First off let me start by saying I'm glad Yahtzee didn't put up his review of Reach this week so that next week I can point to this and say ?Called it!?
Either that or I'll say ?At least I had fun.?
Well, lets get down to it.
You may not remember but back before Reach came out I caught a lot of shit for calling everyone who pre-ordered Reach a tool. Most of them assumed that I was flaming because I hated the Halo games. I tried to tell them that wasn't true, but they didn't listen. They just flamed me because I flamed them...then I flamed right back. But somewhere in all that flame I promised that if Reach was better than I expected I would eat my shoes. Since I don't own a web cam consider this review an Internet shoe eating.
(This is my first review so it might be a little disorganized. Just bare with me.)
All the Halo games thus far have sold on their multiplayer. Now if I had 3 wishes one of them would be to eliminate Xbox live multiplayer from the face of the Earth, given that the Halo games were the only ones that I ever thought were any good. They were the king of the hill, if the hill was composed of manure and 13 year olds calling you a fag. All the ?effort? that Bungie put in to their on-line multyplayer meant that the story and writing in the first 4 games was equatable to a bucket of vomit being dumped on your head. Not to mention the duration of the story on Heroic difficulty was somewhere in the region of 8 or 9 hours. 5 or 6 or ODST.
Aside: none of what I'm about to say applies to Cortana.
The campaign mode in Halo game is about a bunch of one dimensional characters being one dimensional on a linear plot that doesn't make a lick of sense or seem to have any relevance to the gunfights I'm taking part in. The only times I actually knew what was going on was when Cortana would strait up tell me what the fuck just happened. Their attempts to try to make me empathize with the NPC's failed hard. They even tried to kill off the same character twice to try and get some emotional response. How dumb do they think we are?
That's why I was shocked to find myself giving a shit about all of Noble team. They all have their own unique personalities (Except 6, and that's the biggest problem I have with Reach) even Carter who's the closest to a stick-in-the-ass military man that inhabited all the other Halo games. And he gets told off by one of the side characters for being such a nit wit. Even the random marines you run it to on the Exodus mission weren't all macho dickheads. I'm not saying Reach is exceptionally well written, (I'm only comparing it to other recent mainstream games and First Person Shooters. And that makes it really good. But the storytelling In Halo Reach is a three-legged near-sited mouse if Jak 2 was a lion with a Katana, and Silent Hill 2 is a Grizzly bear with a gatling gun strapped to its back) but I'm going to give all the credit to the voice actors because imagining all the lines delivered in a dull Master Chief voice would have made me gouge my ears out. I even understood why I had to engage in all the random gunfights I took part in. My only complaints about the story are nit picks. Pretty massive nit picks but they're too full of spoilers to complain about in a review. So the story and acting not being terrible is an instant point in in Reach's favor
Lets talk about the game-play, shall we. In my flame I accused Reach of copying Halo 3's game-play wholesale. (which wouldn't be too far off form saying Reach would copy Halo 2's game-play wholesale.) But as it turns out I was wrong. Reach decided to copy Halo 1's game-play and a couple things from Halo 3. Then give you a jetpack as if to say ?Look, we can be original....never mind that Dark Void beat us to it.? The game-play is just as good as it always was. And yes I love the return of the monstrously overpowered pistol. The AI is smart enough on all the difficulties for the game to be fun to anyone. Wait, hold that. I mean the enemy AI. Jorge and Kat are the only friendly AI's that do anything besides hog oxygen and pick their noses. And if you plan on engaging in a vehicular gunfight you better plan on driving unless you want to end up a blood stain on the front of someone's Wraith. So from a mechanical stand point the game-play is pretty damn good. But form an immersion standpoint the game-play gets in the way. You'll run in to a reoccurring scenario where after a massive firefight you'll be out of ammo. (duh right?) But if you're playing on Heroic or Legendary you'll realize that there are only 5 weapons that are really helpful so after every fire fight you'll run around the battlefield and rummage through the corpses to try and find some god damn bullets. So yeah holding this Grunt corpse by the ankles and shaking him in hopes of finding needler rounds is obviously more important than disabling that anti-aircraft gun right? I'm reminded of the phrase ?I need a weapon.? Then there was the Nightfall mission which starts off like it's going to be some awesome stealth mission but the second you take your first shot all the enemies figure out exactly where you are, and realize that you're only packing a sniper so they all rush you forcing you to bust out the pistol turning it into just another action level... Disappointing but not necessarily bad. And if the last mission on Legendary doesn't give you a hernia you're obviously the Dalai Lama.
