Wow, we didn’t review this game already. Yeah, I’m looking back and, well, no we didn’t have any takers. You would think such a hyped, uber successful and an essentially good game like Halo: Reach would have been snapped up a lot sooner. Maybe the reason for this is that Halo Reach is filler, like Halo ODST, it’s purely thrown out there to soak up some of your excess cash. Is it worth it though, well that’s kinda the point of a review isn’t it.

 

Halo: Reach continues the trend of the Halo series in that the story is getting more and more invasive, certainly cutting down on the time alien killing. Halo had you plonked on an alien world in the middle of a battle and you had X amount of hours to save the universe from parasitic aliens. Halo 2 saw you fighting more of all of the above to save the universe but also allowing you to control one of the aliens in the quest for some sort of holy religious war which turned out to be a full civil war. Halo 3 was everything of the above just now everything is on earth, world is in danger, aliens are attacking, more aliens are attacking, ancient artefact, hidden space platform, fate of the universe, ancient human precursors. Blah, blah, I just want to make a grunt’s head explode.

 

 

How it’s Halo: Reach, and as we all remember from the advertising in Halo ODST, bad things happened on planet Reach. We take control of the newest member of the Spartan only group, Nobel 6, who have just learned of the pending Covenant invasion. We have; 1 level headed leader, 1 big strong man with a compassionate side jarring against certain pigeonholes, 1 female tech geek, 1 lone sniper with a superiority complex, 1 loyal Russian who seems to be there only to make up the numbers and the last is the black-armoured, unnamed and un-faced Spartan that we control. Considering the number of times all the other characters whip off their helmets to reveal their scars and facial tattoos it feels really odd that we never get to see Nobel 6’s face, but hey it’s tradition.

 

Anyway through the game each one of the team gets picked off one by one and you’re meant to feel something. I’m guessing this because everything is so ham-fisted, clichéd and forced. There was only one death in the game that really shocked me because it wasn’t signposted from a mile away. “Hmm” you think “so we have to infiltrate an alien warship and set off a bomb with no visible way of escape and there are only two of us on this mission. What could possibility go wrong?” I wouldn’t mind, really I wouldn’t, but there are over an hour worth of cut scenes in this game and the main game itself is probably only 10 hours long. Sure you can skip some of them but they’re the only thing linking together the wildly differencing tones in the levels.