Halo Reach (XBox 360) Review

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Summary [ If you are a Halo fan: 9.0 out of 10. If you are a fan of Shooters: 6.5 out of 10. If you like Good Games : 5.5 out of 10]

Halo Reach is the final Bungie effort in the series that put the Xbox on the map. People were looking to this game to be the finest in the series but with repetitive game play, a lack of real dramatic tension and rehashed series conventions with little new innovation, if the first Halo was Combat Evolved then Reach is Combat Rehashed. It is easily the best looking game in the series with generally pretty cut scenes and good voice acting but these things do little to make Reach seem fresh. If you are a Halo fan then you will find everything you love about Halo games of the past. If you aren’t a Halo fan, Reach will remind you of exactly why that is.

Introduction

I am not, nor have I ever really been, a Halo fan. I was hoping that for Bungie’s swan song I would be won over but instead I found myself more frustrated than ever before by the same problems that has plagued the series from game one. It isn’t that I hate all things Halo. I think the fiction is decent even if a large portion of it is cribbed from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and there are some cool characters in the series. As far as the books go, the Fall of Reach was my favorite and there was a compelling story to be told there. Sadly, that did not translate to this game. The story left me cold and dramatic moments were so undersold that I felt nothing when the inevitable started to happen. The only consistent emotions I felt while playing Reach were frustration, annoyance and boredom.

The Good

  • Multi-player Variety: If you enjoy the multi-player experience in Halo, you will find several different options to experience it. From the co-op campaign to zombie mode Infected, there is a lot to do online and plenty of people playing. I’ve never had any trouble with matchmaking and things get underway pretty quickly. Your mileage may vary on the actual quality of these online experiences but at the very least they offer up a lot of them.
  • Voice Acting: As is a general rule with the series, the voice acting is really good. None of the leads in Nobel team are celebrity voices but there are a fair number of them doing incidental voices. Nathan Fillion is a clear standout and it is always good to hear him. The Covenant are back to being unintelligible which is a nice change from the goofy voices we were subjected to in some previous entries.

  • Graphics: Generally I have found Halo graphics to be pretty bland and unpolished. This is not the case in Reach. Character models are detailed and the colors are vibrant. The textures look nice and the animations are fluid and life-like. The cut scenes are really beautiful and fun to watch and the environmental effects are impressive. It isn’t the best looking game on the 360 but it is definitely the best looking Halo game by a damn sight.
  • Controls/Targeting: After all this time, if this aspect were broken I wouldn’t even be able to bring myself to finish the game. In a general sense the controls are tight and the targeting is good. I didn’t have much fun playing the game and I generally hated it but I can’t blame that on the controls. The button mapping is solid and it is never hard to find what you need to on the controller so when you die for some stupid bullshit it is due to bad level design and not because the controls are broken. So that is nice.
  • Flying Missions: I think the only times I really dug the game were during the brief flying missions. The controls here were tight and the game play was well put together. I am not sure how they succeeded here so much while blowing the core game play or how the flight controls are spot on when ground based vehicles are so bad you may as well be trying to control them with your mind but it is what it is. I was just glad to have something to have fun with in this game.

The Bad

  • Game Play: This is a broad category and a lot of the finer points are broken down below but the game play in Halo essentially amounts to hopping in and out from behind things and plugging away at enemies while they can apparently shoot around corners or it involves just straight running through the battlefield to the next check point and hoping not to die on your way. There is some element of strategy involved as different tactics will yield different results and eventually if you find the right one you will succeed. There is an element of joy in finally clearing a section that has been giving you problems and I thought about including that as a plus but it occurred to me that if the only enjoyment you are getting out of clearing an area is happiness that you don’t have to do it anymore, that is profoundly bad game design. It isn’t that things are ‘hard’ it is just that it is hard to feel like an elite super solider when apparently an elite can put two shots in your ass and it takes you a clip worth of headshots to break through their armor and then they finish you off on the re-load. That isn’t ‘hardcore game play’ it is just bullshit. If I have an elite in my sniper scope while cloaked from several feet away and I take the shot, the elite shouldn’t have the Spidey sense to side-step shit he should never see coming. And don’t get me started on the bullshit convention of drop ships depositing more forces every 10 or 15 seconds to ratchet up the difficulty, there will be plenty of time for that in its own bullet point below.

