I got the weirdest feeling while playing a finished version of Halo: Reach this week. I felt a little bit of regret. Regret, because I–and probably a lot of gamers–have been taking Bungie’s excellent work on the series for granted. And now that the original Halo designers and the universe they worked on are about to part ways, there’s an undercurrent of sadness as Reach gets ready to lift off the runway.
But I wasn’t too sad, because Bungie’s going out with a bang. I got the chance to play through the first five or six levels of Bungie’s farewell to the Spartans and the Covenant. I can only talk about two of those levels, though, or black vans with Seattle license plates will abduct me to parts unknown.
(More on Techland: Halo: Reach Comes Alive with New “Deliver Hope” Trailer)
Reach feels deep in a way that previous Halo games haven’t. There’s a reason they named this one after a planet. From the very first opening cutscenes, the game resonates with a sense of place that even the levels based on Earth in Halo 3 didn’t have. Reach isn’t overbuilt like other planets we’ve visited in the Halo-verse; it’s got vast expanses of emptiness and a lot of the time playing is spent covering distance and soaking up the vistas that the developers have built. At first, you’re not even sure that Covenant are on Reach and even when you start fighting against them, you have no idea why they’re focusing their attentions on the planet.
The other thing that hits you right away is how much more humanized the Spartans of Noble Team are. As I covered before, players will be controlling Noble Six, a new member of the elite unit. When you meet the other members of Noble Team, you find they all have names and they refer to each other by name, not just callsign. Kat, Emile, Neil Jorge and their leader Carter have their own relationships with each other and you can tell that they’ve all been working with each other a long time. It’s a little odd, then, that they never address your character by name. Granted you’re the new guy on the team, but it still feels weird.
[vodpod id=Video.4123173&w=425&h=350&fv=fake%3D1]
In terms of world-building, Reach pulls back the curtain on the human experience inside the Halo-verse more than any other game in the series. Yes, the architecture of the universe is plenty delineated in the various novels, comics and animation spin-offs but the main experience of Halo is still in the games. There’s been precious little insight about how the politics of space exploration and colonization play out in Halo‘s futuristic vision but Reach offers up some of that. You meet other humans on Reach that represent militia movements and rebels who aren’t necessarily in line the governing authority. It’s not a huge plot point but it’s there and hints that humanity’s not just one monolithic happy family in the future. The idea that there’s a political back drop filled with fractious strata of people in the Halo-verse gives it a texture that the previous games lacked.
Of the levels I can talk about, Nightfall–the fourth mission of the game–came up first. As it opens, Noble Team gets orders to investigate Covenant activity in a tucked-away location. The mission opens with gameplay that’s almost stealth-like and the tone of the early part of the mission is creepy and foreboding. You’re sneaking along, using the new Assassinate moves to silently take out a few Covenant guards along a mountain ridge. The Armor Abilities added to Halo: Reach come in handy, too. The Active Camo ability turns you invisible and enhances your radar, populating it every Covenant lifesign in the vicinity. Active Camo also gave me one of my favorite moments of the playthrough, where I was cloaked and picking off enemies at a vast distance with a sniper rifle. Sudden, invisible death by an unknowable enemy. But things quickly shifted when my Noble partner and I came upon giant, bi-pedal lifeforms stomping through a clearing. I learned later that these creatures–with long tusks, elongated trunks and sloping, knuckle-dragging gaits that looked like a towering mash-up of ape and elephant–were called Guetas. I sat there stunned for a few seconds, unprerpared to fight anything that wasn’t wearing armor and pointing a gun at me. My AI partner and I put them down, but that moment of astonished discovery is another way that Reach feels different than any other Halo game so far. As we come upon the Covenant base, a big firefight ensues. During a battle in the Campaign Mode, you’ll find Armor Abilities sprinkled throughout the environment. You’ll be able to swap from Armor Lock which makes you temporary indestructible to Hologram, which generates a decoy that you can use to lure enemies . This flexibility means that you can change up the Campaign play experience more than any other Halo to date. The mission ends with two Hunters showing up and the biggest, burliest members of the Covenant are nastier than ever. Their laser cannon fire faster than before and can take you out with one direct hit and they dodge and evade surprisingly well for creatures as big as they are. The mission ends with a confirmation of the imminent full-scale invasion of Reach.
(More on Techland: Weak Point: 10 Terrible Movies Adapted from Video Games)
Tip of the Spear was the mission that followed and it felt like the exact opposite of Nightfall. Just as the sun’s coming up, huge waves of Covenant drop ships and ground troops storm across a field as human forces do the same. It’s one of the first times that a Halo game felt like a full-on war. The fighting is hot and heavy and the level features lots of vehicular combat. One of the vehicles was a Warthog with some sort of energy turret that fired automatic bursts of missiles. It’s a super-fun vehicle and I manned the turret while Noble Team member Kat drove, using it to take out three or four Revenant tanks. I also notched an Achievement during Tip of the Spear. “Your Heresy Will Stay Your Feet” popped up informing me that I got it for killing an Elite Zealot before he escaped. Further along the mission objectives switched and I was tasked to take out Covenant anti-aircraft emplacements. These locations were heavily guarded by Ghost vehicles, turrets and tons of troops. Blowing up the AA guns meant destroying the power cores and once I died in the explosion that followed. Durrr.
Next up was investigating a spire that projected an EMP dead zone which prevented UNSC sensors from scanning the area. Turns out the spire was a teleporter and the last part of Tip of the Spear showed just how serious the stakes of this battle were going to get. A UNSC frigate bearing reinforcements came into view and it looked like the tide of the conflict was turning to in favor of the humans. Suddenly, a Covenant super-carrier looms into view and destroys the frigate, demoralizing even your Spartan comrades. As desperate as this battle’s already been, it’s only going to get moreso. The mission after Tip of the Spear leads directly into the space battle sequence that Lev, Peter and I got to check out a few weeks back, and knowing the context makes that fight in the sky all the more important.
(More on Techland: Reach for the Stars: Hands-on with Bungie’s Last Halo Game)
That desperation is one of the things that’s distinctly different about Halo: Reach. The Campaign Mode shows off tons of tonal variation, going from spooky to balls-out without ever feeling un-Halo. I handled a few new weapons in Reach, too. Of those, the Target Locator gave me another new Achievement called “Two Corpses, One Grave” after I used it to call in an orbital airstrike that took out two Revenant tanks at the same time. Another weapon that became a favorite of mine is the Plasma Launcher, which fires energy bursts that track targets.
After my Campaign time, I jumped into a bunch of multiplayer sessions. I loved the new Headhunter mode, where players fight to collect the most skulls in a time limit; whoever gets 10 skulls automatically wins the round. Another all-new mode is Versus, where two teams face off with one group controlling Spartans and the other team controlling Elites. The Elite team has infinite lives and care only about killing humans; they’ve also got the advantage of swarms of AI bots to help them. The Spartans have a set number of lives but at the end of each round, teams switch sides.Overall, Reach seems like it’s going to be a greatly varied send-off for Halo from Bungie. Whether it’s the moodiness of the single-player or the deep amount of customization in the various multiplayer modes, Bungie’s pulling out all the stops. September 14th can’t get here soon enough.