Whoo, boy! I ain't done this in a while!
*cracks knuckles*
[HEADING=1]TARGET ACQUIRED:[/HEADING] [HEADING=2]HALO REACH[/HEADING]
Given that this is www.Escapistmagazine.com, chances are, if you're reading this, you don't have a terribly high opinion of HALO. Chances are you're also fifteen, an atheist, and kind of a douchebag[footnote] If those words don't apply to you, pretend I wrote something nice instead.[/footnote], but that's not the point; the point is that many of us, myself included, have had something of a tumultuous relationship with the Xbox's prized franchise, and for good reason: Halo 1 was an exercise in tedium and boredom marketed as a game; Halo 2 was a slightly more refined version of the same; Halo 3 was actually kind of good but brought down by a pathetic campaign and some awful design decisions; ODST was genuinely decent, but universally disliked for some inexplicable reason; and Halo Wars was so mind-bendingly awful that I don't like to admit it exists.
Given that, it's hard to believe that I like the franchise as much as I do: but try as I might, the stylish post-Liefeldian space opera aesthetic and immensely satisfying run-and-gun gameplay override my dislike of the often-lazy storytelling and the punishing bullet-Hell difficulty. So it was with a decidedly neutral stance that I awaited HALO: Reach, the last entry in Bungie's work on HALO, and possibly the last HALO altogether.
...And now, after beating the campaign twice over (once on hard, once on super-hard; once in co-op, once on my lonesome), earning oodles of in-game commendations and achievements, creating a pimp SPARTAN, and blowing just over six hours on online matchmaking, my neutral stance has yet to change.
To put it plainly, HALO: Reach is simply...there. It pushes no envelopes, but on the other hand it cuts little slack. In the grand scheme of things, it's largely insignificant, and had it not borne the HALO name, it would've sat on the shelves for a few months and been swiftly forgotten. As a tactical shooter, it sits about even with Modern Warfare 2; as a run-and-gun shooter, it's a step below Serious Sam and a step above HALO 3; as a story, it's worse than ODST but better than Bad company; and as a Bungie title it's still made a mockery of by Marathon.
Nearly all of Reach is, in one way or another, a mistake; I can't think of a single opportunity it didn't waste or miss, with the possible exception of the extremely amusing armor customization feature.
For those of you who haven't obsessively read the HALO novels, comic books, and websites, compulsively played all the previous HALO games, and committed the HALO encyclopedia to memory, allow me and my incredible knowledge retention abilities/power to guess like a nut to explain:
Reach takes place before HALO 1, on the planet Reach during a massive attack by the race of Scientologist fundamentalists known as "The Covenant". Reach is the planet where the SPARTANS (the big lads and lasses in powered armor you play as) are trained and outfitted, as well as one of the few planets that's as strategically important to the human race as Earth itself. Given that the siege of Reach is a well-documented event in-canon and the game's tagline is "Remember Reach", there's nothing I can really spoil about the plot; and as such I will not use spoiler tags when I tell you that *MASSIVE PLOT SPOILER AHEAD*
*MASSIVE PLOT SPOILER OVER*
You play as the nameless "Six", who aside from being the spawn of Kratos and Princess Shera (as far as I can tell) is the newest addition to the six-man SPARTAN team of Noble Squad.
...Unfortunately, every single member of your team is so token that they could give the boys from Mass Effect 2 a run for their money. Additionally, they're all one-note to the extreme. First, there's Carter, your ostensible commander, who is voiced by the omnipresent Nolan North and says maybe nine things in the entire game. Then you have Kat, the ambiguously Slavic token hacker girl with a robot arm; and Jun, the ambiguously slavic token sniper guy. After that you have Emile, the ambiguously Australian psychotic killer who inexplicably is voiced by someone who I can only identify as Shaquille O'Neil; and Jorge, the most well-realized of the characters in the sense that he is Hungarian, large, and apparently had some kind of romance with the lady in charge of the SPARTAN program.
Bringing up the rear is your player avatar, the newly inducted Noble 6, who is ostensibly a highly trained assassin versed in the arts of akimbo firearms, heavy demolitions, and all those other things PCs like to be good at. Interestingly (for a HALO game), Six is created from the ground-up in the single-player and multiplayer. At the start of the game, you dictate Six's gender, armor color, and armor ensemble; and as you score points and gain ranks throughout all of the game modes (a bit like the newer Tom Clancy games), you unlock new pieces of armor which you can apply as you would. To give Reach credit, it's a fun and well-designed system, even more so because the changes you make to your character are reflected in cutscenes as well as gameplay.