  • Co-op/scaling: Co-op should be a great multi-player mode and it should really ratchet up the fun with the possibility of increased teamwork and tactics that your AI companions aren’t capable of. What it ends up amounting to is the two of you yelling obscenities while your characters bodies pile up and your buddy has to stay back to hold the respawn checkpoint in place. When you are doing Co-op the difficulty scales to how ever many players you have. In Halo terms this means they just throw as many enemies as possible and make sure those enemies’ weapons do at least 150% more than yours and their shields are roughly as strong as the ones guarding the second Death Star. If AI tactics improved that would be one thing but co-op on legendary is just basically the players running through to trigger the next check point and spam weapons fire at anything that has the color scheme from 80’s Rainbow Brite characters. Maybe it is just me but there is nothing fun about dying repeatedly over stupid bullshit. You can claim that if I wasn’t such a noob who spent time chugging dicks I would be better but honestly getting proficient at this game is so painful to play that I am surprised you don’t find at at more S & M fetish clubs.
  • Score: In the past the Score has always been big and impressive, occasionally getting into moving territory. For some reason, in a game where you are supposed to be legitimately moved by things that are going on, the score is flat and lifeless and occasionally so corny that I could swear I could hear banjos. Even when it felt like the score was trying to get bigger and more epic it fell flat and was more often than not just goofy.
  • Level Design: The level design has not changed fundamentally since the first Halo game and that seems pretty lazy and pointless. How many times do I have to run through the same bunkers or open, vaguely rocky grassy area, or space ship areas before I get bored? I mean me personally it was roughly halfway through the first game but I just don’t see how the same repetitive level layouts are providing countless hours of fun for people. Occasionally the multi-player maps are interesting but more often than not they are just the same boring bullshit over and over again. The campaign level design is absolutely just the same thing over and over again. There were some caves this time and that was nice but generally every level in this game looked pretty much like every level in the other games except that occasionally the walls have big black burn marks to show how ‘devastated’  the planet is by the Covenant invasion. I would think if the game play has to be so boring the levels could at least be worth a damn but I would be wrong. From beginning to end the levels were really badly designed and boring.

  • Floaty: One of my big complaints with Halo has always been that it doesn’t seem to have any kind of weight to it. This gives the whole game a very inconsequential feel. It is bad enough that the action is PG and the enemies look like they could have been lifted from a Care Bears cartoon but with the fact that everything feels light as air any sense of grittiness goes out the window. Again, with the story available here and the dark vibe of the whole fucking planet getting wiped out one would think that maybe this time they would impose a bit of gravity on things but no, we may as well be playing Kirby in Dreamland with the way this feels.
  • Dicks on Multi-player: This isn’t exclusive to Halo but it is really bad, probably because the graphics are colorful and cutesy so all the kids like it and they can pretend to be all hardcore. Playing anything but the co-op online sounds like an episode of Rugrats if they were all racist homophobes with Tourrett’s Syndrome and I have to have the chat muted to make it through a match. I get smack talk and all but there is a point where it gets ridiculous and that point happens about 3o seconds into the average Slayer match in Halo Reach.

  • Poor Ending: I don’t want to spoil anything but the ending sucks really bad. After going through the nightmare that is playing this game I expected something a little bit moving or impressive for my effort. What I got was essentially just a big middle finger by Bungie and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole ending cut scene had been FMV of the game’s development team running a train on my Mom. That is about the only thing I can think of more disrespectful than what we were offered at the end of this thing.
  • Undersold Story: I have read the Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund and the story was compelling and well written. There were actually pretty badass and heartbreaking things going on during the Covenant invasion of Reach and it could have been epic had the story touched on these things. As it is, Bungie apparently decided that for this game they needed to focus on the most boring and irrelevant things going on at the time. If they had decided to focus on a ladies’ knitting circle and how they reacted to coming threat it would have been only slightly less interesting. Or more interesting depending on which team the ladies in question were playing for. At the time all of this bullshit is happening Master Chief and a cadre of Spartans were running around doing badass things. When THOSE Spartans died in battle they did so heroically and in an emotional way. Here, when members of Nobel team get taken out it is pretty flat as there is so little time spent developing them. I mean sure, there is more character development and story going on in Reach than any previous Halo game but that is like saying that Ms Pacman really evolved the story from Pacman. There was a lot of potential for awesome drama and heroic deaths and touching cut scenes but all of that was squandered on flat missions and just more of the same.

