Halo Reach-A Retrospective


So after nearly a decade Halo finally got a PC release in the form of MCC collection on steam and windows store.The package contains Halo 1,2,3,ODST,Reach and 4 out of which Reach is currently available with rest being released in 2020.
So looking at a game from 2010 now would be e good time to see how it stands up today.

Presentation-


Halo Reach's story stands as a prequel to the whole series and depicts the start of Human Covenant war.You take control of Noble Six the newest member of an elite team of spartans as they fight on Reach.Even though Reach has a cliche bare story its presented very well.All of the Nobles are well characterized and developed which makes an impact even when one of them dies .The cutscenes are also well directed showing you the scope of the battle and do a good job of setting a backdrop for the events.But what I adore the most is how the Covenant are depicted.Usually the Covenant are but a joke to Master Chief as the games showed him destroying their whole fleet by himself.In Reach however the Covenant are depicted as a formidable force with an inexhaustible supply of Elites who cannot be defeated.There are many moments in the story where it appears as though you have put a dent in their forces but these are followed by moments where they just strike back harder making everything seem pointless.This is even highlighted in the end where the game does a neat thing of mixing narrative with gameplay, as you keep fighting an endless horde until they overpower and kill you.


Gameplay-


  The combat in reach is classic Halo combat, a first person shooter where you carry two weapons at a time and your shield regenerates when away from combat. The new feature added is armor pickups basically you can swap chips in your armor for different features like camouflage or a jetpack, by default you have a sprint function.It has a variety of weapons for both humans and the covenant, but that we all know what I want to talk about is how different Halo is from your typical modern shooters.

Most modern shooters tend to be a linear series shoot outs connecting you from set piece to set piece and encourage almost next to none exploration.Halo on the other hand has large open maps where each level takes place and gives you complete freedom to move and fight on them.More often than not you'll find vehicles that you may use if you want to or you just wanna jump up on some rocks and shoot guys it's all upto you.Maybe you want to hijack a Ghost to destroy a Tank or you just grab onto it and attach a grenade or you may entirely avoid fighting it's your choice.This may seem trivial things but these things are absent from most modern shooters in favour of a succession of linear shootouts until you reach the next setpiece. The open levels and choice of playstyle not only improve gameplay but also help to give the world a feeling of grandiose. Halo also has a pretty good enemy variety keeping things from going stale and they have pretty solid AI as well.

Verdict-


I went into Halo Reach expecting a pretty good story and solid FPS action to go with it and that's exactly what I got, but what I didn't expect was how much better it's gameplay model is as compared to most of the other shooter franchises. Shooters these days tend to railroad players by shoving explosives and action into their faces with very little context so they fall into a trance of shooting endless dudes for 6 hours until the campaign ends. Call of Duty and Battlefield are worst offenders of this design as most COD games have not payed any attention to telling a proper story for a long time and while Battlefield 1 did change the formula we don't know how long it's gonna last.It's not just these two either alot of the shooters follow the same page and that's not good.Shooters aped many of Halo's systems like regenerating health system and ability to hold two weapons at a time but they didn't take the good bits.Halo is famous not only because of the Xbox but also because its a franchise that treats its singleplayer the same as its multiplayer and offers a good story along with delivering fun gameplay experience.Halo Reach is great installment of the franchise which still holds up today and I can't wait for other the installments to come to the MCC in 2020.

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