The Long Goodbye: Halo: Reach Review

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Halo: Reach
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Bungie
Systems it’s available on: Xbox 360
ESRB rating: M for Mature
System reviewed on: Xbox 360

Chances are, you won’t be able to escape mention of Halo: Reach this week. The new video game will surely rack up hundreds of millions of dollars, and most gamers already know whether they’re going to buy it or not. But this game asks a particular question: what does Reach mean?

If you’re completely new to the series (don’t laugh, fanboys, it’s true for someone), Halo‘s a science-fiction first-person shooter series where players inhabit the armor of future cyborg soldiers called Spartans. The first three Halo games had you controlling Master Chief–last of the Spartans–as he led the charge in humanity’s war against a collective of alien races called the Covenant. Halo: Reach is a prequel to those games and the last title that series’ originators–the development studio Bungie–will be working on. (Microsoft retains the rights to Halo and the franchise will continue under the auspices of a to-be-announced developer.)

(More on Techland: Bungie Partners With Activision for New IP [Update X 2])

Now that the newbies have the basics, let’s talk about Halo‘s influence. For my part, I’ve never been a crazily passionate Halo fan. As a game critic, I had to engage with the perennial releases with a mix of exasperation and dread. No matter how anybody feels about the games Bungie’s been making over the last three-quarters of a decade, one has to admit that they’ve all been daunting heaps of content. After my preview sessions with Halo: Reach a few weeks ago, I mentioned to a fellow critic how surprisingly good my time with the game was. His response was to say, “The games have never been bad; they just have outsize influence.”

He’s right. Halo‘s been the Xbox’s marquee franchise ever since Microsoft got into the console business and each one’s been symbolically super-important to the tech giant’s video game ambitions. The first game, Halo: Combat Evolved, delivered to a console the kind of sharp, fast first-person shooter action that PC fans had been enjoying for years. Similarly, Halo 2 brought the culture of online game competition to a wider audience than ever before. By the time Halo 3 rolled around, the record-breaking sales numbers it posted seemed like an inevitability. And, in the time since Combat Evolved came out, a legion of rabid fans, elite professional gamers and adherents dedicated to competing consoles (like the PS3) have all codified their identities as gamers in either allegiance or opposition to Halo. So it’s easy to lose focus on the stones that create these huge ripple effects, which is to say the games themselves. Previous games have been straightforward blasts of bombast, with the terse Master Chief grimly facing down hordes of aliens. (Last year’s Halo: ODST took a Rashomon-style approach to its story, but felt very similar to the first three games.) Reach is atypical. It goes somewhere different and gets there in different ways.

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.

(More on Techland: Reach for the Stars: Hands-on with Bungie’s Last Halo Game)

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.

(More on Techland: Make Mine Master Chief: Frank O’Connor and Brian Reed On Marvel’s New Halo Series)

You can see where Bungie might’ve picked up a few tricks from other developers, too. They do more to create a sense of place and embed humor in the environment. Civilian life is being disrupted right before your very eyes, which drives home the stakes of the battles. But, then, Latin-infected muzak starts playing during an elevator ride to yet another fateful encounter, and you can’t help but laugh. It’s definitely gallows humor, since the Fall of Reach has been a well-established fact of Halo lore. It’s been foretold for years that the planet succumbs to the Covenant assault. So, from a story perspective, Reach surprises because you’re watching a planet die. What’s more, for all your extraordinary efforts as a cyborg super-soldier, you can’t do anything about it.

If the single-player portion of Reach is structured to evoke different moods, then the multiplayer is piled high with catalysts for different kinds of chaos. Reach’s multiplayer homes in on players’ reptilian pleasure centers expertly, as in the Rocketfight mode where players can unleash unlimited missile launcher ammo at waves of Covenant troops with joyful abandon. The frantic crabs-in-a-barrel play of the Headhunter mode pits you against one another, as people grab collectible skulls and take out each other to acquire others’ loot.

(More on Techland: Black Ops Designer: “Certain People Will Never Love Multiplayer”)

Reach delivers superb doses of moment-to-moment tension, ones where you don’t feel like a one-man juggernaut. After the bravado of the opening levels, even your fellow Spartans get morose as the odds continue to mount against them. For a series that’s made its bones on letting players save the day over and over again, this last Halo game by Bungie feels positively funereal. And that’s a pretty brave move for a medium stereotyped as being all about shallow adolescent power fantasies. The game’s a strong sign of maturation for Bungie, with considered pacing for the story-centric Campaign mode and a smorgasbord of destruction in its online multiplayer offerings. Halo: Reach might be said to be a forward-looking farewell, then, one that encourages fans to appreciate where the studio’s been while ensuring that they follow Bungie’s next steps.

Official Techland Score: 9.8 out of 10

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