- Tupolev
- |
- Honorable Member
Multiplayer is well built but a little hit and miss on the execution; most of the default map/gameplay combinations in MM are absolutely horrible, and most of the official maps are absolutely horrible. Gameplay usually winds up being okay with the occasional spike of awesome. Custom games with cool people and good custom maps (which are often vastly superior to Bungie's maps) generally increase the rate of awesomeness spikes and overall gameplay quality to being pretty good.
Ultimately, the multiplayer is very good if you actively seek out the goodness, and I like playing some of it when I'm home from school.
Campaign? The plot is internally nonsensical; the timings of things leave a ton of gaping logic holes even without taking the other canon into consideration. The characters have horrifically little development for a story which, unlike most other Halo games, is character-driven. There are still arbitrary barriers being substituted in for careful geometry design. The enemy AI is a massive improvement on Halo 3's, but unfortunately this is slightly squandered because the weapon design and balancing often forces you to fight Halo 2-noob-combo-style. The allied AI is the worst in any game I've ever played. The main writing is usually lackluster, and the non-scripted dialogue for some reason incorporates "tangos" all the time (and misuses it in places). The admitedly well-written data pads don't seem to serve any interesting function in the canon; unlike the Halo 3 terminals or ODST audio logs, they don't strike me as spiritually welcome or meaningful in the story, but rather seem like an attempt to shoehorn in Marathonishness, or something.
I'm probably going to take a lot of crap for this, but here's my take on LW: it's one of the best ideas Bungie had for Reach, but its execution felt too contrived for it to work for me. I finished the game convinced that N6's demise had more to do with the RtB-gods than the Covenant, and the cinematic at the end was trying much too hard to be epic. I can definitely see where Yahtzee was coming from when he accused Reach's plot of being a "who can die the noblest death" competition between the characters. Yet all the cutscene combat really accomplished was taking the privilege of actually playing out N6's death away from the player. And those HUD cracks? Why are they there? My HUD didn't crack on all the other times I died; the effort to make this death "special" in some way makes it feel yet more like an overly scripted sequence, especially since those cracks can appear when you aren't being shot in the face.
I guess I would say Reach's campaign is decent as far as games in general go, but I pretty much shelved it after my Legendary playthrough. Contrast with the other Halo campaigns, all of which I still like to play occasionally, especially Halo CE.
As a whole, my perception of Reach is that it's good but that I'm nonetheless dissapointed.
[Edited on 01.22.2011 12:01 AM PST]