  • Vehicle Controls: How can we be this late into a series and have vehicles that control this badly? The Warthogs control so badly that when I got in as a passenger and the AI was driving we still got hung up on rocks. Part of this plays into the bad level design from early but holy shit, there have been innovations in vehicle control since the first Halo game and apparently no one bothered to tell Bungie about it. Any time I was told I needed to drive in the game I thought about taking the disc out and breaking it so I could slit my wrists. Given the control though, I doubt I would be able to get the disc to do it.
  • Lack of Cover: Can someone explain to me how I can be standing behind part of a mountain cliff and I am still taking damage like they are curving the bullets like in Wanted but if they step behind a quarter inch thick hand rail my bullets are blocked from reaching them? Yeah yeah I know it is because I am a noob who takes it up the ass from a million dicks but I am serious here. The lack of cover reduces game play to essentially moving sideways out of cover, firing a little and then moving back behind cover for your shields to recharge and hope to god that the Elites firing at you can’t manipulate the laws of physics for like 15 seconds. I guess I am spoiled by game designers who know what the hell they are doing but this lack of cover is infuriating.
  • Balancing: This ties in with several other complaints but the balancing in difficulty is so bad that it doesn’t even really make sense. It will go from really easy to damn near impossible in the blink of an eye and there is no real rhyme or reason for it. Whether you are playing on normal or legendary or whatever the balancing in the game  makes no sense at all. I am not sure if there are players who enjoy replaying from the same check point over and over again for an hour and a half because the game saved when you had a sliver of life and four rounds of ammo but I don’t.

  • Dropships: If you want definitive proof of how poor the game design is in Halo Reach, or any Halo game for that matter, look no further than drop ships. I wasn’t out of the first level before I was tired of this bullshit. If they want to extend the difficulty or time spent on a level, they just send in dropships to dump more enemies and occasionally turret fire on you and you have to deal with it. God forbid they space enemies in the level in an organic way that makes some sense, no they just use this tired 10 year old device to make their jobs a bit easier. It makes a certain measure of sense to use drop ships given this is an invasion force but when they have done this in every Halo game previous I can’t cut them any slack for using them here. Dropships are a crutch Bungie uses to avoid doing good and proper work and it is annoying and makes the game boring.
  • No Achievements On Easy: Often times Halo players are characterized as elitist and arrogant people who look down on anyone just starting out or lacking in as much skill as they have in lieu of basic interpersonal relationship skills. In Halo Reach that elitism is institutionalized as players who are new to the series or who just want to check out the story are penalized for choosing the easy setting. Sure you should scale goals and rewards to encourage people to keep trying to improve and climb the ladder but it helps if you give them a little taste of success. Here, if you don’t start off on at least normal you don’t get shit but scoffed at by people who are better than you. This isn’t cool.

  • Repetitive Game Play: Gameplay in Halo Reach is the same thing over and over again. You show up, deal with some grunts and the occasional jackals and a couple of Elites, then a dropship comes and deposits more. Repeat. The entire game is like this. The only times this doesn’t happen are when you are flying in space or around the city. I am kind of surprised there were no dropships in space honestly because that seems to be all that Bungie has to extend a level.

Conclusion [ If you are a Halo fan: You stopped reading after the first paragraph. If you are a fan of shooters: 6.5 out of 10. If you like good games (and this is my real and definitive score: 5.5 out of 10]

I hated Halo Reach a lot.

I had almost no fun of any kind. I give it a 5.5 because it looks pretty and it controls pretty well as long as you aren’t driving something. I almost raised the score slightly because there is a legitimate sense of accomplishment when you get through a tough level until I realized that feeling was just relief that you aren’t playing that part anymore. Any time when your only enjoyment out of a game is relief that you aren’t playing it anymore then the game is a horrible piece of shit. And that sums up Halo Reach in a nutshell. A lot has been made of this game being Bungie’s swan song for the series but I am kind of happy about it as now we might have a chance of getting a good Halo game.

28 Comments


  1. I thought I was the only one who didn’t like Halo. Everyone telling me Reach is different made me excited that Riyad mentioned a Halo Reach contest where I might actually be able to try it out without having to fork over any money.

    After reading this, Patrick was able to do something I have never been able to do and that was to put my gripes about the series into words.

    Looks like ill stick with Mafia II (which is awesome btw) and NBA 2K11 next week.


    1. GJ, you are plagued with the same problem Patrick and I have… good taste.

      Halo Reach is bullshit just like Halo 2 and 3 were, but there are moments of Triple-A production (mo-cap, voice acting, cutscenes, graphics at some points) so you think you are playing this amazing game, but if this game were reviewed in a VACUUM and wasn’t “Halo”, I am willing to bet my life that people would rate it on average around a 7 out of 10… but because it’s Halo, all the big game sites out there pucker up, lube up and start writing reviewed filled with words that end in “ly”.


