The last Halo game from Bungie happens on a planet where the Spartan program began. You play as Noble Six, a newly-minted Spartan joining the Noble Team squad. Your comrades have an easy camaraderie and they’re battle-tested in a way that your charcter is not. Noble Six is a little wide-eyed and the game goes to great pains to make Reach feel vast and variegated. It mostly succeeds. The world-building is layered and thought-out. For example, weird lifeforms and craggy mountain ranges make the landscape feel foreboding. The Covenant begin massing on Reach for reasons unknown, but it’s hinted that recent human research finds hold the answer.
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Reach throws players into grim attrition-heavy ground battles, then vaults them far into the sky for spectacular ship-to-ship combat against Covenant spacecraft. The space battle sequence in particular teases fans with an electric dose of what could have been, leaving them to wonder how much more wonder Bungie could’ve delivered on their favored franchise if they’d stayed on. The gameplay in Reach contains lots of facets. As I mentioned in my preview and again in an interview with executive producer Joseph Tung, there’s a whole lot of tonal variation in Reach. It’d be a disservice to say that Bungie’s finally learned how to make Halo, as they’ve been making it all along. But the thing that comes through more than ever is the feeling that every piece of the experience has a more distinct texture than ever before. Five games into the series, a Halo game’s never made me jump with fear or dread going into the next room. But there are moments in Reach where I felt exactly that. The Marines that follow you around die and each death is a little sting in a way that it wasn’t before.
From a nuts-and-bolts perspective, Reach combines elements from every game in the series. The health systems resemble older games and the moody nightvision so prevalent in ODST returns for some moments in Reach. The enemies’ artificial intelligence is fiendishly improved, too. The Elites–Covenant field generals–are cagier, bobbing and weaving out your shots and the gigantic Hunters move faster and track more accurately. The vehicles and weapons in Halo have always had personalities of their own, but now the huge canvas that Reach draws gives players a bigger field to play them out across. Aside from the upper atmosphere spaceship skirmish, there are also sequences where you pilot a Falcon gunship and engage in grittier dogfights amongst smoke-spewing skyscrapers.
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