Back in 1999, when there was no Gametrailers or
YouTube, avid gamers would rely on a large culture of magazines and demo
discs to learn about the next biggest thing in gaming. Occasionally, we
may have even come across that rarest of occurrences, the gaming
television show. One specific show that I remember with great appeal was
Game Over on the now defunct satellite channel .TV. Hosted by Andy
Collins, the show provided tongue in cheek despatches from the video
gaming world. The Game assassins would review the latest games like
Brunswick Pro Circuit Bowling with much relish, whilst the space girls
focused on tips in space. The show also marked the humble TV origins of a
one Matt Berry, before he went on to greater things, namely Dark Place,
The IT crowd and of course those Volvic Mineral Water adverts starring
Tyrannosaurus Alan. I am going somewhere with this intro... Essentially,
it was on this show, that I was first introduced to a game that was
specifically designed for the Mac by little known developer Bungie. The
demo footage revealed a simple but staggering in concept, a buggy,
complete with realistic suspension being chased by two purple hover
bikes across a strange alien landscape. This was my introduction to
Halo. There was talk from the developers of a ring planet, and open
ended combat, but there was also talk of co-operative gameplay. The
buggy, of which I would come to know of as a Warthog could seat three
players. One would drive, whilst another manned the machine gun turret
and the third rode shotgun. This was enough to send my thirteen year old
mind into overdrive. Co-operative gaming hadn’t come into the
mainstream as of yet. We had our split screen Goldeneye, our two player
Machine Hunter or Streets of Rage, we may have even been lucky enough to
play Counterstrike on a decent connection but the point is,
co-operative gaming just didn’t exist as it does today, but it was built
into Halo from day one.
I quickly remembered the
names Halo and Bungie, to the point I even played Oni, Bungie’s
pre-Halo game, a decent enough brawler with a manga art style and a
mechanic involving performance enhancing drugs. I watched the
development of Halo closely, as it went from a third person shooter for
the Mac to first person shooter as the secret weapon behind Microsoft’s
new gaming platform The Xbox, the game that was now called Halo: Combat
Evolved. I then got an xbox with a copy of Halo, and the rest is
history. What I am trying to say is that I am a fan of Halo. I had
always been a fan of first person shooters, from Doom to Unreal
Tournament, to Half-Life and Perfect Dark, but what Halo did was open
the doors and define how first person shooters should be played. With
friends. Halo became the reason to buy an xbox, to have 16 player LAN
parties. To say Halo broke new ground is an understatement. Halo brought
console based first person shooters into vogue, effectively opening up
the floodgates. Before Halo, there was only Goldeneye on the N64. There
was of course the brilliant Perfect Dark, but nobody brought it, despite
it being ahead of the times. Elsewhere what was there? Medal of Honour?
Red Faction? If there was no Halo, there would probably be no Call of
Duty and certainly no Modern Warfare 2 generating over a billion dollars
in sales, as of now the most profitable entertainment event in history.
But certainly, Halo did prove that first person shooters could thrive
away from the mouse and keyboard and into the more profitable arena of
console gaming. It is for this reason that Halo is both loved and hated
so passionately.
Halo: Reach is Bungie’s fifth
and final Halo game before they go off to spend the next ten years in
bed with Activision developing this new supposedly ground breaking IP.
Based on the Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund, which was initially written
as a prequel to the original game, Reach effectively brings the
franchise full circle on itself. Reach itself is a planet, where a
fairly large human colony has been based. The planet is also home to the
Spartan super soldier program, of which the series’ iconic Master Chief
was spawned. The whole marketing strategy behind Reach has been based
on the notion that the player already knows what is going to happen to
the planet, even if they are unaware of the surrounding fiction. For
those who are unaware, Reach is doomed, attacked and glassed by the
alien forces of the Covenant. At the start of the original Halo, the
Pillar of Autumn, the ship that houses Master Chief and Cortanna, makes a
blind jump into slip space after escaping Reach. It is here that they
miraculously come across the Halo ring world which kicks off the
trilogy.
