Tag Archives: Halo: The Master Chief Collection

Halo Fest 2020 – Spartan Ops

The Story So Far: Adrift for over 4 years, the crippled UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn is pulled towards a mysterious object. Cortana wakes the Master Chief from cryosleep and the pair discover that they’re being attacked by a splinter fleet of Covenant loyalists led by the Sangeili Jul’Mdama. Without warning the object opens and violently pulls all nearby ships into it. Crashing onto the interior surface of what they learn is the Forerunner Shield World Requiem, Cortana picks up a faint signal from another UNSC ship, the supercarrier Infinity. Attempting to warn the Infinity of Requiem’s gravity well, the pair unwittingly release an ancient Forerunner warrior leader, the Didact, from stasis. The Didact resumes control of his army of defensive constructs, the Prometheans, with Jul’Mdama’s faction also falling into his ranks. Barely escaping, Master Chief and Cortana reach Infinity’s crash site where Master Chief rallies the UNSC defense, forcing the Didact into retreat. Aboard the Infinity Captain Del Rio dispatches a force to disable Requiem’s gravity generators so that the Infinity can escape. In the process the Master Chief is lured to a Forerunner facility where he’s contacted by the AI imprint of an ancient Forerunner called the Librarian. Explaining that the Didact intends to use a device called the Composer which had been used to digitally conscript living beings, including humans, into Prometheans to fight against the Flood, she insists that he must be stopped. Upon returning to the Infinity, Captain Del Rio observes Cortana’s instability and orders Master Chief to surrender her, ordering his arrest when he refuses. Instead, the Infinity’s executive officer, Commander Lasky, aids the Chief by procuring Pelican gunship for him. The Didact departs Requiem aboard his flagship, the Mantle’s Approach, though the Chief and Cortana make it just in time to stowaway on an accompanying Covenant dropship. Later hijacking the ship, the pair head to Ivanoff Station, a research facility where the Composer has been relocated. They find the station already under assault and attempt to sabotage the Composer before the Didact can reclaim it. Failing, they witness the Didact unleash the Composer on the station to devastating effect. Master Chief and Cortana then arm a Broadsword fighter with a HAVOK nuclear missile and pursue the Mantle’s Approach as it heads for Earth. Crashing into the ship’s interior, Master Chief takes the warhead and continues to fight his way to the Didact on foot. Confronting him, Cortana distracts the Didact for long enough for the Chief to manually arm the warhead. Cortana is able to teleport the Chief safely off of the ship but sacrifices herself in the process. Master Chief is later found and brought back aboard the Infinity where he quietly mourns the loss of Cortana.

Oh goody, more Knights...
“Oh goody, more Knights…”

Replacing the popular Firefight wave survival mode first introduced with Halo 3: ODST and iterated on with Halo: Reach, Halo 4 included a separate episodic co-op oriented campaign called “Spartan Ops”. 343 Industries might have opted to do this as part of an effort to canonize Halo 4’s multiplayer (AKA “Halo: Infinity”) with competitive modes being presented as war games conducted aboard the UNSC Infinity. Similarly, and the reason I wanted to cover Spartan Ops despite not talking too much about multiplayer during my Halo Fest posts is that, unlike Firefight, the Spartan Ops campaign actually includes a full story, taking place just after the events of Halo 4.

Back in the day I had started to work my way through Spartan Ops by myself on “Heroic” difficulty but quickly discovered that it was definitely tuned for 4 person cooperative play. Between this and that it still retained much of Firefight’s wave survival gameplay (and you were fighting damned Prometheans a lot of the time to boot) it was quite the slog. I think I made it as far as episode 2 before burning out, and I believe this is a huge reason for that negative impression of Halo 4 I’d been carrying around for almost a decade now. Going back to the campaign in 2021, I decided that cranking my difficulty down to “Easy” would probably be a solid first step in meeting my goal of making it all the way through this time.

What can I say? The Warthog never gets old!
“What can I say? The Warthog never gets old!”

