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dkirschner's Halo Reach (360)
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| [March 17, 2013 11:19:25 AM]
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After finishing Far Cry 3 yesterday evening, I decided to just stay in and start Halo: Reach and thought if I played the rest of the night I could beat it by the time I went to bed the next day. Turns out I beat it by noon the next day. Short game! It took me somewhere between 6-7 hours only, which was from about 8-12 Saturday night and roughly 9-12 Sunday morning, max. So yeah, short, but whatever because it was awesome and is my favorite of the Halo games thus far. I'll rate Reach, 2, 3, 1. Reach is a prequel to the trilogy.
It's action-packed and epic as hell. There are epic space battles, ground battles, lower atmosphere battles...battles everywhere. The space battle stuff is all new as far as I know (never played Halo 3: ODST, so that might have some) and was a lot of fun. The vehicles handle better than ever, and the controls in general are tighter and more precise. The game is faster, something like the same leap from Halo 2 to Halo 3. One noticeable thing missing from this game is dual wielding, which turned out to be quite fine.
They also ditched Halo 3's item system, which I was very glad for, and this is genius, replaced it with ability pickups. You might say, Well David, that's the same thing, isn't it? No Dear Reader, it is not. You see, when you picked up items in Halo 3, you could still sprint, and as I recall, using items was an odd button that I didn't press much. In Halo: Reach, Sprint isn't a given. Sprint is a default pick-up. So the other pick-ups replace sprint. Since I LIKE Sprint a lot, then I'm going to use those other pick-ups because they're replacing one of my favorite things. Also, you can't sprint to checkpoints in Reach like you could in previous titles, so that helps. The new abilities are mostly awesome. There is a jet pack, which lets you fly around some and reach high ground, hover over enemies, and so on. Very useful. There is a hologram, also incredibly useful when dealing with tough/multiple enemies. You kind of shoot it at a spot in the distance and a hologram of yourself runs to that point and stands there, distracting enemy attention so you can flank and whatnot. The last one was some sort of armor boost where you kneel down and become invulnerable for a short time. You can't do anything while you're invulnerable. This was, in my play, useless, but I imagine it being great in co-op or multiplayer since one player could run out and draw fire, then become invulnerable, while the other player flanks or supports, sort of like a human hologram. But these abilities were so useful precisely because they replaced sprint. And you know you would encounter more pick-ups throughout the levels, so abandoning sprint for the jet pack or hologram was a situational strategic decision. Actually by the end of the game I wasn't thinking in terms of "abandoning sprint," but of sprint simply being another pick-up.
The story is excellent. It's a story of sacrifice and heroism, very sad (and happy?), sets the scene for Halo 1, and the end of Reach is a nice loop back to the opening scene of the game. Highly highly unexpected that I would enjoy this so much. I had no idea it would top the other games in the trilogy. Highly recommended.
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dkirschner's Halo Reach (360)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Saturday 16 March, 2013
GameLog closed on: Sunday 17 March, 2013 |
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