Are they standing on the sun?

Understand, I just wrote a two page article listing all of my problems with Halo: Reach, but my inability to click the “save” icon on the top of the page cost me everything. I’m now angry, a little drunk (as I was drinking while I wrote it) and am having to redo it. Now, I didn’t like the game, so the anger wont hurt the rewrite. I also found the game to be so dull that I drank through the second half so (come to think of it) the drinking part shouldn’t really hurt the review either. Okay, I’m gonna try and list why I didn’t like the game in a few, easy to read paragraphs.

BE WARNED!  SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

First and foremost is Noble Team. This is your team of Spartans that are your generic Super Soldiers. They’re big and scary. They’ve got colored armour and cooler weapons and are walking machines of death. The biggest problem…..THEY TOOK OFF THEIR FUCKING HELMETS!!!!

I'm sure the bright armour is great for blending in.

Master Chief was seven feet or rage-fueled armour that wanted only to take a plasma-grenade and stuff it up a grunts ass just to see if he could. Here, you’ve a team of Spartans that are basically just humans in pretty armour. By removing their helmets, they showed that a Spartan is just a well-trained man (or woman) and that, vicariously, Master Chief was the same. It wasn’t until he’d almost single-handedly destroyed an Intergalactic Army of combined Alien Races that the Chief removed his helmet and was called by his birth name. Here, we’re given all of this up front. This was done in an attempt to make me care about them when they die, but that didn’t happen at all. They were cartoons and caracatures, there was nothing human about them. The writing seemed to have been stolen from some Halo Fan Fiction, only with the Alien Rape scene cut out.

This leads me to the plot of the game. It’s a lot of “drive here, shoot this.” Every so often they’d mix it up with “drive here, shoot this, press/activate this button”. It gets pretty old. The levels are very pretty, much prettier than the Halo’s 1-3, but they still look like a lot of the levels from earlier in the game series. I don’t know how often I felt the “been here, done that” with a level design or mission structure. The enemy AI is better (although, the friendly AI was as useless as a penguin with down-syndrome who only waddles to his left), but it doesn’t make things any more fun. They did add a space flight level that was new to the series, unfortunately it was generic and short. Fly around, shoot “bullets and rockets” at the bad-guys, invade their space. I’ve done this a hundred times in other games, it wasn’t needed here.

Then their was the deaths of your team. They die while either sacrificing themselves for the team, or because they forget that their armour has shields when a sniper decides to take a pop-shot at them. Either way, the deaths are unremarkable. It reminded me of the deaths of all of the Jedi in Episode 3 of the Star Wars Prequels.  I know that these are special beings, and I know that their deaths are supposed to be moving, but I just found myself not giving a shit.

I have many fond memories of Halo’ 1-3 that are moving and mind blowing. The first time I met the Flood. The betrayal of the Guilty Spark. My losing Cortana and desire to get her back. The Arbiter and I working together. These are moments that were moving and genuine to the story. In this game, there is only one time that even comes close, and I’m reaching (pun intended) at that. It’s a mission called “Survive” and it occurs after the credits. When the most memerable part of your game occurs when it’s over, there is something really wrong.

Halo Jumping gets taken to all new heights

Finally, my complaints with the multi-player. The maps are way too big. There is not intimacy of battle. Sure you can customize your armour with earned credits, and you can use new Armour Abilities to customize your game-style, but when you spend half your time running to find an opponent, it’s just not fun.  Me and a few friends played on the “Blood Gulch” remake in a team slayer game that was four verses four. What we got was a game that times out because we’d run around for almost 20 seconds at a time just looking for someone. We then went to a team game that had a total of 16 players. More people on a map that size should fix that problem. Instead they doubles the players and the map size. It was the same damn problem. The only time it seemed close to reasonable was when we played “free for all” games, and that was just a hodge-podge of watching people battle it out, then picking them off from a distance while their shields are weak. Not really fun, but a sound stratagy. This, combined with the loss of Duel-Wielded weapons made for a multi-player experience that was average at best.

The only game type that could be called fun, is the “Firefight” mode. This is where you and a team take on wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemies. They had this in Halo: ODST and just about every multi-playing shooter has this in one fashion or another since Gears of War 2. It’s fun, but it’s not ground-breaking either.

If you love the Halo-verse, you’ll love this game. If you think the previous gameswere pretty good, you’ll find this underwhelming. It’s wasn’t a horrible game, but for it being the cumulation of a series, it was indeed a letdown. As far as I’m concerned, this series ended with Halo 3. I will deny the existence of Halo: Reach, like I do “Rocky 5” and the “Star Wars Prequels”. They weren’t the worst things in existence, but compared to what had come before it, they could have been.

Halo: Reach gets a 3/5 ships.