Halo: Reach Review
Short Version: Halo: Reach helps wash away bad memories of ODST by delivering a polished compelling offline campaign with plenty of variety. Jetpacks, Falcon Gunships, and Space Combat portions help keep things fresh. Bungie’s multiplayer offers potentially hundreds of hours with an immense amount of control, content, and stat tracking to its online community. A perfect thank you to fans, but ultimately its unwillingness to take risks has it fall just short of being revolutionary as the first two Halo’s were.
What you’ll Like:
• This is Halo Polished to the Maximum, the very best of all of the games, if you haven’t played any Halo this is the game you should start with.
• The Space Combat is actually really fun!
• The amount of multiplayer modes, customization, and stat tracking is amazing – few games can come close to what Bungie offers players here.
• The Soundtrack is superb as always!
• Best Part: The Space Combat section was a welcome break and brings a whole new and fun experience to the Halo Franchise! More of this please.
What you’ll Hate:
• A bit of wasted potential here as its unwilling to take risks – No multiplayer Space Combat or Persistant Online War Modes.
• With a shortish campaign around 8 hours its seems theres not enough time to grow an attachment to any of the Noble Team members who fall into the generic stereotype traps.
• The Story on a whole should have had more emotion.
• Worst Part: Bullshit Checkpoints that end up screwing me in Heroic and Legendary Difficulties.
Final Verdict:
8/10
Excellent!
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180 thoughts on “Halo: Reach Review”
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I can’t agree more with you, Joe. I’ve walked through Reach some time ago and it was a wonderful game, but somewhat felt short and it just ended right there, when I was feeling “now I know how to play this game, sweet, let’s roll”. Bang, the end. What? I’ve just bought Xbox and Halo: Reach after my divorce with PS3 and that’s it? An end already?
Space battle – absolutely sweet, doesn’t take much to imagine persistent online space battle, that would be EPIC like ME3 multi.
Joe, so far I’ve just watched your show and was interested on your opinions on games I didn’t have yet, but after watching Reach review – I’m listening to your opinion blind. You’ve just earned one more faithful fan. Thank you!
PS: And if Americans feel wallet-raped for paying $60 for ODST, imagine how people in Poland feel with $60 game and 800$ pay… No fucking way! AJ show first, then buying (or not) from now on.
Very great review, Joe! Very truthful as always, and as much as I always want Halo games to always come out as 10/10 material, I think it’s cool you still rate them fairly without either overly forgiving reviews or overly damning reviews. I must point out, however, that you can have 4 players for offline coop, not just the 1. Keep up the good work, Joe!
if you move the camera in the ending credits, you can see master chief.
The REAL problem with this game is the TEAM A.I.nuff said
ah i see you referenced star wars battle front 2
Halo Reach was a fairly decent game, though there were a few things that lacked a bit.
rumors have it that halo is going to go all the way to Halo 9
do halo 4
Alright. I’ve played every Halo game extensively, and to me the most powerful was, is, and will forever be Halo 3. Halo 3 is the PERFECT first person shooter. I don’t say that lightly. I have played over 2.5k custom games in Halo 3 and I loved every. single. second. of it. Halo Reach… wasn’t like that. First of all, Halo Reach requires a lot more focus on the packs that you use, some of which are criminally overpowered or simply too weak to even matter. For example, active camo: it doesn’t make you fully invisible, PLUS it activates radar jam. You’d think that’s a good thing, but when I see radar jam I instantly look for someone phasing in and out of invisibility, and I almost always find them. Armor lock is useless since you can’t actually DO anything in armor lock and the person you’re locking from is just gunna gun you down when it runs out. The jetpack is useless, and combo’d with the falling damage (WHY IN HELL IS THERE FALLING DAMAGE IN A HALO GAME) doesn’t help one goddamn bit. Sprint is the only one that’s actually balanced, and you’ll NEED sprint because the normal running speed is so…. so…. slow compared to other Halo games.
Now, when I look at Halo, I look at it completely for custom games, getting 15 other friends together to fuck around in random awesome maps made by the community, and a lot of the custom games that bring me back to Halo 3 TO THIS DAY just… don’t work. What’s broken the most is infection, and that makes me EXTREMELY sad because infection was the HIGHLIGHT of Halo 3! Try to set finite lives in infection, and have the zombies run out of lives. Guess what happens? NOTHING. THE GAME GLITCHES AND DOESN’T END UNTIL EVERY HUMAN SURVIVOR COMMITS SUICIDE. Not to mention that the elegance, the simplicity of the original Halo 3 is gone completely; it doesn’t take 1000 options to make something fun, just a little bit of tweaking and some imagination, which Halo Reach completely throws out the window.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the changes to melee damage. No matter what amount of health the person is at, if the target’s shields aren’t completely down, you have to hit them twice to kill them. ALWAYS. So if you hit someone just a BULLET too early, they have the chance to punch you twice and kill you first. Unacceptable. And parrying doesn’t work for shit, or it works too well and keeps fights going on for far too long, worse than it was in Halo 3 with the sword because there was actually STRATEGY behind that, like whether you hit B or RT and at what time you did so.