      1. its exactly the same for call of duty and battlefield if you want my opinion so shut your mouth dickhead.


  2. Yepp, I agree. Never understood how poeple find Halo single player more than mediocre.


  3. It’s really funny when you have reviewers that don’t really play the series and have no ideal how the game should be. Try reading the Halo books and then you’ll have a sense of what supposed to happen. I was really upset at the fact that there weren’t enough enemies in the games. The Covenant are like locust invading with numbers large enough to overwhelm the opposing force.

    By the way, Spartans are the best the earth forces have and that doesn’t necessarily mean their equal or better then the Covenant.

    REVIEWERS THAT ARE NOT TRUE GAMERS LACK KNOWHOW, PLAY ON EASY AND DON’T PLAY THROUGH THE GAME.

    Lam gamers as reviewers suck…


    1. Jack, Patrick addressed both of your anti-points in the review. We’ve played every Halo and he’s read the books.

      Thanks for posting though. I understand the review has some emotion wrapped up in it, that’s a side effect of Halo having such rampant fans… you just can’t avoid it.


  4. This isn’t a review, it’s a rant. Disliking a game is one thing; a juvenile tirade is another. Don’t slam the people who are rude in game-chat, then do the same thing yourself in an online game review.


    1. What, it’s “honest” because he agrees with you? Go back to sucking cock, faggot.


  6. No Achievements On Easy is one of your negative points.
    Nice non biased review here, also it really does seem that you were just getting destroyed by the AI.
    And dropships are less lazy than spawn cupboards, etc.


    1. dred,

      Spawn cupboards are *absolutely* the worst, no doubt about that. As for the AI on Legendary, we got rocked pretty hard for about 4 hrs before we stopped playing.

      If there are justin.tv links of people blowing through Legendary without the same problems we had in a co-op setting (so it’s scaled up the same) I’d love to see it.

      I’m willing to accept that I’m terrible at Halo on Legendary, but I’d like to see someone that is amazing at it and figure out what I’m doing wrong.


  7. you should polish the grammar so the fanboys have nothing to attack when they get their panties in a wad. This is completely accurate by the way, Halo has always been mediocre.


  8. You call out all of these difficulty problems, and then you run out into the open and die like 20 times in that video. If you want to complain about something, at least complain about something legitimate. You were playing the game on its hardest difficulty. Nice going broseph.


    1. Derpin, I acknowledge that the first kill was a fairly obvious “jump and die”, but during the entire video there are plenty of strategic attempts at moving forward and taking dudes out without being overly stupid and those were all met with failure.

      After I stopped recording it took us 20 more minutes before we just *ran for it* past that setpiece and checkpointed…. that’s the only way we moved forward.


  10. Most of your points are simply that you are terrible at the game. Just because you suck doesn’t mean the game does, FYI.


  11. Sums up many of my feelings as well. I stopped playing after two or three levels because I couldn’t be bothered. Multiplayer I gave about six hours but I found it horribly bland and boring.

    If everyone’s entitled to his opinion then so is this author. To me, the series is little more than a generic space opera trying to be epic and failing badly.


  12. What you are doing wrong is that vid is part of the core design that makes up the gameplay which dates back to the first Halo. Elites have shields. Human weapons suck at depleting them. Covey weapons tear through shields but aren’t the best at killing quickly. You need use a plasma weapon (pistol overcharge works best and has tracking) to knock out shields and switch to a precision weapon to get the headshot. It’s that simple. Two shot kills. Fine if you don’t like it, but that is how to play the game on the harder settings. Use a alien weapon to lower shields and then use a human weapon to tear through flesh. Grunts and jackels are also one shot headshot kills with precision weapons. Drop the AR and grab a pistol DMR or needler rifle. Give it a try sometime.


    1. cyniqk,

      Appreciate the constructive followup — I didn’t know that the difference in the weapons had such a large impact on the gameplay experience on harder levels.

      I will most definitely give it a try.


  13. If you want to plow through enemies like the way you are trying to do in the video, go play on easy. Being a halo player since Halo 1, Legendary provides that challenge that makes it interesting and very difficult. The odds are against you in legendary suck it up.


  14. On legendary difficulty, don’t expect to run and gun ala COD. Take cover and let your shields recharge, and don’t just camp at one place. move around.


