Less Canon, More Cannon: A Review of Halo Reach

I had actually been planning to wait to write this review. The point being, I don't actually own Halo Reach; my friend bought it, and I played through the campaign co-op with him as well as borrowing it on a few occasions. I figured I should give it a more thorough playthrough, get to really know it, before I wrote a review.

This was before I've had it sitting in my room for the last 3 days, where when faced with free time I played Gears of War 2,  L4D2, and SC2 unless specifically asked by someone else to play Reach. So before I get into details on the game, a tl;dr would be that Halo Reach is merely ok. It works as a social game, but it'll never be something that's my go-to game, nor will I ever buy it unless it gets down to the $20 price point.



There's an interesting comparison to be made here. As readers of this blog will recall, I initially had fierce resistance against buying Starcraft 2 and was determined not to buy it, until Aaron bought the game and got me to try it, which convinced me I should spend the money. I likewise had about zero excitement and interest in Reach: I had seen the previews (missed the Beta due to be in Vienna) and none of it caused me to consider buying it. So when Matt told me he wanted me to drive him to Gamestop to buy it and then play on my Xbox, I said sure, already resigned to the fact that it may cause me to buy the game. But that didn't happen, despite the fact that I own every other Halo FPS.

Anyway, as the title suggests, this review is broken down into two parts, the first being gameplay (safe to read) and the second regarding the story and how it relates to the canon, something that seems to becoming a trend on this blog (and this section is filled with massive SPOILERS).

For this review, I shall doubtless be drawing endless comparisons to the Call of Duty (CoD), Gears of War (GoW) and Battlefield (BF) franchises, which I feel represent the biggest competitors to the 360 FPS scene, just to get those annoying acronyms out of the way.

The biggest problem I think Halo suffers from is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The Halo franchise has always been a guaranteed money-maker, and given the average immaturity of Halo players, minor changes cause lots of complaints (see: dual wielding, equipment, practically every change made to the games). From this perspective I can understand why Bungie would be reluctant to change the formula much, but this means that Halo 1 multiplayer is pretty much exactly Halo Reach multiplayer: the guns, graphics, and minor things may have changed slightly, but it feels pretty much exactly the same. However, other series have progressed further in that time, and Halo feels so incredibly dated. While the retro feel seems to work for me in terms of SC2, for Halo it just doesn't cut it. Halo multiplayer relies solely on keeping a reticle aimed on an opponent while emptying your clip, unless you get a power weapon and then you try and spam it. The maps are uninteresting, the modes rather lackluster, and the player-base generally annoying. While I'm impressed they've tried to add variety with things like the Invasion mode, I have to point to games like BF2142 and BF:BC which have done a same thing... but better. Much better. (See Titan mode from 2142). Team games don't feel like you're on a team at all, since it might as well be a FFA with certain people you can't shoot, which is far from the tactical experience you get in GoW. The fact that you're always starting out with an inferior weapon (see: Battle rifle) means whoever gets a better weapon is automatically doing better, something CoD manages to avoid very well (even the advanced weapons are not inherently better than the starting weapons).

While I approve of some of the new weapons, equipment, and vehicles, they don't change the game at all. They just feel different, not better or worse. The closest thing to something being really "new" is the jetpack, and honestly it felt pretty boring and far from game changing. The addition of sprinting from something nice (again, say hello to every other modern FPS) but that fact you lose it whenever you pick up something better was merely frustrating to me.

In terms of the campaign, it was likewise lackluster. Despite theoretically being a  part of a world-wide war, it never felt like it, rather just like a series of minor skirmishes. Despite being a member of the team, you spend the majority of the time either by yourself or with maybe one teammate, and they act basically like Sgt. Johnson or any of the invincible Marines in the other Halo games; i.e. you don't feel like you have Spartans on your side, at all. (On a side note, the lack of Cortana and Johnson made me sad, since they were the most entertaining characters Halo had). A huge missed opportunity here. The fact they're invincible just aggravates how easily you die on harder difficulties, and made me miss Gears, where teammates can get downed just like you in the campaign, making them feel more equal to you. None of the battle felt any different than something that hasn't been done in prior Halo games, and even the space battle felt like a Banshee fight. This is a far cry from Gears and CoD, where the newer games always add something new to the campaign. Even ODST did something more interesting, whereas Reach just reverted to the same old... *yawn*.

I'm also rather frustrated with the difficulty levels. Heroic was nice for a playthrough, and then I decided to try Legendary (much like I've played though the GoW and CoD campaigns on Insane/Veteran). Unlike the latter two games though, I don't feel like Legendary was actually a challenge.... it just killed you a lot for no reason. When I died in Gears or CoD I always know why; I made an unwise tactical choice, I missed a shot I should have hit, I didn't take cover when I should have, etc. I feel like Halo punishes you just because: you want to take cover because you'll die instantly otherwise, but it doesn't give you an easy way to shoot while in cover; the game is all about Master Chiefing it, but that doesn't work on higher difficulty settings. Unwelcome changes like making Energy Swords and Plasma Grenades no longer one-hit kills only augments this problem. In short, I didn't feel like I was playing it for a challenge, I felt like I was playing it to be masochistic.

Firefight still pales in comparison to Horde mode, and while the Forge is cool, you need a lot of patience to really do anything cool like make custom maps. The fact you can do 4 player split-screen online but not the same for Firefight and the campaign is stupidly annoying and I would almost say inexcusable. The Armory is likewise an attempt to copy the progression system from CoD but ends up being far less compelling, for the simple fact that everything is cosmetic.

In short, Reach is completely outdated, and what it tried to update doesn't measure up to the things it's trying to copy. Now for the things that are a bit more subjective: the story.

Reach tries to tell an interesting story. The first problem is that it's about as interesting as the other Halo games, which is to say barely at all, since much like Gears much of the story is told via secondary means, i.e. not the game itself. This is a bit disappointing because ODST had a better story, and the campaign benefited as a result. The other annoying things concerns me as a consumer. I bought the initial Halo novel skeptically, not actually expecting it to be good. However, I was proven very wrong, since the novel was excellent and did an outstanding job fleshing out a universe that was in all other respects rather generic aliens fighting scifi humans. I've since then bought all the novels and the graphic novel collection, and enjoyed them all. When I heard that Reach was set in, well, Reach, and that it pulled from the novel Fall of Reach, I was very excited since the novel was perhaps the best of the bunch.

However, I was sorely disappointed. The game is nothing like the book; Reach is basically a normal planet instead of a top secret military planet-fortress, the Covenant somehow sneak past all the defenses of the planet, the planet has apparently a tiny military force and no ships in orbit (seriously?), civilians are romping all over the place, and Spartan IIIs are not only present but wearing MJOLNIR armor, which makes absolutely no sense. I honestly felt very betrayed by Bungie, since I bought the novels and stuff, and the game basically went "haha none of that is actually true." And this is doubly disappointing because the novels did a much better job than the game did. Seriously, GoW2 had a more compelling narrative than Reach does, and this is the franchise that had laughably little in the first game. They did a good job differentiating between the different members of Noble team, but none of them were interesting, and I didn't really end up caring about any of them (augmented by the fact that they did and said a lot of stupid things for being Spartans).

I could probably go further on this subject, but I think the point is clear. My final verdict is this: if you're a big fan of the Halo franchise, you've probably already bought it and aren't going to care what I'll say. If not though, I'd encourage you to try it out before buying it. If you're disliked or were apathetic about previous Halo games, there's nothing that will change your mind here; it's the same old, with no real improvements or changes, which is sad because the franchise could have used a breath of fresh air, as well as listening to what those creative authors they hired actually came up with.

-HTMC