About every other level is broken up by driving sections that handle a lot better than they did in any other Halo game. There are a couple of rail shooter Falcon rides and even a space ship level. Even the standard first person shooting is a little better than most games. Although sit and snipe seems to be your best bet to survive a gunfight if that gets too monotonous you can always go balls out and take on a pack of enemies with a needler and melee. So the game-play is varied enough to never be too boring
Anyway the story mode took me about 18 hours on Heroic difficult which is better than any other FPS that came out recently. I'm willing to give it a thumbs up for length alone, but combine that with the game-play is more than just a grind of the same headshots over and over again. (don't get me wrong it still has that. If a Halo game actually pulled a Bioshock and made FPS game-play fun I'd have shit my pants.) I'll give the single player 2 thumbs up!
I don't exactly know how this fits in but there's character customization so you can customize 6 to make him or her look how you want but you need to play for weeks Captain Generic Spartan before you get enough points to make 6 look like you want 6 to look. That's just a fucking pain in the ass to me. So it looses a point for that.
On to the multyplayer.
Since I don't care for multyplayer I'm only going to touch briefly on a few points that I liked. For instance the cooperative Firefight mode. I love the Co-Op game-play because my ?sit and snipe? tactic only works really well if I have a couple ?run and gunners? on the ground soaking up enemy fire. And there's nothing 13 year old douchebags do better than run and gun. So I'm usually very effective in Firefight mode, thus inflating my ego enough to try my hand at the competitive stuff.
That's when I noticed that they let you vote for what kind of game you want to play. That's also when I noticed that the only game anyone wants to play is Infection. So out of about 30 online games I played more than 20 of them were Infection and it got old fast. (In case you don't know Infection is a team game where a team of fast moving zombies with swords kill the slow moving humans with shotguns)
So fuck me I never got to play Oddball (my favorite Halo multyplayer game type) or Head Hunters (a new game type that looked interesting)
The big team stuff is mostly unchanged except for Invasion mode which combines all three big team games into one, and I didn't care too much for it.
Forge mode is still intact and better than ever with the massive forge world that you can go to town on..
but the actual In game maps are more ?meh? then they were in any of the other Halo games.
And that's one thing that Halo always did so well. Remember the Space station level form Halo 1 where you could snipe across the way if you wanted to or take the teleporter and sneak up on the sniper. Could you imagine how fun that would be with the Jet packs from Reach?
So in conclusion with out a doubt this is the best Halo game. This is the only Halo game I'd consider good if you compared it to anything that wasn't a different FPS. Is it perfect? FUCK NO. Is it fun? Fuck yes.
So now there are 3 FPS games I like
Half Life 2
Bioshock 1
Halo Reach.
Either that or I'll say ?At least I had fun.?
Well, lets get down to it.
You may not remember but back before Reach came out I caught a lot of shit for calling everyone who pre-ordered Reach a tool. Most of them assumed that I was flaming because I hated the Halo games. I tried to tell them that wasn't true, but they didn't listen. They just flamed me because I flamed them...then I flamed right back. But somewhere in all that flame I promised that if Reach was better than I expected I would eat my shoes. Since I don't own a web cam consider this review an Internet shoe eating.
(This is my first review so it might be a little disorganized. Just bare with me.)
All the Halo games thus far have sold on their multiplayer. Now if I had 3 wishes one of them would be to eliminate Xbox live multiplayer from the face of the Earth, given that the Halo games were the only ones that I ever thought were any good. They were the king of the hill, if the hill was composed of manure and 13 year olds calling you a fag. All the ?effort? that Bungie put in to their on-line multyplayer meant that the story and writing in the first 4 games was equatable to a bucket of vomit being dumped on your head. Not to mention the duration of the story on Heroic difficulty was somewhere in the region of 8 or 9 hours. 5 or 6 or ODST.
Aside: none of what I'm about to say applies to Cortana.
The campaign mode in Halo game is about a bunch of one dimensional characters being one dimensional on a linear plot that doesn't make a lick of sense or seem to have any relevance to the gunfights I'm taking part in. The only times I actually knew what was going on was when Cortana would strait up tell me what the fuck just happened. Their attempts to try to make me empathize with the NPC's failed hard. They even tried to kill off the same character twice to try and get some emotional response. How dumb do they think we are?