  15. Seriously dude ? Seriously ?! Unpolished graphics ? And sucky level design ! No. (Assuming you play call of duty over halo since you are hating on this game) Take the developement team for Halo. 3 years in developement with a team in love with the game and it’s universe creating a rich story and characters. Now compare this to call of duty developement. 2 years in the making with people bored out of their minds making the same game over and over again only adding a fixing a few things and just overlaying a new graphics engine and adding a few guns and twitches. Finish by renaming an already sold game and voilâ, got a new bad item for sale. Campaing is macho man having to go trough firefights to complete an objective and commit war crimes. That is why call of duty makes me sick. It’s the same thing over and over again. What I call bullshit is this review.(My own opinion on gamestop starts here.) It’s just like any other gamestop reviews on FPS’s. All biased on call of duty and only that. Nothing else whatsoever.(ends here). BTW only thing that could save black ops 2 is graphics and publicity.


  16. First and foremost, the review was legitimately provocative, so raging fanboys are to be expected. That said, after beating the first three installments on legendary (I’ll finish ODST on legendary sometime, I just can’t stand all that walking around), this was by and far the most aggravating – and for a number of reasons one shouldn’t necessarily chalk up to lack of skill. I’ll also throw in some other things that ticked me off that I didn’t see specifically covered in the review. The following will be an ordeal and will, as per my writing style, inevitably contain myriad end notes…hopefully it will be informative in some way, but mostly it is for my personal venting. Oh, and for the record, I’ve beaten Reach on legendary with Fog and Famine on…

    1. Tactics:
    When I started getting at the elites during the first mission I was actually impressed with their nimbly-jumping-to-and-fro, certainly an upgrade from 3 and ODST’s brutes just kind of standing there. What I didn’t like is that the blitz tactics that 3 drilled into you (even on legendary, it’s not too hard to run the table on a bunch of brutes with a well placed ‘nade and a shotgun) and weren’t eliminated in ODST were absolutely worthless here. In fact, I found that my dad (who plays something like I imagine Punxsutawney Phil would) was outlasting me in co-op precisely because of his pusillanimous method. In short, enacting a tactical paradigm shift in your 5th installment* with no transition** is fine for your dedicated middle/high schoolers who’ve nothing else to do with their time, but I’m almost tempted to go back and play 3 instead.

    2. Human AI:
    They suck. Really bad. They have gone backwards from Halo 3, which is astounding to me: how do you take an AI engine and make it worse without intentionally doing so? I’ve run a few possible scenarios of the dialog, and the only one that Occam’s razor didn’t vaporize is: “The game is more difficult when you have to worry about your friendly AI running over you, driving your warthog when you’re obviously trying to use it as a stationary turret, pushing you out of your cover, flying out of nowhere into your Saber, or blowing up the wraith you’ve so carefully disarmed of it’s turret operator.” This is exacerbated by the fact that try as you might, you cannot kill the other Nobles.

    3. Cheesy Difficulty:
    Though this was covered in the review, I wasn’t satisfied with the points noted. For one, the major difficulty modifiers are all present in the skulls: to wit, Tilt, Thunderstorm, Tough Luck, etc. What irks me about this is that the level of tactical difficulty isn’t changed in the slightest, it’s all just a bunch of cosmetics. Rather than: Easy: Play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’;
    Normal: Play ‘Minuet in G’;
    Heroic: Play ‘La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin’;
    Legendary: Play ‘Nocturne in C minor (op.9-2)’
    we’re treated to:
    Easy: Play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’;
    Normal: Play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ with your big toe;
    Heroic: Play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ with your big toe while wearing a blindfold and smoking a cigarette;
    Legendary: Play ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ with your big toe while wearing a blindfold and smoking a cigarette backwards while covered in palmetto bugs;
    Point being, however you slice it, you’re still not playing anything incredibly interesting.

    4. Non-Sequitur:
    After having personally blown over an hour on various days trying to kill a Noble (usually Kat, or however your spell her name) with everything from sticky grenades to a fucking wraith, that a single shot from a needle rifle through the dome takes her out is just too ridiculous for me to suspend disbelief. I’ve once succeeded in knocking her off a cliff, but she still didn’t die and it was time to move on to the next area, so it was all for naught.

