With Judgement being a Game for Gold this month, I decided to give it a go considering that I hadn't played it at the time of release. Having played a number of multiplayer matches and being most of the way through the campaign, the thought occurred to me, "This is just like Reach!". I know Judgement was not well received by fans and a lot of Halo fans consider it the high point in the series(I disagree entirely but whatever) but they have many similarities in my opinion. I'll do my best the articulate them here.
//////////////////// SHORT VERSION
-Campaigns with little connectivity between levels with bad structure and no real meaning to the lore.
-More focus on class based gameplay and "inclusive" multiplayer.
-Abandonment of Iconic aesthetic for something more digestable.
-Leaving out important aspects of the games(executions, horde mode and MC vs flood and forrunners).
-Markza and DMR are both horrible additions
-Seem to be made by people who didn't want to make them.
//////////////////// LONG VERSION pls read...
First off are the campaigns. In both Judgement and Reach the story you are given is of little consequence. I'm not saying that what happened wasn't important, but they don't tell you anything that advances the lore or fills in any gaps. Unlike, say, Devil May Cry 3 which told a complete story that took place before the others and expands our knowledge of a character and his connection to the main character, Judgement and Reach simply fill in a gap in the story that they created and ultimately give us nothing really to show for it. Playing these games isn't necessary to someone who wants to learn the story. But it would be fine for a game to have little connection to the others as long as they had a strong story, right?
Unfortunately both games do not. The levels in both Judgement and Reach have little connectivity to the others and feel like your doing random shit through most of the game. Judgement is a little worse about connecting its levels however its better than Reach in the "Having a Clear Goal and Proper Plot Structure" category. Very early in Judgement the main characters decide to go set off a big bomb, and that is the main goal of the game. While this meant that their wasn't a lot of plot development in the game, this also meant that the game had sort of structure, it was a linear structure but it was there. Reach didn't, there was no real structure, just a bunch of stuff that happened. While judgement had no rise or fall, Reach rose and fell willy nilly. You spend a while trying to kill this big ship early on, then when you do eighty fucking more show up, then you pretty blunty transition from the early "we've got this" part of an invasion straight into the "we're fucked" part doing clean up missions with the only significant thing you end up doing not introduced until the next to last level. In Halo 3, you felt the stakes of what you were doing, "Finish the Fight" was the tag line for a reason. In Gears 3, you felt the desperation of what you were doing. Neither in Judgement nor in Reach could I feel motivated by what I was doing. Hell, in Reach nothing but the very last thing you did even mattered! Also in Judgement the reason you have to detonate the bomb is because there is this bad guy who you see very little of through most of the game but the bomb is the "only thing that can kill him"?
Not much about the gameplay changed although both games tried focusing more on the player taking on a "role" during gameplay than previous games. Reach had it's loadouts and customizing your campaign character, and Judgement had its class based modes and switching perspectives in campaign. I guess you could say that both games tried making their games more "inclusive" by making the multiplayer more like more popular games. They also made questionable additions to the weaponry. The new snipers in Judgement don't fit in with the fast and aggressive gameplay and the DMR puts more focus on sniping people across maps as opposed to the more varied gameplay in past Halo's.
Lastly, the aesthetic is different in both games in comparison to their predecessors. Gears of War has always had this alien, for lack of a better term machine-punk look to it, even in its human aspect. Everything was bigger and bulkier than it probably needed to be. The world was grey, and depressing and just felt like a world made from war and brutality. Humanity's creations felt different from anything that we would ever make. Even in Gears 3, which added a lot of sun and color to the franchise, the environment had this worn, ravaged look to it. You wouldn't imagine the Gears having something as sensible as a Humvee, but a mech suit modeled after a gorilla fit in just fine. In judgement however, not only was everything given more color but everything looked a little "nicer", a little more digestible for our mind. For example, one level in judgement takes you through a upper class neighborhood and something that I could stop thinking is that it looked just like one of our neighborhoods. The streets, the cars, the mailboxes all made it feel like the gears had been dropped in a cul-de-sac down the road from me. A perfect comparison of the aesthetic is in the computers: in previous gears computers are CRT-like monitors with bulky metal cases and green glass, in Judgement computers are much slimmer monitors with a thin cobalt case. Everything about Judgement's design felt more "comfortable" than a game in the gears world should.
