Excitement and anticipation is at an all-time high for all the Bungie fans worldwide as we approach the “Se7en Days Left” milestone before the long-awaited Halo: Reach goes live. The number 7 is a consistent theme that runs through all of Bungie’s projects so today is a bit of a special milestone for the studio and the fans that have been waiting over a year – well, months since the Beta – for a new Halo title.

Promising to be Bungie’s swan song for the Halo series (don’t fret, I think they said the same thing about Halo 3 and Halo: ODST), Halo: Reach will bring together all the good (and a few bad) elements of past Halo’s and package them together in one, polished, product. If the public Beta test from earlier this year was any indication… gamers worldwide are in for an exciting time filled with hours of fragging, flag capturing, teabagging and trash talking.  Oh yea, there is a pretty snazzy Campaign mode that will tell the story of the ill-fated human colony, Reach. But honestly, who cares about the story, right?

Campaign

The campaign mode of Halo: Reach (similar to Halo: ODST) moves away from telling the traditional tale of Halo’s main protagonist – the Master Chief – and, instead, follows a small team of elite human supersoldiers.  The game is set in the year 2552 and finds humanity locked into a familiar struggle with the alien Covenant.  Players take control of a soldier known only as Noble 6 and are thrust head-first into the battle for the world of Reach.

From Wikipedia:

Reach takes place in a futuristic science fiction setting during the year 2552, shortly before the events of the 2001 video game Halo: Combat Evolved. Humans, under the auspices of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC), have been waging a long war against a collective of alien races known as the Covenant. By the events of Reach, almost all of humanity’s interstellar colonies have fallen. Reach itself is an Earthlike colony that serves as the UNSC’s main military hub. In addition to the military presence, the colony is home to over 700 million civilians.

The game follows the actions of Noble Team, a UNSC special operations unit composed of elite supersoldiers known as Spartans. Players assume the role of an unnamed new addition to the team, identified by the call sign Noble 6. Noble Team’s leader is Carter-A259, a no-nonsense soldier. His second-in-command, Kat-B320, has a bionic arm; together, Carter and Kat are the only two remaining original members of Noble Team. The other members include heavy weapons specialist Jorge-052, Emile-A239, and marksman Jun-A266.

Multiplayer

While the Campaign mode will surely showcase and amazing story and the finest graphics available on the Xbox 360, we all know the REAL thing that keeps people coming back for months - and years - after the release of a game is the Multiplayer.  Halo: Reach will be familiar experience to anybody that has played any of Bungie’s previous Halo titles with the exception of a few notable changes.

Dual-wielding is GONE.  No more plasma-pistol + SMG nonsense.  I’m a huge fan of this change as dual-wielding weapons really pushed the ‘close quarters’ aspect of the game, as opposed to accurate medium-to-long-distance shooting, and often times was just cheesy as hell.

Halo 3′s equipment system is also gone (cheers), instead being replaced by Loadouts that feature persistent Armor Abilities that each player can pick and choose from between spawns (jeers).  This new system is pretty similar to how Call of Duty: Modern Warfare operates with one major difference.  Modern Warfare allows the player to setup custom builds ahead of time for use in-game.  Halo: Reach’s Loadouts are set ahead of time based on the map and gametype being played.  While this may seem limiting, it’s actually a good idea as it allows Bungie to balance certain gametypes without worrying about the extra variable that certain Armor Abilities bring.  Imagine being able to use Armor Lock in a King of the Hill game… nobody would use anything else and the gameplay would become stale.

Armor Abilities are as follows:

• Sprint – A short burst of speed for your spartan on a cooldown
• Jetpack – Allows the spartan to fly for a short time but at the expense of being fully exposed to enemy fire from all angles
• Active Camo – Similar to the camouflage powerup in previous Halo’s
• Armor Lock – ‘Locks’ the spartan’s shields rendering him invulnerable to all enemy fire for a short time, also locks the spartan in place for the duration of the effect. In the Beta, this ability was HIGHLY controversial
• Hologram – Not available in the Beta test, but this appears to create a short-term clone of the spartan that will throw off your opponents

Players will find the traditional Slayer, King of the Hill, Capture the Flag and Oddball game types making a glorious return in addition to a couple new variants described in detail below.