    5. WTF, Grenade Launcher:
    I thought when Halo 3 gave me a flame thrower that was only good for taking out masses of the little flood, but more often than not is better left sitting on the catwalk, I’d seen the last of painfully inefficient weapons. I was wrong. I would prefer to be started out with the DMR and a plasma pistol, as the latter portends to have some measurable effect on an elite. Perhaps through years of penitence and self-denial, one could master this awkward weapon, but unfortunately I devote the requisite time to transcribing Monk solos, writing tasty licks, and going ape shit with Scriabin’s Nocturne for the left hand alone…you know, important stuff.

    6. Un-skip-able Cut Scenes:
    Okay, I get that you blew the majority of your budget on the animation and so you want people to appreciate the painstaking detail you went into, but when I’m trying to beat Solace on legendary with Iron on…yeah, I got out D & G’s A Thousand Plateaus to kill the time and ended up forgetting about the game because “God is a lobster.” That said, the cut scenes were jaw-dropping in HD the first time through the game.

    7. Achievements:
    I don’t really get the “No achievements on easy” complaint, but I do have a few of my own. As noted earlier, my life doesn’t revolve around videogames. However, I do have a desire to complete things I start…so that I have to fork out additional dough to get a Gold membership just to get the other half of the achievements doesn’t sit well with me. That combined with 90% of the weekly/daily challenges containing the phrase “multiplayer matchmaking” suggests the game is geared towards online play. Why does this piss me off? Since downloadable/purchasable content is by no means news anymore, the online portion of the game (excepting co-op) could be offered as a downloadable update for half the price; the meta-game need not be an ineluctable part of the game proper. And that’s missing the point, because what I’m really pissed off at is noticing the same addict-production-sucker-punch – those hotwire-the-reward-centers-of-your-brain marketing tactics – marketing tactics used…well, just about everywhere else*** (though I should note that games like Wii Fit, etc. at least offer the potential of some external benefit).

    8. Ballin’ Easter Bunnies:
    Yeah. That’s my first impression of the Elite ‘Ultras’. Big. White. Easter. Bunnies.

    Well, that’s probably not the whole of my qualms with the game, but I’ve succeeded in pacifying my quivering lip, so I’ll take my leave.

    Oh yeah, to the reviewers: check out Larry Niven’s Known Space series, Ringworld. It played a much larger role than Heinlein ever did…and was, in my opinion, more interesting than Starship Troopers by orders of magnitude. I mean when did an MIT class ever check the physical plausibility of something Heinlein dreamt up – and then, after a few minor adjustments, come out satisfied? Anywho, Ringworld is ubiquitous in Halo, down to Cortana’s choosing Master Chief because he ‘had luck’.

    End Notes

    *: Though ODST certainly had a game-play paradigm shift in the Memento-esque story-telling (and I really enjoyed this point immensely…the wandering around the city for the first time, not so much), the tactics which could be effectively employed weren’t entirely different from the preceding titles.

    **: Here, Bungie would do well to follow FROM Software’s example in their Armored Core series. When they decided they wanted to ramp up the quality of their players, they did so. Gradually. The rift between 3 and Reach would be analogous to going from AC3 to AC:FA online with 1.20 regulations (for those who know – those who don’t can feel free to cue the cricket sfx).

    ***: See if you can find a copy of David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” read it, extrapolate the content to video games (especially one that proffers to track your ‘career’), and become either apathetic or severely pissed off. There may be a middle ground, but it’s probably a more mundane interpretation of nirvana.


  17. Honestly, I liked Halo Reach a lot.
    But it have clrealy some of major problems.

    “Character development.”

    “Too many dropships.”

    “Short campagin when you compare to the previous Halo games.”

    “The game could be repetitvie sometimes.”
    (Press the burtton several times, or destory the Covenant buildings.. etc)

    But others were completely fine to me, Even I’m not a Halo fan,
    I thought Halo Reach was a great game.


    1. Well then I took a glance at Halo 4 and then tought reach did get quite mediocre after 2 months or so…


  18. But what makes me feels bad about this review is
    “If you liked Halo Reach, you are a fanboy.”

    That is the basically what you are saying.
    No I’m not.
    I hated ODST (which game every Halo fans are prasing as a masterpeice),
    but this is also only my opinion, don’t force your opinion to readers.
    I also found that simular things happend in your other reviews.


    1. What I liked about ODST was the survival instincts required (such as should I try to bypass those guys or use some ammo ?) in the streets of New Mombassa (should be another Halo game like that except more free roam focused instead of missions. I really plunged into the story of the rookie after I got this game. I tought it would suck but it was the best campaign yet for my likings and I enjoved the multiplayer disc as I did not get any Halo 3 multiplayer map DLC.

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