Halo Reach went the opposite route in a way, making human buildings a equipment feel less human and more alien. In previous games, despite the advancement in technology everything made by humans looked like it was made by humans. Human tech was simply designed with similar purposes to what we use now and a little "blunt" compared to Covenant tech. Reach's first level, however, successfully made me feel foreign to my own species. The houses and vehicles didn't feel human-made. The human aesthetic in Reach was made to be more smooth and intricate, with architecture being more artistic and less practical and the guns introduced being a little over designed and not resembling an stereotypical counterpart (they made the Assault rifle unnecessarily complicated looking). The military was also switched from a greenish color scheme in favor of a light grey (and sometimes orange) scheme making it less resemble most current military in the general minds of the culture. Halo games are usually full of green jungles, sandy deserts and huge alien structures and Reach felt boring, bland and generic for a game that had a whole planet to work with.
As well, both games cut down dramatically on their non-human environments. Judgement has from what I've seen no locust structures or locations, even areas you attack where they are in control are entirely human made. Reach, likewise, has none of the forerunner environments that were iconic in the previous games. Both games somewhat abandon the Iconic look for the franchise, in my opinion to their detriment.
Overall, if I had to guess I would say that both games were made by developers that didn't understand what made the games great or simply didn't want to make the games at all. They abandoned the aesthetic of previous games and moved away from iconic aspects of them (executions and horde mode, no more Master Chief and no flood or forrunners). I think that the Gears franchise was given to a developer that didn't want it and had more experience with more colorful "fun" games (People Can Fly) and Reach was developed by a people that were tired of making Halo games (Bungie). I'm not saying that these are bad games and both have sparks of great ideas in them, but their drawbacks remind me a lot of each other.
//////////////////// SHORT VERSION
-Campaigns with little connectivity between levels with bad structure and no real meaning to the lore.
-More focus on class based gameplay and "inclusive" multiplayer.
-Abandonment of Iconic aesthetic for something more digestable.
-Leaving out important aspects of the games(executions, horde mode and MC vs flood and forrunners).
-Markza and DMR are both horrible additions
-Seem to be made by people who didn't want to make them.
//////////////////// LONG VERSION pls read...
First off are the campaigns. In both Judgement and Reach the story you are given is of little consequence. I'm not saying that what happened wasn't important, but they don't tell you anything that advances the lore or fills in any gaps. Unlike, say, Devil May Cry 3 which told a complete story that took place before the others and expands our knowledge of a character and his connection to the main character, Judgement and Reach simply fill in a gap in the story that they created and ultimately give us nothing really to show for it. Playing these games isn't necessary to someone who wants to learn the story. But it would be fine for a game to have little connection to the others as long as they had a strong story, right?
Unfortunately both games do not. The levels in both Judgement and Reach have little connectivity to the others and feel like your doing random shit through most of the game. Judgement is a little worse about connecting its levels however its better than Reach in the "Having a Clear Goal and Proper Plot Structure" category. Very early in Judgement the main characters decide to go set off a big bomb, and that is the main goal of the game. While this meant that their wasn't a lot of plot development in the game, this also meant that the game had sort of structure, it was a linear structure but it was there. Reach didn't, there was no real structure, just a bunch of stuff that happened. While judgement had no rise or fall, Reach rose and fell willy nilly. You spend a while trying to kill this big ship early on, then when you do eighty fucking more show up, then you pretty blunty transition from the early "we've got this" part of an invasion straight into the "we're fucked" part doing clean up missions with the only significant thing you end up doing not introduced until the next to last level. In Halo 3, you felt the stakes of what you were doing, "Finish the Fight" was the tag line for a reason. In Gears 3, you felt the desperation of what you were doing. Neither in Judgement nor in Reach could I feel motivated by what I was doing. Hell, in Reach nothing but the very last thing you did even mattered! Also in Judgement the reason you have to detonate the bomb is because there is this bad guy who you see very little of through most of the game but the bomb is the "only thing that can kill him"?
