Halo Reach
- Meet Noble Team. For the first time, players will fight alongside a squad of iconic Spartan soldiers, each with deadly talents as unique as their individual personalities and customized gear
- An intense campaign. Live the events that set the stage for the Halo trilogy as the UNSC and Covenant clash at the height of their military power
- Stunning technical advancements. Halo: Reach takes a massive leap forward through all-new engine technology designed to take full advantage of next-generation graphics, audio, special effects, AI and animation
- The definitive multiplayer experience. Halo: Reach builds on the success of its predecessors, setting a new standard for competitive gameplay, customization, variety and community integration
- Unparalleled feature suite. Halo: Reach expands on the industry-leading suite of features found in Halo 3, including four-player cooperative
HALO Reach (REPLENISHMENT-NO TOKEN)
List Price: $ 39.99
Price: $ 26.00
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Anyone skipping Reach for being “just another Halo” is missing out on a great game,
Skipping out on this game is doing yourself a disservice if you were a former HALO fan. I hadn’t played Halo 3 in months because I was bored with it. There’s a lot of content here and I’m glad to say this game is worth every penny of $60 and I’ve been very entertained. Yes, it’s still Halo and “more of the same”, but they’ve changed enough about it to make a new Halo experience, not just another rehash. ODST was a joke of a game compared to Reach and having owned it almost made me skip out on Reach.
The campaign spoilers will go at the bottom of the review.
I’ll put in some of the major stuff I’ve noticed but I’m sure I’ll miss a lot.
There’s a new graphics engine and the graphics in the game are superior to any other 4 player split screen game I’ve played, and I make a special effort to purchase as many of them as I can. The graphics are certainly not Killzone 2 level, but very high quality. MUCH better than Halo 3. I was very pleased when I played the BETA that the new engine still plays in HD when doing split-screen and that it’s split horizontally. The blood and shield effects are very well done. You have a night vision mode instead of a flashlight now, similar to ODST. The sound effects are pretty darn good. They finally made the sound of a grenade somewhat deafening. The music, as usual, is very well done and adds a lot to the experience.
The new engineering packs have really added to the game and are what really makes Reach a different experience. Your options that you’ll find in the campaign are sprint, hologram, bubble shield(that also heals you), cloaking that doesn’t work well if you’re moving quickly, what I’d call an ostrich or turtle shield that turns you invincible but immobile and unable to attack and a jetpack. My personal favorites are the bubble shield and the hologram. The Covenant have a roll instead of a sprint in multiplayer.
The enemies are much more mobile and capable of dodging than they were in the past. I beat it on heroic and found the game to be more difficult than the past games, but certainly manageable. The Covenant have engineering packs too. They use the roll very well. There are a couple of new enemies/variations that make the game a little more diverse, but for the most part you’ve encountered most of them before.
There are new weapons. There is no dual wielding. Both factions have weapons that are very similar now, I suppose it made balancing the game easy. All the weapons seem more effective than they were in the past (probably explains why there is no dual-wielding). The particle beam gun is pretty neat as is the covenant grenade launcher. The rocket launcher can lock onto vehicles. There are some of the old goodies, but there’s a new covenant needler battle rifle, a covenant multi-lock plasma/rocket launcher and a couple of other new guns. The battle rifle is single fire instead of burst. There’s the awesome pistol from the original Halo. There are two animations in how you melee something when you’re holding a weapon. You can also backstab/knife someone now and it shows a little cinematic of you letting them have it instead of them just dying in with an ordinary hit.
There’s a health-bar under your shields like HALO 1. There’s no red screen when you’re injured either, just a red bar. This is a huge plus for me. It’s the perfect system.
Customizable characters are a great addition. You get credits for every kill you make, and you can use those credits to make your character look different. New helmets, new kneepads, new add-ons etc. It’s a great way to make people feel like they have a real in-game Avatar. As far as I know there are no benefits combat-wise to having new armor, it’s just visual. This is how I like it. In Call of Duty games you have to play the game for quite a while to unlock all the weapons and upgrades and it gives experienced players an unfair advantage online. In Reach you should always have a level playing field, you’ll just look spiffy if you play a lot. Your customized appearance is in the campaign and multi-player, even the cutscense as they’re rendered.
Vehicles. The ghost has been nerfed. It was my favorite vehicle. I got a 27 kill spree on one in Halo 3 so I’m disappointed. The invincibility power ruins running people over. The guns on it are not all that effective either. There’s a mini wraith vehicle that is pretty awesome, it can carry other people too. There’s a missile launcher mounted to a Warthog also. The humans have the VTOL aircraft with side gunners again.
Multiplayer is where this game really shines. No games does online split screen shooter as well has HALO. The engineering packs/loadouts add a new dimension to the game. Sprint and roll makes the game much faster than it used to be. Not every game mode makes use of the loadouts so if you’re a purist you’ve still got options. Some of the…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|The Last Hurrah,
Halo: Reach – Circa 2010
GOOD:
- Tried and true (Halo) FPS experience that many other games have copied over the years.
