On Monday I went to a rather fancy hotel in London, ate some free food, met Jason Bradbury – he’s very nice – and played some of Halo Reach’s Multiplayer. It’s been a little whilst since I’ve really talked about Halo in any significant way. Well that’s not true, I probably talk about Halo once or twice a week, but it’s been a while since I really wrote about Halo so I was more than happy to get the chance again. I’m even more happy to say that, quite simply, Reach is great. After the somewhat disappointing ODST, it’s great to see a return to form. Of course I can’t categorically say the game as a whole will be amazing, it was really ODST’s single player that was a let down, but from what I played the multi-player certainly seems worth the price of admission.
Bungie have done a great job in adding to Halo 3’s already robust multiplayer. The biggest change is the addition of Armour Abilities, essentially special moves you can use a few times before they need to recharge. These include the jet packs that we’ve seen before, sprint, evade (an Elite only move that’s basically a quick roll), active camouflage and the brilliant Armour lock.
Armour lock essentially has the Spartan armour lock down and increase the shield power making you invulnerable to everything. Yes it’s pretty common invincibility, but at the end of the lock an EMP blast is created, shutting down any shields in the area to give you a brief advantage over the enemy. Abilities are selected through the use of a loadout selection, allowing you to select a combination of Armour ability and weapons. Loadouts can be changed at respawn, and in some modes will ‘level up’ as the match progresses.
So new game modes? Well Bungie are talking about four right now, Invasion, Headhunter, Stockpile and Generator Defence. Invasion is the only mode I spent any significant time with so I’ll come to that last, but first lets cover the other three. Headhunter is a lot of fun, a free for all where every player killed drops a skull. You collect skulls, but they only count once deposited in certain areas of the map. If someone takes you out before you can deposit them all the skulls you’ve collected are now up for grabs. Basically it’s a nice twist on traditional deathmatch modes, a welcome addition.
Stockpile boils down to capture the flag with new neutral flags spawning during the game, not much else to say about it. Generator Defence is simple attack and defend, Elites try and attack generators, Spartans try to defend and can turn a shield on for generators in dire circumstances.
Finally we have Invasion, the mode I spent most of my time with. This is very similar to the Assault mode from Unreal Tournament, multiple objectives that progressively unlock new objectives as the game progresses. As the Elites are pretty much always the bad guys in Halo they attack whilst Spartans defend. The ultimate target for the Elites is gaining access to a data core and getting it to an escape craft. As objectives are completed new areas of the map become available, along with vehicles which only become available after the first objective has been completed by the Elites.
There I am, two away from Jason Bradbury. Nice chap.
The basics are pretty much as they are in similar games that feature this mode, but Bungie add one nice touch I haven’t seen before. On each team players are divided into pairs, and you respawn on your partner as long as they’re not in a combat situation. I’ve experienced spawning on other team members before, but never in a pairs way and I can certainly see people starting to use the pairs as tactical units.
That’s basically what’s new for the beta, now the all important question of how it plays, looks, feels. Well to an extent it feels closer to Halo: CE, which makes sense given that it’s set before it. Med-packs are in again for Spartans, although Elites regenerate health. For some reason I actually prefer having to collect health packs than regenerating health, but I think I’m in a tiny minority on that. The overall feel is that it’s not quite as quick as other Halo games, you feel a little slower than in Halo 3, although the high turn speed is still there. It actually feels better this way, mostly because the Armour Abilities seem to balance well with the tweaks in movement speed.
As for how it looks it’s certainly not quite there yet, although the build I was on was labelled as pre-beta so it may well be a little behind. That’s not to say it looked bad, it certainly looks better than the Halo 3 engine. Where it really shines is in the level of detail. Texture detail, particularly in weapons, has had significant improvements and probably looks at least as good as most of the stuff on the market.
On weapons it’s clear the different parts of the weapon are made from distinct materials, something that I don’t typically see in games. Vehicles have also had the same kind of detailed work added, and the overall feel of the game is that everything in the environment is a little sharper than it was before. As I said it’s not quite there yet in the pre-beta build, but I’m certainly willing to give it a bit of a pass until the beta comes out.
Did I enjoy my time with it? Yes, far more than I have in previous Halo games. In general I’m not a huge fan of multiplayer, particularly not deathmatch. However something in Reach made me enjoy the one free-for-all match I played, the few rounds of CTF were enjoyable and Invasion is brilliant, the few tweaks they’ve made put it above comparable modes in other games. I will admit to being briefly disorientated as they’ve changed a few of the controls, but it’s nothing major and easy to adjust to.
Reach certainly seems to still be Halo, which is what I wanted, but they’ve improved on it and made it distinctive from Bungie’s other titles. I was already cautiously looking forward to it, and my time with the beta has moved me from cautious to optimistic. If you don’t have a copy of ODST yet I’d advise getting you hands on one to get access to the beta. Sure ODST didn’t set the world on fire, but Firefight is great and the beta easily makes it worth the cost.