While still not a total cakewalk, there were a few things unique to Spartan Ops that made it a bit more tolerable. For one, weapon racks and ammo crates are generously placed throughout each map. Sure, you may still need to grab a Covenant or Promethean weapon from time to time, but you’ll have the option of using UNSC weapons without worrying about running out of ammo much more often than in Halo 4 proper. There are also special ordnance drops that are given to you during many missions, usually when there’s a particular reason you might need a special weapon; rocket launchers being dropped for you just before a pair (or multiple pairs) of Hunters show up is a common example. You also get to use your multiplayer loadouts which means access to your choice of basic weapons and grenades, equipment, and special “tactical packages” and “support upgrades”. Finally, being multiplayer oriented, you simply respawn if you die rather than having to jump back to your last checkpoint. Nice!

Gameplay wise, your fireteam is dropped into an area and issued a linear string of objectives, coming one at a time to appear more dynamic. For instance, you might be sent to a waypoint, then told to activate a McGuffin, then told to defend the area against a few waves of enemies, then told to reach the extraction point and… oh no, reinforcements! Better defeat a few more waves so you can extract! You get the point. In the first 5 episodes this gets very formulaic and very repetitive very quickly. Even more so when you consider that the same 8 maps are featured multiple times in those 25 levels, and many of them are based on sections from the main Halo 4 campaign or are straight up taken from multiplayer in the first place.

Episodes 6 through 10 greatly improve things by introducing a new batch of maps which feel purposely crafted to be used this way. They also do a better job of varying the gameplay, though the tradeoff is that some chapters end up feeling more like single player campaign missions than Firefight-like scenarios. That said, all 10 episodes have some cool moments, including some awesome vehicle-centric sections. It should also be noted that Spartan Ops doesn’t suffer from the issue of having confined, linear levels that I mentioned in my Halo 4 post. Even some of the small maps feel very open which is refreshing when coming straight from the main campaign.

Palmer and Majestic capture another Forerunner artifact.
“Palmer and Majestic capture another Forerunner artifact.”

Presentation is another story. Individual chapters start and end with short in-game cutscenes and there are numerous radio communications from your mission handlers about your objectives throughout. Most notably, the biggest story beats are told via lengthy, beautiful rendered cutscenes created by Axis Animation that kick off every new episode and focus on a core cast of characters, many of whom you’ve already met in Halo 4. Honestly, say what you will about Halo 4, but these cutscenes are peak Halo awesomeness in my opinion and I’d love an entire series done this way.

The story itself is quite good too. Untangled from the legacy of Master Chief’s story and the perceived lore complexities of introducing the Didact and the Librarian, I’d suggest perhaps better than Halo 4’s. I definitely got pretty into it in any case. For one, I know he didn’t originate with Halo 4, but I thought Jul’Mdama was a great, more grounded antagonist. I also like getting some insight into the SPARTAN-IVs and the idea of Dr. Halsey feeling somewhat left behind as more advancements are made without her (which I feel is a more realistic narrative than making her cartoonish traitor.) Hell, I even started to like Sarah Palmer by the end of the campaign thanks in large part to the way her relationship with Lasky is depicted. The 10 episode story arc has a satisfying enough conclusion while also leaving some major developments wide open and begging for a sequel. I don’t know if one was actually planned or not, but sadly, a second season of Spartan Ops would never arrive, leaving the story to need to be fully resolved elsewhere.

Fun times in the corridors of the Infinity.
“Fun times in the corridors of the Infinity.”

All in all, Spartan Ops is a pretty damn cool batch of bonus content that I doubt a lot of Halo fans have experienced. While I’m not sure I can heartily recommend it to solo players, there were numerous chapters that stuck out to me as likely being incredibly fun when played cooperatively while I was playing through. That said, in the exceedingly likely event that you’re unable to convince even a single buddy to play through this huge 50 mission campaign with you, watching a compilation of its awesome cutscenes is still an absolutely worthy investment of your time and that, at least, gets that my recommendation.

Next up, something completely different…

Halo Fest 2020 – Halo 4

The original Halo trilogy had been wrapped up for over 5 years and Bungie’s last two Halo releases, excellent as they were, were side stories. Now with Halo 4 we were getting an actual sequel, but the first crafted entirely by 343 Industries. Could they execute at anywhere close to Bungie’s level? What new ideas would they have to push the series forward? Most importantly to many fans, what would become of our beloved Master Chief?

