Read the title. A review of Halo: Reach a month and a half after it was released.
I'm not exactly sure why I'm doing this. I think it's because I'm fucking sick of games doing this. Perhaps I'll get a bit into the review before I start explaining what I find wrong with it. So.
I could dedicated numerous sections detailing what I think about the presentation, graphics, sound, and all that. I don't feel like sitting here for half an hour writing about boring stuff so I'll sum it up:
The game looks and sounds great. It's a Halo game; what else would you expect?
Okay. We good? Cool. Now onto the meat of any review: the gameplay, features, campaign/multiplayer and how they work together.
Let me first start out by saying that I am extremely disappointed with this game. Essentially, Bungie had about a million ways they could improve on Halo 3 and a million ways they could fuck it up. It seems they took every moment they could to fuck something up. I'm not really sure where to start with this, so maybe I'll just go with what is nearest and dearest to my heart: Forge.
By all means, H:R Forge is a vast improvement over H3. The problem is, it's not even close to as much of an improvement it should be. Rotation snaps, coordinates and phasing is great and all, but there are two key problem: We're still not given enough pieces to work with and, even more stupidly, pieces that were so helpful in the original Forge were removed (namely, pallets, movable crates, destructible grav lifts and other such scenery pieces). The pieces we have, while certainly more useful in most situations, have their own flaws. First, everything is grey. Second, there's hundreds, if not thousands of polygons just for a single 1x1x1 box, which seriously fucks with the frame rate. Perhaps if you simplified the shapes and let us adjust the color of the object we could make maps that actually look somewhat interesting.
Also, fuck Forge World. Unless you feel like making yet another floating castle in the sky or two bases facing each other with a centerpiece, your building options are sorely limited by an unnecessarily restrictive template.
Sandbox was way cooler. Better aesthetics, skybox kicked ass and nothing beat blocking of the guarding turrets and creating maps that implemented the sand dunes to their fullest extent.
I figure I'll save the juiciest for last (that being multiplayer) and go into campaign from here.
In a nutshell: Characters are uninteresting, the missions still aren't that fun (note that the last time I found myself replaying any Halo game's single player just for enjoyment was back with Halo 2) and, for any hardcore Halo fan (such as myself), the story fucks up absolutely everything you thought you knew.
Reach was a great idea. I understand, Bungie, why you would want to set a game there. But there were so many different ways you could have done it that wouldn't have absolutely fucked up the timeline.
Time to lay the smackdown on matchmaking.
First off, I want to punch whoever the fucker was that decided adding recoil was a good idea.\
Here's a quick little lecture on how to approach realism in a game: Either you A) go for unrealism and you avoid adding realistic factors or B) go for realism and avoid adding unrealistic factors.
"In that case, how did Bungie do with this idea?" you may ask.
Well, in the case of recoil, they were obviously upping the realism. But then they did the most absolutely ass backwards thinking possible: You're accuracy decreases when you fire, but you could be jumping off a cliff or running or jiggling back and forth like a crack whore about to OD and be shooting just as accurately as someone crouching behind a wall from a steady position trying to shoot the asshole bunny hopping like a ************.
"And this a problem why, exactly?" you may further ask.
Because this encourages people to be as annoying as possible.
Lets say I'm playing some Team Swat and I'm shooting this guy in the back. I've shot him a couple times already and all my shots are missing because of the recoil. But now, this guy, who has been shot numerous times, suddenly whips around and plants a perfect headshot because he is currently not recovering from recoil despite the fact I just shot this ************ through several major organs. If you ever play Swat, you know what I'm talking about.
Case in point, if you're going to make some of it realistic, make the rest of that system realistic as well.
Remember what I was saying about there being a million ways to easily fuck this up? This was one of those. There was literally nothing wrong with the system before. For reasons I can't explain, they fucked it up. They added an accuracy penalty for one thing but did not add a penalty for others.
The solution? Add accuracy penalties for movement/getting shot/whatever or get rid of recoil. And because this is Halo and not ArmA, I would prefer the latter.
Here's a quick list of things they fucked up that they really shouldn't have fucked up:
- Elites never win Invasion Slayer.
- Somehow, someway, Blue team never wins on Hemorrhage. Especially on Team Snipers.
- Fuck the falcon. Hornet all the way. Or atleast give us the option of having passenger only seats, not turrets.
- I don't even know how, but they fucked up infection. Maybe if they replace evade (AKA INSTANT TELEPORT SPELL) with sprint it might be okay.
- Magnums are still too damn powerful to be considered "secondary weapons". Am I the only one that actually liked the Halo 2 magnums?
Etc
I suppose I'm beating a dead horse, here, because I know Bungie probably won't change any of these.
But fuck it, I'm still pissed because half an hour ago I was blue team playing team snipers on Hemorrhage, crouching on a cliff from a perfect vantage point trying to snipe some fucking Colonel grade 3 that was jiggling back and forth like a crack whore about to OD that whipped his aim in my general direction and headshot me.
TL;DR 9/10 THE GAME IS ONLY FUN WHEN YOU AREN'T PLAYING SERIOUSLY. WHICH IS ONLY IN CUSTOM GAMES. WHICH IS NEVER.
