In the middle of a war, it is said the only person you can trust is the person by your side. Halo Reach taught me that trusting the person by your side is only a good idea if they’re not AI – within 20 minutes of coming in contact with a vehicle, my AI companion had managed to, in order, take a 2 minute detour straight towards the middle of nowhere (though, to be fair, I wouldn’t have known which way to go either since the game’s rarely clear about it), get stuck between rocks in 10cm deep water, and park our military issue buggy up a tree.
One can only assume that she had taken the moment to reach for the sick bag because the tree she nailed our Warthog to had been smeared into some semblance of a watercolour painting by the nauseating motion blur. Of course, it would be a really gorgeous watercolour painting, with all the spectacle and colour that’s expected from a Halo game, even when it occasionally pushes its luck – and the Xbox hardware – a little too far, forgoing its usual buoyant elegance by degrading into a choppy 20-frame-per-second slideshow.
They say first impressions last, and my first hour with Halo Reach is most of what I remember when I think back of my time spent with the game: Mawkish cutscenes and insincere dialogue, a George Lucas-inspired pretentious plot presentation, unforgivable frame dropping in the very first cutscene, tons of ghosting artifacts caused by its pseudo-anti-aliasing (the cause of all that motion blur), and another one of Marty O’Donnell’s absolutely fantastic musical scores.
But I’m too harsh. The above misrepresentation is only so that I could get all the bad stuff out of the way at the start. In all objective honestly, Halo Reach is actually as good as a Halo game has ever been. The less-than-stellar opening was quickly remedied when I played the game as it was intended: in multiplayer.
And with the inclusion of ODST’s Firefight mode (now configurable to an almost ludicrous degree) and the game’s most obvious Halo-formula change, the armour abilities, Reach becomes one of the most uncomplicated, simply entertaining multiplayer experiences. The process of finding and joining games of any type is painless and nearly immediate. The matchmaking and other networking systems are massively improved over previous iterations, to a degree that future developers will likely look to Reach for inspiration and ideas.
Halo’s single greatest strength, however, is in its completeness. The video game industry is full of projects that purportedly cost millions of dollars and half as much in man-hours to produce. Reach bulges with so much polish, attention to detail and simple quality that it leaks that money out at the seams. Everything down to the incredibly well-designed menu interface was built so that getting into a game, with friends, is as easy as it could possibly be; it’s all so slick you could gel your hair with it. If that’s your thing. We won’t judge.
It’s a game for the fans, and even if that means it’s not going to make any new ones, it’ll certainly be vying with Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2 for the podium spot of Xbox LIVE’s most-played list. You can’t really ask more of this game than what it so gracefully delivers.
Oh, and the Grunts don’t talk. This made me sad.
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