Halo: Reach has you play as a new
recruit to Noble team, a team of Spartans who are supposed to precursor
the master chief. Like the Master Chief and the Rookie from last year’s
ODST you are a faceless member known only as Noble Six. The strength of
the character is that he is entirely of the player’s own creation. The
game grants a plethora of armour that you can customise your super
soldier with. You unlock new variants as you progress throughout the
game, these variants are completely cosmetic and do not affect the way
you play the game but they emphasise the connection of the player to the
character. You take your character as you initially begin to
investigate a distress call from a remote farming location, where it
quickly becomes apparent that the planet has been invaded by Covenant
forces. What is immediately clear, is a darker more brooding atmosphere,
the Halo trilogy feels like a lucid dream in comparison. That said, the
game progresses much in the way previous Halos have, you have vague
open world levels where you may have a warthog. Other levels will give
you a tank, whilst others will encourage flight.
The
campaign is excellent in my opinion, probably the best of the series.
Despite being of similar length to previous games, the campaign suffers
very little down time. Halo 2 and 3 specifically suffered from grind.
Piloting a tank is usually fun for the first time but a second time it
starts to feel a little stale. In reach, the tank is only limited to one
level, which is just about right. The absence of the flood is
definitely to the campaign’s benefit as well. Fighting the Covenant has
always been the best part of the halo campaign and it is certainly never
been better until Reach. The AI has improved and the covenant are once
again a threatening prescence. The return of the elites is particularly a
welcome re-addition to the series, after suffering the Brutes since the
third act of Halo 2. Though the brutes do appear midway through the
game, they are nowhere near as tough as the revamped elites, who are,
through lack of a better word, ‘proper bastards’. When I first played
through the game, I played on heroic difficulty and was quickly cut down
upon first encountering the elites on the first level. When the tougher
elites are around, you are constantly reaching for the plasma/UNSC
pistol combo to despatch them before they swamp you. It gives the alien
menace a different energy, they no longer speak in English, grunts no
longer run away from you screaming, ‘little people first’. The combat is
much tighter, when you are on foot, the holy trinity of gun, grenade
and melee works as well as it ever has. There are fewer weapons than
other shooters, but every weapon has a particular use. The reworked
battle rifle, the DMR is a favourite of mine, but I always find keeping
my assault rifle in support in case I need to pepper large swarms of
enemies.
The fifth mission is a particular
favourite. It begins with you on foot, steamrolling covenant forces
across a beach until you get to the launch site, where you begin the
much publicised ‘space’ part in which you board a space combat craft and
jet up into the planet’s upper orbit. The combat section essentially
plays like Lylatt Wars or the space sections in Battlefront 2 as you
swat banshees and the shielded seraphs. There is a brief cut-scene in
which human forces prepare their next offensive against the covenant,
whilst huge explosions silently engulf the planet’s surface like ripples
in water, all to the sound of Martin O’Donnell’s majestic score. This
would not be a proper review, if I didn’t pay homage to the score,
though much of the magic of Halo lies in the music, like the greatest
space operas, lies in Martin O’Donnell’s compositions. The space combat
is kept quite brief, never outstaying its welcome but leaving a little
wanting. The day when multiplayer incorporates space combat with a
simultaneous ground battle is the day you get one step closer to making
the greatest Star Wars game ever. If Bungie had incorporated this into
multiplayer then they may have just revolutionised the genre once again,
but maybe this idea is too ambitious for this current generation of
consoles. Going back to the level, it progresses with you boarding a
covenant space craft in zero gravity, your bullets muffled by the vacuum
of space. With the atmosphere that very much conveys the feel of the
‘belly of the beast level’ from the original Halo you fight your way
through the corridors of the space craft until you reach the control
room, before escaping the ship before it all goes up in a glorious
explosion.