As with the last several games, I’d really only played through Halo 4’s campaign once, at launch, though unlike those games I didn’t come away with an extremely positive impression of it. Instead, as I alluded to in my original brief mention of it here, I mostly appreciated it for simply allowing me to revisit a franchise I loved. While I did a fair amount of random matchmaking early on, the days of spending countless hours playing splitscreen and LAN games with family and friends were ancient history. Without those kinds of more enduring memories, Halo 4 is where the series stopped feeling quite so special to me. On top of that, for years now whenever I thought about its campaign I’d often remember it as a bit of a tedious slog. Oof!

Master Chief and Cortana, 2012 style.
“Master Chief and Cortana, 2012 style.”

As with almost everything else I’ve covered as part of Halo Fest 2020 up to this point, I replayed Halo 4 on “Heroic” difficulty as part of the Xbox One’s Master Chief Collection on my Series X. The MCC version of the game doesn’t receive much of an upgrade but, as with Halo: Reach, Halo 4 was already an incredible looking game in the first place. In fact, I’d commented that Reach might have been one of the Xbox 360’s best looking games, and while I think I still favor it artistically, Halo 4 surpasses it.

While Halo 4’s graphics might have been a technical feat, some major aesthetic shifts were less positively received. Bungie tweaked their designs with almost every iteration of the series but 343 took it a lot further. Front and center, Master Chief’s iconic armor was given a major facelift, with a far more futuristic design yet a more gritty and realistic texture and a darker color scheme. Cortana’s new design was particularly jarring, with her model looking far more voluptuous and, well, straight up nude. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I dislike her new look, I can’t help but find the choice just a bit questionable. On the sound design front we no longer have Marty O’Donnell working on the soundtrack for the first time in a mainline Halo game. That’s not to say the new soundtrack, which goes in some very different directions, is anywhere close to being bad, but it feels entirely underutilized and nowhere near as notable a part of the whole experience as it did in, say, Halo 3 for example.

Not really what you want to see first thing after waking up...
“Not really what you want to see first thing after waking up…”

As with Halo: Reach, the campaign features a nice variety of different environments and of course, per Halo tradition, multiple vehicle-centric sections including a couple featuring the new Mantis mech suit. There’s also a level that feels very similar to the Falcon level from Reach where you instead pilot a Pelican gunship, and in a similar throwback to Reach, one that feels like a Star Fox level in which you fly a Broadsword fighter. There’s also a section featuring something of a super-sized Elephant from Halo 3’s Sandtrap multiplayer map called a Mammoth.

One issue with Halo 4’s level design is that there is a major lack of large open areas, especially problematic in those vehicle dominant sections. Really, as a whole the campaign’s levels are rather linear, complete with invisible walls and out-of-bounds kill timers. If you don’t attempt to explore or get too creative you may not even notice, but those hardcore Halo players who like to wring every last drop of gameplay out of each game will definitely be turned off by this. I was also surprised to see some QTE-like interactions very early in the campaign. These don’t make a reappearance until the final boss fight, and while QTEs don’t particularly offend me, having a game that doesn’t really rely on them end with one did feel a little anticlimactic.

The only thing better than a tank is a tank filled with Spartans.
“The only thing better than a tank is a tank filled with Spartans.”

I already mentioned the Mantis and the Broadsword, so yes, Halo 4 absolutely continues the trend of featuring a variety of new and updated vehicles and weapons. In fact, it goes even further than previous games by making changes to practically every piece of equipment at your disposal. They’ve also been renamed to designate that, canonically, they’re supposed to be different, newer versions of the classics we know and love. There’s also some new additions, like the Covenant Storm Rifle, the UNSC SAW, and the UNSC Railgun. More notably, there’s the huge addition of a whole arsenal of Promethean weapons. For the most part, these feel like counterparts to UNSC and/or Covenant weapons, but given that ammo can be fairly scarce and you’ll be fighting Prometheans most of the time, you’ll likely end up using them whether you want to or not, and you may not, as several of them are fairly lackluster. I’m looking at you, Pulse Grenade!