- Great Co-op Gameplay allows up to four players to go through the entire game from start to end.
- Great graphics which look way better than that of Halo 3 and ODST; also there are a lots of new animations for the characters as well as tons of new unique enemy voice work to boot.
- Vehicle and turret shooting are the same as ever (for a Halo game); which is good; but the nice addition here is the new helicopter type of vehicle and even a small section of the game where you can control a space fighter.
- Armor Abilities really help out and give you a new edge in combat. Also you have a night vision mode which works and looks like the one from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
- Intense multiplayer versus action either by yourself on a team; the mode has plenty of different options to choose from. This is a pretty good upgraded version of the famed Halo 3 multiplayer that now has new maps, modes, abilities, and graphics for you to enjoy.
- Fire Fight mode allows up to four players to fight waves of enemies on unique maps (based on those in the campaign) using team work and skill.
BAD:
- Some slight lag and slight blurring at the more intensive moments in the game (with lots of things happening all at once).
- Can’t play Forge maps in Fire Fight mode.
IF IT FITS YOUR TASTE:
- A Sci-Fi First Person Shooter with quick pacing and intense fire fights. Note: that unlike Call of Duty: Modern Warfare this is a sci-fi First Person Shooter and as such your guns must first break an enemy’s energy shield before you can really hurt them also everyone is wearing battle armor so you’ll still need lots of shots to kill an opponent. The thing to do here is make your shots count more so you will need to do overall less of them to an opponent; example use energy type guns to break an enemy’s energy shield and always try to do head shots to your enemy for extra damage. Coming at an enemy guns blazing and either not using the right guns and/or not aiming well will only get you killed pretty quickly.
- Gameplay wise this plays pretty much like Halo 3 but with the life bar from Halo 3: ODST. The missions themselves are pretty fun and take the best bits from Halo 3 and ODST into new experiences.
- The campaign levels can be played by either yourself or with up to four other players cooperatively at one time on any stage.
- The Story is an overall a combat story going from mission to mission with nothing really tying into the overall Halo lore until the last chapter.
- Intense multiplayer action online through Xbox Live with matches as small as one on one and as big as 16 players (and even offline without using Xbox Live using either spilt screen, or system link). Halo Reach is set up similar to that of Halo 3 but with some new modes and all new maps. But much like Halo 3 in the sense that you’re given a rank when you play multiplayer (this rank can go up or down at any time) this rank is representative of your skill and your matched with others of your skill type, that way new unskilled players and hardcore veterans will not often play against one another, unless they make a special match themselves that ignores rank.
- An all new Fire Fight mode (Fire Fight was originally in Halo 3: ODST), Fire Fight which plays similar to Hoard Mode in Gears of War 2 is a mode where either by yourself or with up to four other players cooperatively can play a stage about the size of a multiplayer stage and you fight against enemies that are found in the games story campaign levels in waves. You get points and an overall score on your performance for these stages.
- There is no Master Chief in the game as well (the famed character from Halo’s 1 through 3). Instead you play an assortment of different SPARTANS who were on the planet Reach when it was attacked. As far as the overall Halo story goes, your team is made up of SPARTAN IIIs (with one SPARTAN II). SPARTAN IIIs are cheaper to produce and have a bit less overall combat ability then the famed SPARTAN IIs (Master Chief is a SPARTAN II). Luckily for your team they have been given all sorts of prototype armor and weapons normally left only for the SPARTAN II’s to have (note not even the Master Chief had a chance to get this stuff yet).
- NO FLOOD, it should be noted this Halo title has no FLOOD aliens within it (if you’ve played Halo’s 1 through 3 you’ll know what I am talking about).
- Forge World works like a much upgraded version of Halo 3′s Forge mode is a mode that lets you make and edit your own map and build your very own maps from the ground up but adding/placing walls, ramps, towers, ect you can add or take away any and all of the objects, weapons, vehicles, spawning points and flag zones. This is all done in…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|More than satisfied w/ single player campaign,
I’ll try to keep this brief:
1) I’ve been playing FPSes since before Wolfenstein 3D and Doom kicked off the contemporary genre as we know it. (I’ve been playing video games in one form or another since the early 1970s.)
2) The only aspect that interests me is the single player campaign. The last time I enjoyed multiplayer was Quake III on PC, around 10 years ago. None of my friends still game, and playing online w/ anonymous strangers is a pit of snakes I refuse to subject myself to.
3) Halo 1 has been one of my all time favorite games since I first played it in June 2002. (My review from around that time is still there, if you care to dig for it…)
4) I have enjoyed each of the Halo sequels, but felt that they all fell short of the greatness of Halo 1 in various ways.
5) Halo 1 is still my favorite in the series and probably always will be, but of all of the subsequent entries, Reach comes the closest to matching its awesome radness. My expectations were sky high, and yet it managed to somehow exceed them. I’ve already played through the campaign at least four times and will play it many more times in years to come. Buy with confidence, even if you have no interest in multiplayer.
Was this review helpful to you?
|You must log in to post a comment.