Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the final Bungie-developed Halo game, Halo: Reach! Going in, this was probably the Halo game I knew the least about, but I had always heard that it was a solid swan-song for the Bungie games. How does the game hold up today? Read on to find out…

Love

• Customizable Avatar – Perhaps the coolest feature of Halo: Reach was one that I didn’t realize until I was most of the way through the game. It turns out that Noble Six, the SPARTAN you play as, is customizable and based on your multiplayer avatar. I set that avatar months before I actually got around to playing the game, so I had no idea until very late in the game that my character was personalized, but it’s such a cool feature and a great way to pay tribute to the fans.
• Perks – The equipment system from Halo 3 has been reworked in Reach and, in my opinion, it’s much more impactful now. The equipment pickups are now replaced with Call of Duty-style perks which operate on a quick cooldown and can be swapped out if you find a perk pickup in-game. There’s some pretty cool options, like the armour lock and jet pack, but (perhaps most notably) these perks finally bring sprinting to Halo (albeit, on a pathetically-short time limit, but at least it speeds up traversal a bit).
• Long Night of Solace – This is the first level where Reach really stands out from its predecessors. A very big chunk of this level has you piloting a space ship and getting into full-on dogfights with Banshees and Phantoms before flying into a Covenant supercarrier and battling your way through the interior. It’s a level that is epic in scope and execution. While I can see some people getting annoyed with this level, since the flying combat isn’t as good as dedicated flight game and it can drag on a bit long, but it’s such an ambitious and epic level that I have to give it major props.
• Lone Wolf – Speaking of memorable levels, the finale of Reach is really memorable. You’re given minimal information about what to do (Current Objective: Survive) and then get swarmed by Covenant. Eventually, you’ll come to realize that there is no happy ending, all you can do is take down as many Covenant with you as you can. There’s nothing stopping you from just chucking a grenade at your feet and ending it immediately, but it’s got that Call of Duty Zombies compulsion that makes you want to hop right back in and see if you can make it further next time.
• Exploding Grunts – A pretty small, but funny change is that Grunts’ backpacks can explode, sending them flying wildly when they die. I love the Grunts for being a bunch of cowardly goobers, and this cartoonish death just makes them even more endearing.

Mixed

• Elites Are Back – Look, I know I’ve ragged on the last couple games for being less fun because the Elites were replaced by the less-intelligent Brutes, so I should be happy that the Elites are back here. However, if you put a gun to my head and asked me if I thought that their return was a noticeable upgrade, I honestly don’t think it’s made much of a difference. Hell, even the Brutes don’t feel much like Brutes in this game, they’re just Elites with a different character model. I am not sure why exactly these enemies do not have that spark that made them stand out in the first couple games, but I think it comes down to changes in the enemy AI. Enemies and allies felt like they had personality and intelligence before, but I never really got that sense here.
• New and Rebalanced Weapons – Reach has quite a few new weapons and has rebalanced a lot of the old weapons, although I’m pretty mixed on both of these aspects.
  • In terms of the new weapons, my favourite is the Plasma Repeater, which is just a straight upgrade on the old Plasma Rifle. The grenade launcher is also pretty cool, although it’s kind of surprising that it took this long for one to get introduced. However, other new weapons, like the Concussion Rifle, Needler Rifle, and Focus Rifle kinda suck. Every time I ran out of ammo and had to pick up one of these weapons, I made a stink face and then ditched them as soon as I could.
  • For the rebalanced weapons, the magnum is awesome again, one-shotting most unshielded enemies with a headshot. The needler is also legitimately good here. In every game thus far, I would try it out just to see how it was, but this was the first time where I would actively seek it out. Unfortunately, the plasma sword is kind of shit once again, especially compared to the brute hammer (which has also been nerfed).
• Noble Team – Your squad of SPARTANs in this game, Noble Team are… alright. They have significantly more interesting personalities than the goofball soldiers from ODST, but they don’t have any sort of development over the course of the story. They’re introduced with an archetypal character trait, and then that defines them for the rest of the game. Consequently, I didn’t really care all that much when they start dying, because there’s nothing really to latch onto.
• Story Structure – The fall of Reach is supposed to be this massive defeat for humanity, where one of our greatest strongholds was crushed by the Covenant as they scour the entire surface of the world from orbit. Unfortunately, Reach rarely lives up to this promise, as the game doesn’t feel all that desperate. This is especially true in the first half of the game, where you’re basically just killing time fighting random Covenant patrols. It feels less like a world-ending tragedy, and more like a bunch of SPARTANs getting themselves killed unnecessarily like a bunch of dummies. It’s not until the last couple missions that it finally feels like there are some stakes, but even then it’s not that effective. Hell, I completed the last mission, then the credits started rolling and I literally said “Wait, that’s it?” Sure, it’s followed up by “Lone Wolf” as the epilogue, but I legitimately thought I had a couple more levels of content to go, because the ending felt like an anti-climax.

Hate

• The AI – As I alluded to earlier, the AI in Reach is pretty poor by Halo standards, especially for your allies. That’s a particular problem in this game, since you almost always have a fellow SPARTAN with you instead of some random marine, so it feels even more egregious when they get themselves stuck somewhere and then have to be conspicuously teleported in front of you to keep up. Vehicle pathfinding is a bit better than it was in ODST, but I had one moment in the final level where the AI was driving a mongoose and then they said “We have to jump it!” over a broken bridge… before proceeding to gingerly drive over the ledge. I got lucky and avoided dying because I got caught on the scenery, but it was a pretty embarrassing moment (especially because my AI companion was stuck at the bottom of a canyon, making their forced teleport later even more noticeable).
• No Dual-Wielding – A big reason why the weapons have been rebalanced again in Reach is because Bungie removed the option to dual-wield. This has clearly been done for balancing reasons (you can just make the weapon good, instead of having to make it only good when dual-wielded)… but fuck that. I’m only really analyzing these games on their single-player, so let me have my power fantasy. Dual-wielding in Halo 2 and plowing through a horde of grunts was one of the biggest power trips of my life. I kind of hate this competitive multiplayer mentality some developers have with their shooters, just let players have fun.

Honestly, I was pretty disappointed by Halo: Reach. Ever since this game came out, I figured it would be the definitive Halo game; Bungie’s last, big hurrah before the franchise went to 343. While I did enjoy it more than ODST, it’s missing that special spark that made Halo 2 and 3 so much fun to play through. The industry had changed fairly substantially in the decade between Combat Evolved and Reach, and I can’t help but feel like the growing dominance of Call of Duty, and competitive multiplayer in general, influenced the changes in this entry. Maybe it’s better on the multiplayer side of things, but as far as the campaigns go, Reach was a pretty big disappointment for me, even if the game itself is not bad.

Anyway, onto the 343 Industries games, I’m sure those will be much better…