Halo 4’s equipment system has also seen some changes. While it works more or less the same as Reach’s Armor Abilities, it now includes several totally new abilities like the Autosentry, Hardlight Shield, Thrusters, and Promethean Vision, in addition to some Reach favorites like my beloved jetpack. The ever controversial Armor Lock is gone, while Sprint is now a standard ability anyone can do.

The new Mantis is badass, thouh not badass enough to shoot down the Cryptum, unfortunately.
“The new Mantis is badass, though not badass enough to shoot down the Cryptum, unfortunately.”

If you’ve not played Halo 4, you’re probably wondering what in the hell a “Promethean” is. In short, they’re a new variety of enemy that you’ll be fighting along with our old Covenant pals. There are three main varieties of Promethean. Crawlers, canine-like cannon fodder enemies that sometimes appear in pretty large groups. Watchers, which are flying Sentinel-like enemies that aren’t a huge source of damage but project shields onto their allies and can even resurrect other dead Prometheans. They also annoyingly love to dodge and dart away before you’ve managed to finish them off. Finally, there’s Promethean Knights. An Elite or Brute-level enemy, these assholes are bullet sponges who can wield a variety of weapons, including some high damage ones. They also love to dodge and even teleport away mid-fight, recharging their shields, which is goddamn annoying when you’re trying to finish one off. More frustratingly, these guys almost always have Watchers around them and can even spawn them themselves, which means extra shields you have to contend with and the possibility of coming back to life after you’ve killed them. Argh!

Prometheans are, in short, not fun. I feel like 343 was trying to capture the more interesting aspects of fighting the Flood, yet missed the mark. Knights might be fine if they only made rare appearances, but in some sections they’re absolutely everywhere. Eventually towards the end of my playthrough I’d developed the reckless but effective tactic of charging them with a high rate of fire weapon and trying to empty a magazine directly into their faces before they could teleport away. Those types of weapons tend to burn through ammo though, and, as mentioned, ammo for UNSC weapons is fairly scarce which makes the best candidate for this the Promethean Suppressor. Much more importantly, the shielding and resurrection abilities of the Watchers means they’re always going to be your priority target, and that leads to favoring mid to long range so you can pick them off from safety, which is, yeah, not the Suppressor’s strength. Beyond these issues, I wouldn’t say Halo 4 isn’t overly difficult, but when you add in the fact that so many areas are, yet again, set up like Firefight style wave defense arenas it can be damn tedious.

100,000 years of self-reflection and yet, still a dick.
“100,000 years of self-reflection and yet, still a dick.”

While Halo 4’s story is probably better than most Halo fans give it credit for, I personally don’t love the direction they took it in. First we have the new antagonist, the Didact. My problem with this plotline is that it totally kills the enigmatic nature of the Forerunners and their murky relationship with humanity (at least, as presented in-game.) With that, 343 Industries has had to really complicate the story to work this all in. Backstory that lived mostly in other media is now vital to the games and, worse yet, is clumsily presented, with the bulk being explained in a single, absolute lore-dump of a cutscene. Finding the hidden terminals on every level and watching their associated cutscenes is practically required to really understand what in the hell is going on, at least if you haven’t been keeping up with the books and the comics.

Hinted at in Halo 3, the other piece of the story is Cortana’s emerging rampancy. It’s a minor part of Halo 4’s plot overall, but it definitely affects how the Chief and Cortana are characterized. Beyond being more chatty than ever before, their flirty quips take on an almost awkward tone, as if 343 is suddenly trying to present their relationship as somehow… romantic?! Still, despite the risk of Master Chief developing a personality, I don’t feel like anything he says is out of character. He’s still the same stoic man of action. His actions, on the other hand? It didn’t occur to me until I wrote up the plot summary for Halo 4 for my next post, but he and Cortana fail constantly in this game. Practically every major story beat involves them utterly fucking up. Well, I guess that’s one approach to humanizing a character!