Driving physics are completely ruined as well; vehicle collision just freezes both warthogs in place rather than giving you the ability to push another warthog off a cliff, for example.
Don’t get me wrong, Halo Reach is a fine game, but it has so many issues that hinder it from being the perfection that Halo 3 was. Halo 3 didn’t need bells and whistles to be great, it was all elegance and strategy and twitchy combat skills, which Reach dumbs down to extremely simplistic levels to the point that I no longer want to play the game for extended periods of time. The beta? The beta was really, really fun at the time. But when I bought the actual game, and played it for around 80 hours… that’s when the little things caught up to me.
P.S. Firefight is better in ODST because the ODST Firefights are more tailored to the map and custom-made, it just feels so superficial in Reach, like an afterthought, and the different Firefight maps don’t have the deep changes in strategy they did in ODST.
I luv halo reach this game was for me but I broke my because of all the cool content in the game I played non stop I can wait for halo I’m shiting in my pants because I’m a huge fan this game is bad ass and so are all the other halo game ecept for halo war that game sucked ball sacks
so much fun. grab a friend and play this game for hours. its doesn’t frustrate you like call of duty with overpowered weapons in my opinion.solid storyline, although i didn’t really care when my team stared getting picked off. i was confused on why their is no space combat multiplayer when they made a big deal about it.
This game is really amazing, I especially like the introduction of space combat (although it was a bit of a let down when it was only in the story) as well as the story itself which I daresay is the best in the series, I wished only that it lasted longer so you could get to know more about Noble Team.
HALO 4!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If Joe’s expection become true….HALO Reach will be Call Of Duty + Battlefield in Sci Fi mode…
Badass Story, badass gameplay, and badass multiplayer…and definetely…10/10…Legendary…
This is possibly the best multiplayer of any FPS out there. For every reason stated in this review. Also there is no “this weapon is locked until you reach level ten” or “Press X to purchase for $5″. I could just jump right in with all of the weapons and equipment of someone at the rank of commander. This is the most balanced and fun multiplayer experience I’ve ever had. Sure, you have DLC map packs and you have to unlock new visual armor parts. That’s to be expected in anything that has multiplayer. Now if only Bungie could release this massive space and ground conquest multiplayer that so many psp games have in single player. Unfortunately, Bungie is not in charge of Halo 4 and I don’t have much good to say about 343 Industries as they did a poor job with their anniversary edition of Halo CE. Let’s hope that they can pull it together and make Halo 4 at least as good as Reach.
same people dude.
hmmmm yep persistent online war sounds good but check out armored core 5
for persistent online war
hora sorry em well i dond relly have a xbox ps3 counts but better so i dont relly now whats happening but the revew said it was ok so i dont now this type of game
i would rated this game worse then you did to me this game feels like lack luster The story blew it’s filled with plot holes if you judge it with the books as well as the game. as for game play it basicly borrows from halo 3 and the only thing it adds is an assasination system. the weapons were underpower especially the covenant weapons with the exception of the sword which is overpowered. and it brings back the shitty halo 3 shotgun which is an inaacurate piece of crap which can barely hit a anything unless it’s a foot in front of you and even then I may or may not kill them. with the half assed shot gun it makes the sword unbalanced and even then it doesn’t work half the time. it’s another case of how a sequel takes out everything we liked about the previous games and cuts out or “fixes” stuff that didn’t need fixing. and fails to be innovative in everysingle way. most of the maps are either the like 4 or 5 new maps and recycled halo 2 maps or even the piece of Shit forge maps.
they need to stop milking this franchise and let it die before it ends up like final fantasy or a complete fable 3 disaster.
I wouldnt really call this game the best of the franchise. Halo Combat Evolved had the best story, Halo 2 had the best online and Halo 3 was the good between the two, it was kind of dark at certain points and had the most epic music of all the game with not that bad online, and a pretty descent story with cool missions and a good ending to the series. Then Halo Wars came which basically was an attempt to earn money off of Halo fans, then came Halo 3 ODST which wasnt really bad or good, but that was insultingly short, had uninteresting characters and unfunny parts that was suppose to make us laugh. And Halo Reach. It had too bright colors, the music wasnt like how the music was at the earlier games, the characters werent that interesting. The most interesting was Jorge i must say. And it was pretty short, the spacebattle was pretty cool, but it didnt add much new, the ending was disapointing, the new armor abilities and the new weapons was bullshit and the online was the worst part with boring and unoriginal game modes. Also, most of the armors you could choose from was boring looking.
