=The Taco of Choco
Halo Reach is Bungie’s latest and last halo game. After this, Halo is being run by 343, so Bungie decided to go all out with Reach. It contains several game modes, including Campaign, Multiplayer, Firefight, Custom, and Forge. I shall try and devote a paragraph to each.
The Campaign is a prequel to Halo 1 (there are quite a few Easter eggs referring to the original games). In it, you take the place of Noble Six, the elite Noble team’s newest and most promising member. The game starts out when your team goes to investigate rebel attacks, only to find out that they were instigated by the Covenant, an alien race hell bent on destroying Earth, by eliminating the planet Reach first. Your force eliminates the small teams quickly, but the Covenant begin to grow in numbers, soon bringing in vehicles and even anti aircraft guns. As your team tries to eliminate the growing threat, they begin to realize they are far outnumbered, and one by one, they sacrifice their lives to take out as many of them as possible. Reach is soon abandoned, and you are tasked with protecting Reach’s last hope, ancient artificial intelligence called Cortana. You eventually fulfill your mission, with almost every single member of your team killed. You deliver Cortana into good hands, and are then abandoned on Reach, where you singlehandedly must fight millions of Covenant. The game ends with a survival round, where you are trapped in a small base with floods of aliens coming in to murder you. You die heroically, and it shows your broken helmet returned to earth as the final scene.
Down to Campaign gameplay, each level is based with a specific game style in mind, e.g. sniping level, vehicle level, but due to the variety of weapons, each level can be completed with practically any set of weapons. You can choose to use the rocket launchers and assault rifles they give you, or you can sneak up onto an enemy tank and steal it. Enemies also come in multiple varieties. There are the stupid grunts, fast skirmishers, shielded jackals, powerful elites, and several other species, each with certain weaknesses and weapon sets. Difficulty wise, one can play this game on the easy or normal setting and beat each level in a matter of minutes, or it can be attempted on legendary for someone who desires a real challenge. If you’re suicidal like I am, you can turn on “Skulls” which make the game almost impossible, to the point where I’ve put almost three hours into a single level. I would buy this game for just the campaign by itself, it’s so good. But Bungie didn’t stop with just a fantastic campaign.
Matchmaking is a massive online FPS arena, where you and your team can eliminate players and score objectives, or you can be a lone wolf and eliminate everyone, gladiator style. There are several game modes, ranging from four to sixteen players. They are categorized under Slayer, Objective, and Special, which includes game like Living Dead and Swat. A personal favorite of mine is Invasion, which reminds of a campaign mission with the enemies being live people. The game play is relatively difficult, because unlike it’s counterpart COD, it take more than two seconds to kill someone with the regular weapon. Where it lacks the number of guns COD has, it makes up in variety. No two weapons are the same, and when used correctly all can be extremely devastating. And unlike CoD, there are drivable vehicles, adding another element to the game play. Team work is required for almost every game type, so players must work together to kill their opponents and score their objectives. Overall, it’s absolutely fantastic, but I admit that some of the guns are too powerful and need to be nerfed.
Firefight is a survival game type, where hordes of enemies from the campaign are spawned and a single player or group of people have to fight a select number of waves until they, or the hordes of enemies, run out of lives. When playing skillfully and cautiously, a single player can survive the game without dying a single time, or a group of friends can grab power weapons and just screw around for fun. Custom is exactly what it sounds like. A group of friends can fight each other locally or on Xbox live, on whatever maps and game types they choose. Forge is definitely one of the highlights of Halo: Reach. One can make maps of their own, using a set of hundreds of different weapons and platforms on an insanely massive landscape.
Overall, the game is fantastic, with so many game types and options that I have never gotten bored with it. The game is not for everyone, but if you want to know about how many game play hours you can get out of it, some of my friends have logged in a total of forty days worth of game play. I myself have only logged in about ten, but that’s impressive. Two hundred and forty hours, more than I’ve spent on the rest of my games combined. I would rate this game a 9.7, and the only reason I took three tenths of a point off was because there are several people who abuse the multiplayer, doing things like betraying their teammates and modding.