Warthog run? Nah, how about a Ghost run? Bop!
“Warthog run? Nah, how about a Ghost run? Bop!”

If it’s not obvious by this point, Halo 4 is a divisive game. A lot of the Halo fanbase considers it to be utter trash. As with Halo: Reach, some of that comes from the multiplayer community, who felt like things like custom loadouts and ordinance drops were desperate attempts to chase the Call of Duty crowd. While there is no shortage of genuine criticism of the game to be made, there’s also a lot of silly toxicity around the 343 Industries handoff that muddies the water. The ironic part is that much of what fans bash 343 over in Halo 4 is them continuing exactly where Bungie left off with Halo: Reach. Personally, replaying it again, I enjoyed it a lot more than I’d remembered. In fact, I suspect it was Spartan Ops, not the Halo 4 campaign itself, that soured my impressions of the game so much. I’ll be talking about that in my next post.

Bonus live-action media time! “Scanned” is a trailer for Halo 4 released just after Forward Unto Dawn started being released, also on Halo Waypoint. It depicts Master Chief being restrained by some sort of field and being scanned by what we’ll come to find out is the Didact. As the scan probes his mind, it zooms into scenes showing John as a child being abducted by ONI, his later SPARTAN-II augmentation, and being suited with his Mjolnir armor. It then fast forwards to Master Chief engaging a group of Promethean Knights before being subdued. This one is definitely very cool!

Halo Fest 2020 – Reach

Even more than with Halo 3: ODST, I was hyped-up for the release of Halo: Reach. By this time we knew that Reach was going to be Bungie’s last Halo game and between previews and Bungie’s own PR, it sounded like they had every intention of sending the series off with a bang. While I was a bit disappointed that early rumors of Reach being a more squad tactics oriented game were never realized, the game we ended up with was still my favorite entry in the series up to that point (at least, when I’m not nostalgically giving that credit to Halo: CE.) As with ODST, I only really played through Reach’s campaign once, just after its release, and I was looking forward to playing through it again. I wasn’t disappointed.

Everyone to the cave for a team meeting!
“Everyone to the cave for a team meeting!”

Despite my praise, Halo: Reach ended up being controversial to much of the hardcore fanbase for various reasons, from its lore departures from most people’s introduction to Halo fiction, The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund, to a plethora of mechanical adjustments that, while seemingly small on the surface, drastically changed the landscape of multiplayer – from overpowered and gimmicky armor abilities such as armor lock, jetpacks, and sprint, to reticle bloom and the overreliance on Forge-built maps, just to mention the highlights. Even today Reach is blamed for killing the Halo competitive scene, beginning a downward spiral as Halo headed into the 343 Industries years. Thankfully, being relatively casual multiplayer players, me and my friends didn’t have too many complaints on this front. The game felt a little different, sure, but each iteration does, and hey, fucking jetpacks!

Halo: Reach was added as part of the Master Chief Collection almost 10 years after its original release, and of course, that’s how I played it on my Xbox Series X for this playthrough. Like MCC’s Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST, Reach didn’t receive a remaster as much as a straight port with requisite improvements to its resolution, textures, and framerate. That’s okay, as Reach was certainly a major technical leap from Halo 3 if not one of the Xbox 360’s best looking games, period. It’s just an amazingly beautiful game all around, and it still holds up rather well today thanks to the abundance of care and polish Bungie put into it. Save for some occasionally stiff looking character animations and some odd looking facial and hair texture and lightning issues, it even manages to look fairly modern.

MY gravity hammer!
“MY gravity hammer!”

Iterative technical improvements aren’t anything new for the series, of course, but one major departure from the rest of the Halo games is the story. While still conjuring the typical themes of heroism against overwhelming odds, sacrifice, like, real loss of life sacrifice, is a huge theme in Reach. As such, the game has a much darker, more mature story than any other Halo game. Characters die, the heroes of the story aren’t conventionally victorious, and as such, Reach is utterly lost to the Covenant. Hopefully none of that was too spoilery. In fact, since this is a side story taking place out of chronological order from the main series anyway, I’ll recap the plot now. While I’m fairly vague in these plot summaries they absolutely do still contain spoilers, so skip the next two paragraphs if you want to avoid them.