The Fall of Reach is undoubtedly a
catchy title for a book, but is it a good narrative for a game? How can a
genre like the first person shooter, which essentially relies on
conveying the fantasy of empowerment over hordes of enemies, tell the
story of mass genocide? Where not even your own character makes it out
alive no less. It is an intriguing theme to be sure and it is certainly
not the first game to try to grapple with this concept. The modern
warfare series has frequently done this, probably most effectively in
COD4, when you control a US marine as he staggers through a silenced
warzone under the shadow of a mushroom cloud, doomed. In Reach, you
finish the campaign, successfully completing your mission and all that
stops you from the end credits is a firefight section. The atmosphere is
dusty and covenant drop ships roam the skies like sharks at feeding
time. As you take damage, your visor cracks and splinters until finally
you are beaten. Though it does not prevent you from trying to survive
the onslaught, just to see whether you can survive Reach, or see that
final cutscene when your character walks off into the sunset, alive to
fight another day. It was the only way to finish the game really, but
compared to say Modern Warfare, where you were constantly dying as you
were running down that frigging hill to get to the helicopter whereupon
the narrative kills you anyway. Reach was a lot more satisfying, but I
think it comes down to mood.
Mood is what
elevates Halo over other first person shooters and it is something that
only real Halo fans can see. There has always been a sense in Halo that
you are exploring and fighting in a real world, more so in Reach, where
Bungie have spent more time on level design to create a believable
world. A common criticism of the Halo trilogy was that it did not have
much variety in its indoor sections, which were essentially the same
maps stuck together. Conflict in Halo, always made you feel you were
part of something big. Enemies don’t just spawn into the map, they are
usually dropped in via drop ships. They feel as if they are part of a
larger machine; with you, the player, in the position of antagonist. I
like the Call of Duty games, don’t get me wrong. But I do feel that Halo
has something special. Whereas Call of Duty offers a shooter experience
that is grounded in realism and tighter shooting mechanics, the joy of
Halo multiplayer has always been in the variables. It is about walking
into a man cannon at just the right time when you hijack a marauding
banshee in midair. It is about tagging that bastard with the awesome
helmet, ending his spree in a phenomenally cathartic blue explosion. It
is about rocket firefight, where you gleefully jetpack over a hordes of
grunts with unlimited ammo. It is about careering through the campaign
in a warthog with your friends, feeling invincible. This is part of the
reason why Bungie implemented the theatre section to the game, so that
you could capture these monumental moments, but it was also to display
the sheer amount of activity that was going on at one time, whilst you
were seeking to hi-jack that ghost. In Halo 3 for example, whilst you
were tackling the scarab, you could use theatre to focus on one of the
hovering pelicans, you can see the soldiers in its hold. You could see
allied AI picking targets. With Halo, there is little in the sense of
smoke and mirrors, that is rife in so many other video games, the battle
is all there to be displayed, scrutinised from every angle it is as if
Bungie dare you to attempt to catch their engine out.
I haven’t even begun to review the other components of the game. The
multiplayer, the firefight modes, the challenge structure or even Forge
World, which now allows players to create their own maps. Forgeworld is
effectively a gigantic map, a playground where you can spawn in various
items and objects, creating your own structures for multiplayer. The
hardened PC player is likely to guffaw at this mode in comparison to
modding culture that surrounds titles like Half-Life, but it is still
there, should players want to milk more out of their game. Judging what
has been accomplished with Forge in Halo 3, we are going to be seeing
all manner of ingeniously made structures. If I may make one request, a
massive Mad Max style Thunder Dome, with interlinking raceways for use
of Mongoose.
After the understated release of
Halo 3 ODST last year, Reach is a return to form for the franchise. It
does not really do anything new with the franchise it is an accumulation
and a perfecting of everything that has made the franchise great over
the last nine years. There are a few negatives, the frame rate chugs at
times when things get extra chaotic and the checkpoint system can be a
little frustrating. Regardless, these aren’t even scratches in the
game’s reputation. It is a complete package, the campaign is endlessly
replayable, designed with a new found affinity for four player co-op,
when that fails, the multiplayer suite will have players playing for
years to come. Halo and the master chief are sure to return to us in
some form. Microsoft will be sure of that. Whether it will be as good
without Bungie is another matter.
