide array of drivable vehicles is great. The controls require you to go in the direction that you point the camera, which was weird to me at first, but it works perfectly well. It was super fun to run into enemies at max speed or ram into other vehicles. The vehicles with weapons on the back which require a second player are the best since they require collaboration between the driver and the gunner so that they can aim at the enemies.
Plot
The plot of the game is not my favorite, but is acceptable. I feel like the deaths of every noble one by one was not earned. The cutscenes are short and there are not a lot of them, so I didn’t get to care enough about any one of these characters for their deaths to really mean anything. Maybe if we spent more time with these characters, it would have hit harder. I also don’t like that our goal became to save an ancient alien artificial intelligence to win the war. That feels so random like where did this thing come from and why is it on our side? I understand that this game is a prequel, so maybe this makes more sense knowing what happens in the other games.
New Alexandria
New Alexandria is my favorite level in the game. The atmosphere of the level is amazing; having just seen a ship full of evacuating citizens be destroyed, flying over the bleak, burning city all around you really hit home the direness of the situation.
My team spent way too long on this level trying to find two Easter eggs. We ended up finding both the club and flying pelicans after about half an hour. I like these Easter eggs, the weird actions you have to complete to achieve them feels like one of those urban legends kids would talk about back in the day, like finding Mew under a truck, but they are actually real.
Score
I feel weird about scoring this game. Halo Reach is not within a genre I am super familiar with, so I don’t know the standards for these types of games. I’ve heard that it is the last really good Halo game, but I have any clue what might make it better than Halo 4 or 5. Do the bullets come out too slow in those games? Without anything to compare this game to, how could I possibly score it objectively? The answer is that I can’t. So, to hell with the Objective Score!
For me, Halo Reach was a mostly boring game with sprinkles of fun gameplay throughout tied to an underdeveloped story. My friends made the experience a good time; on its own though, it is not the game for me.