It's really a shame that nobody you meet is memorable; ODST had more personality and flair than Reach does, and at least Master Chief had that eargasmic disc jockey voice. I doubt the average Joe will even remember your team members' names (I know the average Jane certainly doesn't), and this is supposed to be the deep, meaningful, character-driven finale! It's not like Bungie can't tell a good story or write a character arc--I mean, they've done both of those with this very franchise (to an extent). All it would've taken is a few cutscenes, a flashback or two, or even some in-mission dialogue to round the cast out.
It should be noted that, in a nod to Half-life 2 and...well, too many games to count, really, you spend at least one mission with each of your team members in what I assume is a tragically inept attempt to make you feel an attachment to them. What Bungie failed to realize was that players enjoyed the company of Alyx Vance and Elena Fisher because they were more than just a few extra guns you didn't have to carry; both of them were developed in their own ways, so they felt less like clouds of ones and zeroes and more like living, breathing people.
I--and I think I speak for everyone--don't want to play a game where I work as a team with Kat, an ambiguously russian cyborg with a gun. I want to play a game where my teammate is Katherine Tchaikovsky, a native of the Russian-dominated agricultural planet Byway, where she had a promising career as a ballerina before being kidnapped at age seven and brainwashed into becoming a SPARTAN; and I want to know that one day she hacked into her personal file and rediscovered her past, to find out that her mother had died in a tractor-related accident shortly after she was taken and her father had joined the army; and I want to learn about how she realized, horrified, that her father had been gunned down while she watched two months previously, and how ever since she's been wrestling with her torturous existence as a living weapon of mass destruction who is also, under that mask, a breathing, thinking human being.
But, as it is, Noble team is essentially:
_______
[color=white]________________[/color][b]Left to right: Heavy Weapons Guy, Nathan Drake, Space whale, Skeleton hat, Miss Ingarm, and Baldy
[color=white]_______________________[/color]Not Pictured: [s]Nomad, Preston, Gordon, Fixer, Soap, the Green Ranger[/s] Noble Six[/b]
The premise itself is also wasted; more noticeably, even. Just think about it--there you are, one of the greatest warriors who ever lived, surrounded by five of the same, fighting for all that you know and love against an overwhelming enemy force over the course of a month and a week (give or take). [i]Reach[/i] should, for all intents and purposes, be a long, arduous, and trying bloodbath of a game, that allows you to witness first-hand everything that is being undone by your foe. As it is, it's a paltry and generic ten-mission campaign with plenty of timeskips, which doesn't create the feeling that you're fighting for the sake of an entire planet as much as you are bracing yourself for the competitive multiplayer.
As far as gameplay goes, the game can be more readily forgiven. The many weapons at your disposal have been redesigned, rebalanced, and generally refined: all of them are satisfying to use, satisfying to listen to, and are useful for enacting satisfying degrees of violence. The sniper rifles are snipey-er, the assault rifles are assault-rifley-er, and the perennially useless energy carbine has been replaced with the extremely accurate and stupidly high-powered needle rifle.
The guns are, in case it isn't clear, a major step up from [i]HALO 3[/i] and [i]ODST[/i], but at the end of the day they're basically just retreads of what we already had. What Bungie did change about the increasingly stale [i]HALO[/i] formula, however, is conspicuous in the extreme.
First and foremost, [i]Reach[/i] introduces us to "armor functions". An armor function is, essentially, what would happen if the marketing guys got to design the powerups for the game; by holding down the left bumper, you can use whichever function you have equipped, and each one is wildly different. One finally serves as the much-needed "Sprint" command; another freezes you in place but makes you completely indestructible as long as you use it; another sends out a holographic decoy of you to draw enemy fire; and my personal (spectacularly ineffective) favorite activates an active camouflage function and allows you to Agent Texas your way through entire armies if used properly.
Oh, and there's also those jetpacks that the marketers keep banging on about, but really who gives a toss.
