Hands-On: Halo: Reach

With the less than stellar response to last year’s Halo 3: ODST, Bungie need to put in a little extra to make Reach fly off the shelves. Yesterday they decided to show just how much more they’ve put into their final Halo title, and to be honest it’s a lot. It’s not just passed ODST, what they showed looks like it could be above and beyond the main trilogy as well.

First up was a presentation showing off the Forge editor, Forge World and the start of the game’s campaign. To put it simply Forge World looks incredible. For those of you not familiar with the Forge mode that appeared in Halo 3 it’s essentially a real-time map editor that allows you to switch between editing and playing. Forge World takes the editor and shows you what it can really do.

Essentially Forge World is a huge empty map designed specifically to be filled with the player’s Forge creations. Don’t worry  the Forge editor is still there to some extent in every multiplayer map, Forge World is just taking the concept and putting it on steroids. The world itself is split into five zones designed for building different types of maps, and just to demonstrate what you can really do with the tool Bungie are including some maps built entirely in Forge. Two of these maps will have long time fans very excited with ‘Hemorrhage’ being a remake of the classic map made famous by Red vs. Blue ‘Blood Gulch’, whereas ‘Pinnacle’ is a remake of Halo 2’s ‘Ascension’.

The absolutely huge Forge World aside, Forge itself has had some updates. From what we saw at the event a lot of these are designed to let players build more complex maps, although there doesn’t seem to be any one new ‘killer’ feature added to the editor. Rather they’ve upgraded or added a lot of small features, building out a more comprehensive and usable editor.

With the Forge presentation over Bungie swiftly moved onto showing the campaign. We were only shown the opening stages of the campaign,with your squad investigating a suspected insurgency. Of course anyone who knows their Halo lore will instantly jump to the conclusion that it’s actually a Covenant force, but Bungie still manage to build the suspense. You catch glimpses of fast moving figures out of the corner of your eye and you quickly encounter evidence of firefights.

The story itself looks to be coming together nicely, but the main thing I took away was the graphical fidelity. It just looks great, the water and particle effects in particular. The scale of everything is what impressed me the most, Reach seems huge even if the maps you play in may be a bit more constrained. This also feels a bit more like a ‘living’ world. It doesn’t come close to touching titles like Grand Theft Auto, but you’re not in a world that’s only populated by enemies.

Whilst Reach is a military base, it still has a civilian population. At the game’s start the planet hasn’t turned into a warzone yet, and civilians are still around. In the sequence Bungie were showing your squadmates try and get some information out of a group of farmers who were sheltering from the initial attacks. We were told this won’t be a one off event and that civilians will be part of the story and world. Civilians are nice, but what stood out as more interesting was Reach’s wildlife.

A couple of ostrich looking creatures tagged along with the squad at a few points, making Reach seem more than just some random planet. In fact Bungie seem to have gone quite some way to add a unique character to the planet, as well as making the environment seem inhabited little details in the background make the world seem a little more real than in previous Halo titles.

Bungie weren’t showing that much of the campaign, but the two presentations were just the build-up to the main event – hands-on time with Firefight. The Horde-style mode first appeared in ODST, but a lot’s been added in a year. Along with a few more subtle changes Bungie were showing off seven different variations of the wave based gameplay, compared to the single mode that was featured in ODST.

To start with there are the two ‘basic’ modes of Firefight, the default and Classic. The Classic mode is taken directly from ODST, with endless waves of attacking enemies dropped off by Phantoms, whereas the new core Firefight mode is a timed experience only lasting for one set of enemy waves.

The first really ‘new’ mode is versus, which puts two players each on the Covenant and Spartan sides. The Covenant are still backed by the waves of Covenant, but the Spartans get no such backup. Sadly this makes the mode seem unbalanced and far too easy for Covenant players. Even when playing as the Covenant the mode just isn’t fun, killing Spartans over and over with little to no challenge just isn’t entertaining. Hopefully Bungie will give the Spartans some backup to try and restore the mode’s balance.

Next up is Generator Defense. This was playable in the multiplayer beta, although wasn’t shown as a Firefight variation. What it boils down to is playing as Spartans and stopping wave after wave of Covenant from taking out your power generators. This was pretty fun in the beta as a versus mode, and it only gets better as a Firefight mode.

Finally three modes that are best described as ‘gimmicky’ or party modes have been added to Firefight. Rocketfight outfits you with infinite rocket and pistol ammo, turning the map into a mass of explosions. This is the most fun I’ve had playing Firefight, it’s simply brilliant and far trickier than you’d imagine. You’d think that having infinite rockets would make things pretty simple but there’s more tactics involved than I would have thought. Rockets are fine against the low powered Grunts, but once you get up to the quick moving Elites or the tough Brutes you have to plan ahead and try to co-ordinate rocket strikes with other players.

Gruntpocalypse has a silly name to reflect a silly mode, waves and waves of Grunts in large groups are coming at you. Fighting off Grunts doesn’t sound like it presents much of a challenge, but it’s tougher than you’d expect. The silliness of the mode comes from the confetti that erupts when you score a head shot. Every time you see that confetti you get a small feeling of achievement and also a little burst of joy. The final ‘gimmicky’ mode is score attack which pretty much does what it say on the tin.

What the thousand words above really say is Reach is great so far. They’ve kept pretty much everything that feels familiar in Halo, but added enough that it feels interesting. The story telling has certainly evolved far beyond the main trilogy and is leaps and bounds past the lacklustre attempt at the noir genre in ODST. The game engine is looking far more polished than what was shown in the multiplayer beta. Forge World and the updates to Forge look excellent and significantly add to what players should be able to create; and Firefight’s new modes, with the exception of versus, really add to a mode I already felt was very enjoyable. I’m sold so far, all that’s left is to see if this all comes together as a whole.