Headhunter is a new Free For All (FFA) game type that features a ‘resource gathering’ system mixed with traditional Slayer gameplay.  Upon each death, a flaming skull will fly out of the fragged player’s body.  The goal of the game type is to kill your opponents, gather up the resulting skulls and ‘bank’ the skulls in a defined location that, depending on the specific variant, moves around the map.  The real twist comes from the fact that as you pick up more and more skulls, players will be gunning for you because all of your accumulated skulls will spill out of your body upon death.  The game then becomes a fine balancing act between gathering skulls and making sure to ‘bank’ the skulls you have gathered before your opponents can kill you and steal all of your un-banked skulls.  This game type was definitely fun but extremely frustrating and nerve-wracking at the same time.  There was nothing worse than having a nice cache of skulls, running to the area to bank your skulls… and then being killed right before you could complete the task.  Epic Fail indeed.

Stockpile is a new team-based game type that has players fighting for 3 flags that spawn in a neutral position on the map every minute.  The goal of the game type is to grab the flags, bring them back to a pre-defined capture spot and then defend the capture spot for a given amount of time (~1 minute) before the game registers your flags as being ‘captured.’  Its a bit of a twist on Capture the Flag and a Territories based game type.  New flags will spawn every minute – on the minute- so the action is always a fast and furious balance of offense (trying to prevent your opponents from capping flags at their base) and defense (defending the flags you’ve managed to get back to your base from attacking opponents).  This game type relies on great communication between team members as you need to maintain a solid defense while a couple of your teammates seek out the opponents base to prevent them from capping.  This game type was fun to play during the Beta but was severely imbalanced on the 2 maps it was featured on in the Beta.

Invasion is a new 6 vs. 6 gametype that pits a team of attacking Elites (advanced Covenent soldiers) against a team of defending Spartans in an epic three-stage battle.  The goal for the Elites is to first secure a territory that unlocks a navigation core.  The elites must then attack their way towards the core and finally transport the core to a dropship to end the game.  The Spartan team basically defends against these waves of attack.  As each objective is completed by the Elites, new areas of the map open up and new Loadouts (with corresponding Armor Abilities) are available to both sides.  I only played this a couple times in the Beta and, frankly, it wasn’t for me.  The maps seem massive… often times TOO massive to really enjoy.  There is nothing worse than searching around for where the action is happening on a map when you spawn and then having to RUN all the way over to said action.  I’m sure fans of the Big Team Battle playlist will eat this game up.

Conclusions

Lets be honest here, this game WILL be the top selling console game of the year, if not the top selling game regardless of platform. Truly an amazing feat considering it is being released in September.  The only thing that might give Bungie a run for the money is Blizzard’s new Cataclysm expansion for World of Warcraft (no release date announced yet, rumors put it sometime in November).

The Campaign seems interesting enough and I’m sure the game play will tell a fine, if not a bit cliche, story. The new changes to the multiplayer are exciting and worrisome at the same time.  I have a feeling that the high-end competitive scene will just take out all of the Armor Abilities and create gametypes more akin to earlier titles.  I also forsee several abilities being abused which could create extremely frustrating games for novice players.  Either way, I’ll probably grab a copy sometime next week  - my days of waiting in line at midnight are well behind me - and dive in head first.

Links

Enjoy the footage linked below, if this isn’t enough to trigger a Pavlovian reaction… you probably don’t care that much about Halo in the first place (and thats cool too).

Official Bungie Video Links

Halo: Reach Multiplayer footage

Halo: Reach Trailer – Deliver Hope

Bungie ViDoc – Carnage Carnivale

Bungie ViDoc – Forge World

Bungie ViDoc – A Spartan Will Rise

Halo: Reach Firefight footage

Halo: Reach Quick Look – Team SWAT on Countdown

Halo: Reach Quick Look – Headhunter FFA on Boardwalk

Halo: Reach Beta footage – The Good, the Bad-ass and the Ugly