Just finished playing “Halo: Reach”, and although I don’t think it measures up to any of the Halo FPSs, it’s a very competent shooter, and I enjoyed playing it very much…
First, the good part: As usual, Bungie has done a great job in the playability and in the level design… this becomes more apparent if you consider that the game doesn’t add absolutely nothing to the genre, except for the space fighting and Hornet sections, which are quite fun, albeit too easy. The characters are not annoying (in this day and age, I call that positive), although a bit stereotypical (i.e. “psycho”, “hacker girl”, “righteous commander”, “rookie”, “lovable giant”).
The bad part is that the game feels like it has taken some steps back from the Halo franchise; The lack of duel wield kind of bothers me, since it was one of the selling point of the original Halo, besides being fun…
The game doesn’t add anything to the FPS genre, it’s just a well done FPS, with some technical flaws (lots of frame-rate stalls, for example). The story and storytelling are simple and predictable, the characters are too simple for me to actually care about them (which is important considering the objective of making the player feel sad because of the situation on Reach and in Noble team). To be honest, from a story perspective, the whole situation in Reach is kind of silly, and it only becomes vaguely interesting closer to the end of the game…
By the way, developers of the world: having a subtitle option that is only useful for cutscenes and not the in-game dialog is stupid… specially when most of your game’s storytelling relies on communications between team members during the fights where stuff is exploding and shots are being fired… For non-native speakers, it’s very hard to understand what’s being said…
Finally, note that my opinion is based only on the single-player experience, since I don’t play multiplayer FPSs, so the game might be actually much better with the multiplayer taken in consideration…
End of the day, “Halo: Reach” is a competent shooter, with some neat elements, but nothing to write home about…
Numbers:
- Gameplay: 9/10
- Story: 6/10
- Graphics: 7/10
- Sound: 8/10 (with 10/10 if we consider only the soundtrack!)
- Sad Platoon-like feelings: 10/10
- Overall: 8/10