The Good
- Excellent, refined gameplay. The enemy shielding makes the strategy more interesting. You can't just run and gun. Often you'll lower an enemy's shield with one weapon and finish them off with another one. You are also rewarded with cool assassinations if you can sneak up on an enemy.
- If you're into multiplayer this one is a no-brainer. Of course you have the standard multiplayer modes, but you've also got Firefight, a co-op mode where you and some buddies take on waves upon waves of enemies. It's extremely customizable, so you can tailor it to play exactly how you want. The co-op campaign feature is nice as well. Then there is the forge, which I haven't tried yet, but apparently you and some friends and play, edit and tweak maps with your friends and even upload what you create. That is certainly a nice touch that keeps things fresh. Bungie also allows you to filter out the kinds of players that you don't want to play with, which is quite nice. If you don't want to chat you can select an option that only seeks players that have the same desire. If you just want to have a good time and aren't out to win, that's an option, too. Although, if you are too picky it might be hard to find a game.
- The world looks excellent. There are nice variations of scenery. Some locations are vibrant and full of color and others are full of death and destruction in the form of dull colors and burning cities. You get a little of everything here.
- Some nice mission design in the campaign helps to keep things exciting. There is good mix of vehicle and standard shooter missions. Many of the missions are a combination of the two and it flows pretty seamlessly.
- Like Red Faction Guerilla you have a variety of packs available that give you special skills. Some of these packs include a jet pack, a drop shield, sprint capability, holographic decoys, and others.
The Bad
- The disproportionate amount of ammo and grenades that the Covenant has, especially when you are playing a solo campaign on anything above normal difficulty means that you will die a lot in some areas, and that can be quite frustrating. Fortunately there are usually ammo lockers around, so you can reload when you runout. A lot of those trouble spots come down to trial and error and sometimes luck. I'm sure playing through the campaign with friends is a big help.
- The friendly AI is pretty worthless a lot of the time. The most your squad members do a lot of the time is draw some of the enemy fire long enough to let you sneak around. But most of the time, they charge in guns blazing and boom, they're dead. Plus, they are pretty bad at driving vehicles and they get stuck quite frequently.
- The story itself isn't really all that compelling. It's pretty standard fare here, and not as interesting as either of the first two Halo titles. I never played Halo 3 or ODST, so I'm not sure about the storyline there. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just seems like something is missing. Like they needed a bit more time to develop a more solid story with more interesting characters. It has a few good moments, though, and it's definitely worth staying through to the end of the credits as that is its best moment. Although, the last shot is nearly ruined by a pretty bad voiceover. It's a pretty short campaign, too. I think I clocked in at around 9 or 10 hours. Story complaints aside, it moves at a good pace.
The Mediocre
- As I said, I think the world, looks great, but there are definitely some frame rate issues in a lot of the cutscenes.
- Overall, enemy AI is pretty good. They come after you and are pretty relentless. Though, there quite a few spots where an enemy will follow you only so far and then he'll just kind of stop and hang out until you reenter his line of sight. It really pulls you out of the moment when this happens and it makes me wonder if they just needed a little extra time in the testing process. It doesn't take away too much from the experience, though.
- The checkpoint system can be quite handy for saving progress as you move around a level, but I find that every once in a while it'll save just as you get into a bind where you only have 3 bullets left and a huge shielded brute nearby. So you take him on and die. Now, Instead of having an option of going back to a previous checkpoint, it'll automatically throw you back into that 3-bullet scenario and the only way to undo it is to start the mission over completely from the beginning which is frustrating in the longer missions.
- The warthog controls just don't work all the well for me. I have a hard time steering and I find them unresponsive. However, all of the other vehicles in the game handle quite nicely.
All in all, I think Halo Reach is a great game that you'll get a lot of enjoyment out of if you are into shooters that have a heavy focus on multiplayer. It's up there with the best of them in that regard. However, some of the technical drawbacks and uneven AI and lackluster story keep it from being a masterpiece.