The Story: NOBLE Team, a SPARTAN special operations fireteam assigned to the colony world Reach, is dispatched to investigate a blackout at a major communication hub. NOBLE quickly discovers a Covenant advanced team in the area, triggering a planet-wide emergency declaration. A short time later NOBLE participates in a reconnaissance mission that leads to the discovery of a large invasion force gathering on the planet’s surface. In response, the UNSC launches a massive preemptive strike, taking down a number of Covenant teleportation spires and anti-air batteries before progress comes to a devastating halt when the Covenant supercarrier Long Night of Solace appears. Lacking sufficient weapons to take down the supercarrier, NOBLE is dispatched on a mission to commandeer the slipspace drive from a UNSC frigate, infiltrate a Covenant corvette, and then detonate the drive close enough to the supercarrier to cripple it. Manually detonating the drive, NOBLE-5 successfully destroys the ship, though sacrificing himself in the effort. Victory is extremely short lived as an enormous Covenant fleet jumps into orbit only a short time later. NOBLE team is assigned to assist evacuation efforts in the city of New Alexandria during which NOBLE-2 is killed in action and the city is completely annihilated. With a full withdrawal now underway, NOBLE is dispatched to ONI Sword Base on a demolition mission. Fighting their way into the base, the team is led into a secret research facility built around a large underground Forerunner ruin where they meet Dr. Halsey, the head scientist behind the Spartan program. Halsey tasks the team with carrying new information that she believes will be vital to the war effort safely off world. NOBLE-3 accompanies Halsey while the remainder of the team head to the shipyard where the UNSC cruiser Pillar of Autumn is waiting to depart. NOBLE-1 sacrifices himself clearing the way for NOBLE-4 and NOBLE-6, who manage to clear the shipyard, repelling multiple waves of Covenant attackers before NOBLE-4 is killed. NOBLE-6 delivers the package to Captain Keyes but elects to stay behind to man an anti-air battery, helping the Pillar of Autumn to escape. NOBLE-6 is eventually overcome while the Pillar of Autumn jumps to safety where it is revealed that Dr. Halsey’s information is contained in the AI Cortana and that the Pillar of Autumn has just jumped to Halo Installation 04.

There are so many beautifully framed cutscenes but this one was especially poignant.
“There are so many beautifully framed cutscenes but this one was especially poignant.”

The focus on Master Chief as the hero of the series has mythologized the idea that Spartans are practically demi-gods so actually seeing them dying left and right in a Bungie developed Halo game was, hopefully, a bit of a wake up call, even if most of them being SPARTAN-IIIs provides something of an out for diehard fanboys. The events of Reach also send home how overwhelmed humanity was by the Covenant. They had the technical and numerical superiority and a fanatical cause driving them, and humanity was being systematically wiped out. Finally, I love how the end of the game brings the series full circle, with the last moments of the campaign being precisely where Halo: Combat Evolved starts. Knowing that NOBLE’s sacrifice directly led to and enabled the events of the main trilogy made it all the more effective, putting a positive spin on an otherwise somber story. It also managed to conjure up some unexpected but powerful nostalgic emotion in me, even the second time through.

Appropriately, Bungie seemed to go back to the original game for a lot of inspiration. Based on original designs, the Covenant species feel more alien and more menacing. Even those adorable little grunts are less overtly silly and are all-around tougher than they’ve ever been before. In fact, playing through Reach on “Heroic” felt a lot more like the difficulty of Halo: CE or even Halo 2 than Halo 3 or ODST. While I don’t remember being utterly stuck at any point, I definitely feel like I had a lot more back to back deaths this time around. Part of that was due to Reach’s reliance on Firefight arena style map sections where you’d need to defeat wave after wave of enemies before moving on. I know ODST is the game with the reputation for overusing this mechanic, but I honestly felt it more with Reach.

Kat and I taking our new Revenant out for a spin.
“Kat and I taking our new Revenant out for a spin.”

