{"id":3028,"date":"2010-09-30T07:49:04","date_gmt":"2010-09-29T21:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=3028"},"modified":"2014-05-13T12:57:52","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T02:57:52","slug":"halo-reach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=3028","title":{"rendered":"Halo Reach"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"reachcover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Platform:\u00a0 <\/strong>Xbox 360<\/em>
\nDeveloper:\u00a0 <\/strong>Bungie<\/em>
\nPublisher:\u00a0 <\/strong>Microsoft Game Studios
\n<\/em><\/p>\nH<\/span>ere it is, the final installment of the Halo<\/em> franchise from Bungie.\u00a0 Its the franchise that cemented the popularity of first person shooters on consoles for the past decade and its the franchise that Microsoft built the House of Xbox upon when it launched in 2001.\u00a0 As swan songs go, Bungie do themselves justice and signs off with a bang.\u00a0 This is an absolutely fantastic game.<\/p>\n

Reach\u2019s campaign mode retraces the journey of Noble team, a group of Spartan warriors who embark on what is effectively a suicide mission to save the planet Reach from a Covenant invasion.\u00a0 The player takes the role of Noble 6, the latest member to join the team.\u00a0 Bungie make no attempt at any real characterisation with Noble 6.\u00a0 They are effectively tabula rasa.\u00a0 The rest of the crew consists of a leader, a grunt, a Latino guy and a one armed woman.<\/p>\n

The campaign they go through is well paced and full of variety.\u00a0 Bungie appear to have taken on player feedback from previous games and removed the lengthy backtracking segments that soured previous campaign modes and instead, have taken a page out of Call of Duty<\/em> and added a few more scripted sequences that have a cinematic flair about them.\u00a0 That said, they haven\u2019t discounted the series\u2019 traditional strength:\u00a0 the enemy AI is still very clever and offers up some entertaining challenges.\u00a0 Those side-stepping Elites in particular are utter bastards.<\/p>\n

The Halo<\/em> franchise, from the original trilogy helmed by the eight foot tall spartan warrior Masterchief, has always been presented as an expansive space opera epic and yet I think its only now with Reach that the series really delivers fully on that sense of scale.\u00a0 The original trailer for Halo 2<\/em> hinted at a game that was set in a full scale alien invasion of Earth but this appeared to be scrapped by the time the final product was released.\u00a0 Halo ODST<\/em> took us one step closer by setting the game in a civillian environment but it was almost entirely bereft of civillians.\u00a0 Finally in Halo Reach<\/em>, Bungie delivers a stage set in a civillian environment under an alien invasion where the Spartans interject to try and save the day.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lot of fun to play through as you\u2019d expect.<\/p>\n

This newfound sense of scale also carries over to other parts of the campaign.\u00a0 I certainly wasn\u2019t expecting the Noble team\u2019s journey to carry them into space where a battle ensues between two fleets of spaceships.<\/p>\n

The variety is what really makes Reach\u2019s campaign stand out.\u00a0 The terrain varies greatly from level to level.\u00a0 There are mountainous regions one moment and cityscapes the next.\u00a0 Some levels are designed around sniping stealthily in the dead of night, others call for a group assault in broad daylight using armoured vehicles.\u00a0 I particularly enjoyed the battle in the space station where the sound is muted aside from the breathing you can hear of Noble Six inside their suit.\u00a0 A very cool effect.<\/p>\n

By the end of the campaign, Bungie have taken you on an exhaustive ride where they throw the proverbial kitchen sink at Noble team, who slowly perish one by one, trying to save Reach.\u00a0 Finally, the game, the franchise and the developers come full circle by closing out the pre-credits ending with a shot of the Pillar of Autumn taking the survivors away to safety, recreating the same shot we saw in the opening scene of the original game.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fitting end and rather sweetly, Bungie includes a final message thanking the fans for their support.<\/p>\n

As for the multiplayer modes, time will tell what the community can come up with utilizing the new Forge mode which allows for a huge range of customization and level creation.\u00a0 The new maps for multiplayer have the expected level of polish and well crafted design of a Bungie product.\u00a0 Personally, I have a bit of a beef with how frequently the Team Slayer mode spits out SWAT games but I remember Halo 3<\/em> having a similar problem with too many Shotty Sniper matches and that was corrected after some user feedback.\u00a0 What I do expect is that Bungie will continue to support the community and that it will remain as strong as it was with Halo 3<\/em>, where three years after its release, there was still a community of several thousand users regularly playing the multiplayer maps.<\/p>\n

Although this is the last Halo<\/em> game made by Bungie, it certainly will not be the last Halo<\/em> game nor will it be the last Bungie game.\u00a0 I don\u2019t envy 343 Studios who have to step into their shoes and create the next installment of the franchise.\u00a0 Where do you go from here?<\/p>\n

As for Bungie, at last, ten years on from the original Halo<\/em>, they now have a chance to work on some new IP.\u00a0 There\u2019s the opportunity to go multi-platform and the chance to do something completely fresh.\u00a0 It\u2019s clearly what they were craving, after opting to walk away from Microsoft and into the arms of publishing giant Activision.\u00a0 What they do next is anyone\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n

(My guess is another shooter)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reaching for the stars<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[412,505,653,9],"class_list":["post-3028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-bungie","tag-halo","tag-halo-reach","tag-xbox360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3028"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14879,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions\/14879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}