Not much about the gameplay changed although both games tried focusing more on the player taking on a "role" during gameplay than previous games. Reach had it's loadouts and customizing your campaign character, and Judgement had its class based modes and switching perspectives in campaign. I guess you could say that both games tried making their games more "inclusive" by making the multiplayer more like more popular games. They also made questionable additions to the weaponry. The new snipers in Judgement don't fit in with the fast and aggressive gameplay and the DMR puts more focus on sniping people across maps as opposed to the more varied gameplay in past Halo's.
Lastly, the aesthetic is different in both games in comparison to their predecessors. Gears of War has always had this alien, for lack of a better term machine-punk look to it, even in its human aspect. Everything was bigger and bulkier than it probably needed to be. The world was grey, and depressing and just felt like a world made from war and brutality. Humanity's creations felt different from anything that we would ever make. Even in Gears 3, which added a lot of sun and color to the franchise, the environment had this worn, ravaged look to it. You wouldn't imagine the Gears having something as sensible as a Humvee, but a mech suit modeled after a gorilla fit in just fine. In judgement however, not only was everything given more color but everything looked a little "nicer", a little more digestible for our mind. For example, one level in judgement takes you through a upper class neighborhood and something that I could stop thinking is that it looked just like one of our neighborhoods. The streets, the cars, the mailboxes all made it feel like the gears had been dropped in a cul-de-sac down the road from me. A perfect comparison of the aesthetic is in the computers: in previous gears computers are CRT-like monitors with bulky metal cases and green glass, in Judgement computers are much slimmer monitors with a thin cobalt case. Everything about Judgement's design felt more "comfortable" than a game in the gears world should.
Halo Reach went the opposite route in a way, making human buildings a equipment feel less human and more alien. In previous games, despite the advancement in technology everything made by humans looked like it was made by humans. Human tech was simply designed with similar purposes to what we use now and a little "blunt" compared to Covenant tech. Reach's first level, however, successfully made me feel foreign to my own species. The houses and vehicles didn't feel human-made. The human aesthetic in Reach was made to be more smooth and intricate, with architecture being more artistic and less practical and the guns introduced being a little over designed and not resembling an stereotypical counterpart (they made the Assault rifle unnecessarily complicated looking). The military was also switched from a greenish color scheme in favor of a light grey (and sometimes orange) scheme making it less resemble most current military in the general minds of the culture. Halo games are usually full of green jungles, sandy deserts and huge alien structures and Reach felt boring, bland and generic for a game that had a whole planet to work with.
As well, both games cut down dramatically on their non-human environments. Judgement has from what I've seen no locust structures or locations, even areas you attack where they are in control are entirely human made. Reach, likewise, has none of the forerunner environments that were iconic in the previous games. Both games somewhat abandon the Iconic look for the franchise, in my opinion to their detriment.
Overall, if I had to guess I would say that both games were made by developers that didn't understand what made the games great or simply didn't want to make the games at all. They abandoned the aesthetic of previous games and moved away from iconic aspects of them (executions and horde mode, no more Master Chief and no flood or forrunners). I think that the Gears franchise was given to a developer that didn't want it and had more experience with more colorful "fun" games (People Can Fly) and Reach was developed by a people that were tired of making Halo games (Bungie). I'm not saying that these are bad games and both have sparks of great ideas in them, but their drawbacks remind me a lot of each other.