There were plenty of departures too. The aforementioned “armor abilities” were probably the biggest single change to the Halo formula. Replacing Halo 3’s equipment system, armor abilities allow the player to activate a single on-demand power, most governed by a recharging energy pool. These abilities are all over the place, from classics like active camouflage and the bubble shield, to seemingly simple ones like the ability to sprint or dodge roll. The biggest two additions are the jetpack, which is a little controversial but I’m personally a fan of hopping around all over the place like an idiot, and armor lock. Armor lock essentially makes the player totally invulnerable while on, while an EMP pulse charges and is unleashed once the lock is over. The player’s health and shields will also recharge as normal during the lock. In the campaign this could be useful for preventing big damage or doing an emergency recharge (although the enemy AI tends to simply stop and wait around for the armor lock to end, with feels a little stupid) but in multiplayer the ability to be invulnerable on-demand combined with the situationally usefulness of the EMP pulse altered the flow of fights in a way that many people thought was devastatingly overpowered.

Halo Reach only includes one new enemy, the barely noteworthy Skirmishers which come in several varieties, although all of the classic Covenant enemies have been re-tuned and come in several varieties themselves. Weapons wise, we have a lovely new battle rifle stand-in called the designated marksman rifle (DMR) and its Covenant equivalent, the needler rifle. There’s also a new grenade launcher and its rough match, the Covenant concussion rifle. There’s a few other new items, like Covenant focus rifle, plasma repeater, and plasma launcher, but as usual, nearly every weapon in the game has been adjusted. Reach’s additions to the vehicle inventory are even more conservative, with the new Covenant Revenant which is something like a mix between a Wraith and a Ghost, a fun new UNSC aircraft similar to the Hornet called the Falcon, and the new UNSC Sabre and Covenant Seraph fighters.

Now do a barrel roll!
“Now do a barrel roll!”

Those new fighters are specific to what is probably the biggest new feature of the game, the space sections of the mission “Long Night of Solace”. In these sections you pilot the new Sabre fighter in what feels a little like the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games or the more freeform Star Fox levels. While I thought those sections were an interesting addition to the already good amount of gameplay variety available in Halo campaigns, some people absolutely hated it. As a personal anecdote, every time Reach comes up in conversation with my brother, he always complains about this particular mission, claiming to have been stuck on this part of the campaign since 2010. Ha! The new Falcon also gets some dedicated time in “New Alexandria”. Beyond these sections, Reach features the typical selection of levels from on-foot corridor-running CQB sections, more open on-foot areas, sections reliant on running Warthogs and Scorpion tanks, and of course, most missions mix up all of these. There’s a lot of variety in the environmental aesthetics of these sections too. It all feels appropriately very Halo and about the only thing Halo: Reach is missing is another “Warthog Run” section.

There’s a lot more I could go into about Reach: the weird AI-centered sidestory found on the datapad pickups in the campaign, the numerous changes to multiplayer including an overhauled progression system and the new epic Invasion mode, bringing back Firefight for more co-op shenanigans, greatly expanded Forge and Theater modes, etc. It’s overall one a hell of a package, and a wonderful way for Bungie to wave goodbye to the series. Most importantly, the love Bungie put into it is obvious, and while it might not have the staying power as the mainline Master Chief installments of the series, it’s story was at least uniquely impactful.

Kat is having a bad day.
“Kat is having a bad day.”

As with my last few entries, I’ll end by touching a bit on the awesome live action promotional content developed around Halo: Reach. There’s “Birth of a Spartan” which is a short that shows Carter-A259 being transformed from a young trainee into a SPARTAN-III and “Remember Reach” which depicts numerous citizens of Reach as they go about their normal lives, oblivious to the impending Covenant invasion. Neat but not essential. “Deliver Hope” on the other hand is absolutely essential! This live-action trailer shows NOBLE team in a battle to defend the colony Fumirole as they attempt to get a fusion bomb onto a Covenant battlecruiser to destroy it. Go watch it if you haven’t seen it!

I got so many amazing screenshots this time around, it really was quite an effort to not just replace all of this rambling with a huge image galley and drop the mic!