Valuable information. Fortunate me I found your site unintentionally, and I’m shocked why this coincidence didn’t came about in advance! I bookmarked it.
i love this game i just need a kill cam
I played with Halo 3 but it was boring as hell. I bought it because of a video series I saw on youtube and because the multiplayer was fine. But the singlepalyer? Oh god save me … it’s just not my kind of “story”telling. So I don’t know how could this be good for me.
Anyway , good review ! Even if I’m not a Halo fan.
Correct score, but not the right justifications though Joe.
The campaign was good. Not great, but good. There are many levels that are fun to play, but there are no end all, be all levels that were found in H:CE (AotCR, Silent Cartographer) or H3 (Covenant). But there was still alot of fun to be had. But not once did I have the feeling of the story was epic and that is where I felt let down. I would rather truly make a last stand rather than some tie-in canon shit like delivering Cortana. The story was weak.
The levels themselves were good, and some of them very large, but Bungie are a bunch of idiots. Their whole “30 seconds of fun” motto has devolved the game into pointless exercises and set pieces that no one enjoys. Flying around New Alexandria was the most irritating experience I had in this game. Halo:CE is the best game in the franchise, and a third of it is copy/paste. We dont want every level to be a god damn fucking set piece. Thankfully, there was no “Cortana” equivalent in this game.
MP was almost good. Then they added armor abilities and the balance of the game was once again broken. It seems they are trying to please too many people at once and yet are failing at it.
True some friends call me a Halo freak, but it still managed to piss me off love halo to the max but the booting and “cutting rank ties” [which happened to me wtf] online really pissed me off some how at the rank of major grade 1 my hole campain rank and armor disapeared and i still haven’t beat it after it reset i was so pissed.
it kinda was a addon, u payed for halo 3 multiplayer to support the horrible multi player for odst kinda i gusse…
i think that the main reason bungie didnt do a persistant battle is because of how xboxLIVE works. its not setup to work like the PS3Network, because you have to link to the players in different ways, and it gets really technical. Im sure companies would take advantage of a persistant war, but the xboxLIVE system just dosent support it.
Wongkey is right Joe, you missed a lot in this review.
Though i love the spaceship battles as well, i can’t say i wanted to play it 24/7. To me, it was a fresh taste that you can only get the first time. Then it got more and more bitter as you replayed it. Though i do think there should be clan battles.
And this may not be a Ledgendary ending, but in the cutscene where the pillar of autum is leaving, hold the right stick to the right. Your mind will be blown.
Hmmm I thoroughly enjoyed the mindhack review but IMO this review was lacking big time…
The review entirely misses out what Halo Reach brought to the Halo series. Instead the review is focused on Space battle and visuals. Seriously? This review gives gamers no relevant information as to what is new in the Reach game play universe.
Joe totally ignores the new armor abilities introduced besides jet packing. He also totally forgot to mention the introduction of the bloom on the new DMR and pistol and how it affects gameplay. As a consumer and gamer I would rather listen to the technicalities of the new armor abilities and guns then listen to Joe talk about space battles.
Also introduced was the credit and revamped ranking system which rewards players for accomplishing feats during game play. Reach also brought a wider customization so players could better design their own spartan. The game also has weekly and daily challenges which exposes players to play the different multiplayer gametypes rather than clogging mlg/slayer types all day. It makes players, “play harder” online to earn those challenges and gain credits.
The game received an 8 due to lack of space ship multiplayer battles? This is the dumbest sh*t I’ve ever heard. Why not dock every fps due to the lack of spaceship battles/ninja’s/overpowered guns. After listening to this review, seems to me that Joe is just another noob.
The game definitely does not deserve a 10/10 but definitely higher than an 8/10. I’d say 9/10. But then again I don’t know anything because I want more space battles.
pz
the new add ons are what makes me be a Halo fan instead of a C.O.D. fan.
the problem is that he could be right and you could be right. i think he made some great point, what you listed sounded very .. mediocre, where as space battles and from what i saw, really did leave an impact. but again i dont know why the hell im writing this in such an old review, guess i just dont like jerk who are maybe right but act like they are.
also i love joe! leave him alone! sob sob and all that.
The public of this site gave it even lower than 8… They gave it a 7.7! So stop talking, because it deserves lower! Not MW3 Lower… But a tad lower so shut it.
the amazing was supposed to be sarcastic
in halo reach i got juns helmte as a aveter aword
amazing, and i got Emile’s. besides, jun’s helmet is one of the two easiest helmets to get along side kat’s
me too, too bad you can’t get kat’s helmet ,Jeorge’s ,or Eile’s helmet offline thats a bummer since mine isn’t fast enouph for live play, but i managed to go to a friend’s and buy some new avatar items such as the free oracle from waypoint and recon armor and Carter’s suit to match the helmet.