I'm not exactly sure why I'm doing this. I think it's because I'm fucking sick of games doing this. Perhaps I'll get a bit into the review before I start explaining what I find wrong with it. So.
I could dedicated numerous sections detailing what I think about the presentation, graphics, sound, and all that. I don't feel like sitting here for half an hour writing about boring stuff so I'll sum it up:
The game looks and sounds great. It's a Halo game; what else would you expect?
Okay. We good? Cool. Now onto the meat of any review: the gameplay, features, campaign/multiplayer and how they work together.
Let me first start out by saying that I am extremely disappointed with this game. Essentially, Bungie had about a million ways they could improve on Halo 3 and a million ways they could fuck it up. It seems they took every moment they could to fuck something up. I'm not really sure where to start with this, so maybe I'll just go with what is nearest and dearest to my heart: Forge.
By all means, H:R Forge is a vast improvement over H3. The problem is, it's not even close to as much of an improvement it should be. Rotation snaps, coordinates and phasing is great and all, but there are two key problem: We're still not given enough pieces to work with and, even more stupidly, pieces that were so helpful in the original Forge were removed (namely, pallets, movable crates, destructible grav lifts and other such scenery pieces). The pieces we have, while certainly more useful in most situations, have their own flaws. First, everything is grey. Second, there's hundreds, if not thousands of polygons just for a single 1x1x1 box, which seriously fucks with the frame rate. Perhaps if you simplified the shapes and let us adjust the color of the object we could make maps that actually look somewhat interesting.
Also, fuck Forge World. Unless you feel like making yet another floating castle in the sky or two bases facing each other with a centerpiece, your building options are sorely limited by an unnecessarily restrictive template.
Sandbox was way cooler. Better aesthetics, skybox kicked ass and nothing beat blocking of the guarding turrets and creating maps that implemented the sand dunes to their fullest extent.
I figure I'll save the juiciest for last (that being multiplayer) and go into campaign from here.
In a nutshell: Characters are uninteresting, the missions still aren't that fun (note that the last time I found myself replaying any Halo game's single player just for enjoyment was back with Halo 2) and, for any hardcore Halo fan (such as myself), the story fucks up absolutely everything you thought you knew.
Reach was a great idea. I understand, Bungie, why you would want to set a game there. But there were so many different ways you could have done it that wouldn't have absolutely fucked up the timeline.
Time to lay the smackdown on matchmaking.
First off, I want to punch whoever the fucker was that decided adding recoil was a good idea.\
Here's a quick little lecture on how to approach realism in a game: Either you A) go for unrealism and you avoid adding realistic factors or B) go for realism and avoid adding unrealistic factors.
"In that case, how did Bungie do with this idea?" you may ask.
Well, in the case of recoil, they were obviously upping the realism. But then they did the most absolutely ass backwards thinking possible: You're accuracy decreases when you fire, but you could be jumping off a cliff or running or jiggling back and forth like a crack whore about to OD and be shooting just as accurately as someone crouching behind a wall from a steady position trying to shoot the asshole bunny hopping like a ************.
"And this a problem why, exactly?" you may further ask.
Because this encourages people to be as annoying as possible.
Lets say I'm playing some Team Swat and I'm shooting this guy in the back. I've shot him a couple times already and all my shots are missing because of the recoil. But now, this guy, who has been shot numerous times, suddenly whips around and plants a perfect headshot because he is currently not recovering from recoil despite the fact I just shot this ************ through several major organs. If you ever play Swat, you know what I'm talking about.
Case in point, if you're going to make some of it realistic, make the rest of that system realistic as well.
Remember what I was saying about there being a million ways to easily fuck this up? This was one of those. There was literally nothing wrong with the system before. For reasons I can't explain, they fucked it up. They added an accuracy penalty for one thing but did not add a penalty for others.
The solution? Add accuracy penalties for movement/getting shot/whatever or get rid of recoil. And because this is Halo and not ArmA, I would prefer the latter.
Here's a quick list of things they fucked up that they really shouldn't have fucked up:
- Elites never win Invasion Slayer.
- Somehow, someway, Blue team never wins on Hemorrhage. Especially on Team Snipers.
- Fuck the falcon. Hornet all the way. Or atleast give us the option of having passenger only seats, not turrets.
- I don't even know how, but they fucked up infection. Maybe if they replace evade (AKA INSTANT TELEPORT SPELL) with sprint it might be okay.
- Magnums are still too damn powerful to be considered "secondary weapons". Am I the only one that actually liked the Halo 2 magnums?
Etc
I suppose I'm beating a dead horse, here, because I know Bungie probably won't change any of these.
But fuck it, I'm still pissed because half an hour ago I was blue team playing team snipers on Hemorrhage, crouching on a cliff from a perfect vantage point trying to snipe some fucking Colonel grade 3 that was jiggling back and forth like a crack whore about to OD that whipped his aim in my general direction and headshot me.
TL;DR 9/10 THE GAME IS ONLY FUN WHEN YOU AREN'T PLAYING SERIOUSLY. WHICH IS ONLY IN CUSTOM GAMES. WHICH IS NEVER.