That's why I was shocked to find myself giving a shit about all of Noble team. They all have their own unique personalities (Except 6, and that's the biggest problem I have with Reach) even Carter who's the closest to a stick-in-the-ass military man that inhabited all the other Halo games. And he gets told off by one of the side characters for being such a nit wit. Even the random marines you run it to on the Exodus mission weren't all macho dickheads. I'm not saying Reach is exceptionally well written, (I'm only comparing it to other recent mainstream games and First Person Shooters. And that makes it really good. But the storytelling In Halo Reach is a three-legged near-sited mouse if Jak 2 was a lion with a Katana, and Silent Hill 2 is a Grizzly bear with a gatling gun strapped to its back) but I'm going to give all the credit to the voice actors because imagining all the lines delivered in a dull Master Chief voice would have made me gouge my ears out. I even understood why I had to engage in all the random gunfights I took part in. My only complaints about the story are nit picks. Pretty massive nit picks but they're too full of spoilers to complain about in a review. So the story and acting not being terrible is an instant point in in Reach's favor
Lets talk about the game-play, shall we. In my flame I accused Reach of copying Halo 3's game-play wholesale. (which wouldn't be too far off form saying Reach would copy Halo 2's game-play wholesale.) But as it turns out I was wrong. Reach decided to copy Halo 1's game-play and a couple things from Halo 3. Then give you a jetpack as if to say ?Look, we can be original....never mind that Dark Void beat us to it.? The game-play is just as good as it always was. And yes I love the return of the monstrously overpowered pistol. The AI is smart enough on all the difficulties for the game to be fun to anyone. Wait, hold that. I mean the enemy AI. Jorge and Kat are the only friendly AI's that do anything besides hog oxygen and pick their noses. And if you plan on engaging in a vehicular gunfight you better plan on driving unless you want to end up a blood stain on the front of someone's Wraith. So from a mechanical stand point the game-play is pretty damn good. But form an immersion standpoint the game-play gets in the way. You'll run in to a reoccurring scenario where after a massive firefight you'll be out of ammo. (duh right?) But if you're playing on Heroic or Legendary you'll realize that there are only 5 weapons that are really helpful so after every fire fight you'll run around the battlefield and rummage through the corpses to try and find some god damn bullets. So yeah holding this Grunt corpse by the ankles and shaking him in hopes of finding needler rounds is obviously more important than disabling that anti-aircraft gun right? I'm reminded of the phrase ?I need a weapon.? Then there was the Nightfall mission which starts off like it's going to be some awesome stealth mission but the second you take your first shot all the enemies figure out exactly where you are, and realize that you're only packing a sniper so they all rush you forcing you to bust out the pistol turning it into just another action level... Disappointing but not necessarily bad. And if the last mission on Legendary doesn't give you a hernia you're obviously the Dalai Lama.
About every other level is broken up by driving sections that handle a lot better than they did in any other Halo game. There are a couple of rail shooter Falcon rides and even a space ship level. Even the standard first person shooting is a little better than most games. Although sit and snipe seems to be your best bet to survive a gunfight if that gets too monotonous you can always go balls out and take on a pack of enemies with a needler and melee. So the game-play is varied enough to never be too boring
Anyway the story mode took me about 18 hours on Heroic difficult which is better than any other FPS that came out recently. I'm willing to give it a thumbs up for length alone, but combine that with the game-play is more than just a grind of the same headshots over and over again. (don't get me wrong it still has that. If a Halo game actually pulled a Bioshock and made FPS game-play fun I'd have shit my pants.) I'll give the single player 2 thumbs up!
I don't exactly know how this fits in but there's character customization so you can customize 6 to make him or her look how you want but you need to play for weeks Captain Generic Spartan before you get enough points to make 6 look like you want 6 to look. That's just a fucking pain in the ass to me. So it looses a point for that.
On to the multyplayer.
Since I don't care for multyplayer I'm only going to touch briefly on a few points that I liked. For instance the cooperative Firefight mode. I love the Co-Op game-play because my ?sit and snipe? tactic only works really well if I have a couple ?run and gunners? on the ground soaking up enemy fire. And there's nothing 13 year old douchebags do better than run and gun. So I'm usually very effective in Firefight mode, thus inflating my ego enough to try my hand at the competitive stuff.
That's when I noticed that they let you vote for what kind of game you want to play. That's also when I noticed that the only game anyone wants to play is Infection. So out of about 30 online games I played more than 20 of them were Infection and it got old fast. (In case you don't know Infection is a team game where a team of fast moving zombies with swords kill the slow moving humans with shotguns)
So fuck me I never got to play Oddball (my favorite Halo multyplayer game type) or Head Hunters (a new game type that looked interesting)
The big team stuff is mostly unchanged except for Invasion mode which combines all three big team games into one, and I didn't care too much for it.
Forge mode is still intact and better than ever with the massive forge world that you can go to town on..
but the actual In game maps are more ?meh? then they were in any of the other Halo games.
And that's one thing that Halo always did so well. Remember the Space station level form Halo 1 where you could snipe across the way if you wanted to or take the teleporter and sneak up on the sniper. Could you imagine how fun that would be with the Jet packs from Reach?
So in conclusion with out a doubt this is the best Halo game. This is the only Halo game I'd consider good if you compared it to anything that wasn't a different FPS. Is it perfect? FUCK NO. Is it fun? Fuck yes.
So now there are 3 FPS games I like
Half Life 2
Bioshock 1
Halo Reach.