...Come to think of it, there's a lot of things about the hype that really don't matter. The space combat that everyone made such a huge deal out of only appears for a very short stint halfway through the game (but is immediately followed by a decidedly superb zero gravity firefight); the [i]Modern Warfare[/i] style stealth sections--that you know, the ones that were also advertised as being in [i]ODST[/i] way back in 2009--are all unfailingly awful; the AI still eats shoes and licks windows; the vehicles handle slighty better than they did in [i]ODST[/i] (but those were never really trouble for me anyways); and the campaign denies you access to the "jump slighty to the side and don't get hit my that missile" power, which would be about a million times more useful than anything it actually gives you.
The level design is (usually) much more open and expansive than previous titles--they're often more reminiscent of [i]Crysis[/i] than [i]Doom[/i]. There's usually a dozen or more ways to approach any given situation, with the exception of the insufferable frequent miniboss encounters, all of which railroad you into a direct (and usually very painful) confrontation.
Speaking of, one thing I noticed was that Bungie has apparently gone soft on the players: the difficulty curve, even on the infamously brutal Legendary difficulty, is much less pronounced than other [i]HALO[/i] games. Even with several the difficulty enhancers on, [i]Reach[/i] is fairly easy. It's certainly no Veteran difficulty, and it makes [i]HALO 3[/i] look like [i]I Wanna be The Guy[/i] in comparison.
...Of course, that might be due to the fact that you can actually do stuff now, so I won't complain too much.
In a nutshell, [i]Reach[/i] is just a slighty-tweaked model of the HALO 1 formula, because Bungie has apparently realized that next to nobody liked [i]2[/i] or [i]3[/i].
The multiplayer is more of the same, to nobody's surprise. It's all there: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, etc. All of the new maps are well-designed, though, and most of them are pulled pixel-for-pixel from the campaign. The iconic Blood Gulch map makes a return, as does Bungie's trademark Easter egg Tourette's. The only genuinely new additions to the mutliplayer are the aforementioned armor functions, the redesigned (and much, MUCH, deeper) Forge system, and a new gametype called "Invasion".
[color=white]____________________________[/color][img src="http://www.gamereactor.eu/media/20/lyssnahalo_202086.jpg" width="300" height="470"]
[color=white]______________________________________[/color] [b]LET'S DOOOOOOOO IIIIIIIIT![/b]
The armor functions have a dramatic impact on combat; more than you'd think, in fact. In most gametypes, you select a class that comes with predetermined weapons and an armor function to match. For example, the Elite-exclusive "Assassin" class carries a close-range high-powered needler and a shield-destroying plasma pistol to go along with his radar-jamming active camo; while the SPARTAN "Scout" class uses a magnum and an assault rifle along with his sprint ability. Players can act as medics using their healing-and-damage-negating "drop shield" power, while others can use their jetpacks to casually rain death from a hard-to-reach location. If used properly, clever players will have their opponents chasing after ghosts, wasting ammunition on an indestructible (or perpetually mobile) opponent, and walking into backstabs.
Speaking of, another big part of the hype was the new "assassination mechanic". As always, if you get behind an opponent, you can press the melee button to make his vulnerable and nublie rear feel the furious penetration of your weapon for instant satisfaction; but if you hold down the button, you'll trigger an elaborate three-second animation where you hop on your victim's back and get fancy with your knife, which is sure to leave you ecstatic and your opponent screaming from the pain and humiliation.
Said backstabs come in many varieties; land on an enemy from a great height to knock them over and stomp on their head; assassinate an enemy mid air to suplex them and throw them into the ground; or assassinate an enemy about to turn around to duck under their initial blow and introduce your weapon to their innards.
...However, while performing one of said assassinations, you are immobile and extremely vunerable to damage, making them into nothing more than showy, impractical insta-kills (that are, albeit, extremely satisfying).
[color=white]_[/color]
Forge World is supposed to work like LittleBigPlanet, but it's not very interesting to me. Moving on.
[color=white]_[/color]
For what it's worth, I think Invasion is pretty fun: it pits a team of SPARTANS against a team of Elite Covenant warriors (called "Elites", oddly enough). One team attempts to defend a series of checkpoints, while another attempts to occupy them for twenty seconds so they can conquer them. After the first set is conquered, a secondary set of checkpoints further down the map appear, and after one of those is captured, then--wait, hang on a second...
I know I've heard that somewhere before. Just gimme a second...
[img src="http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/106/1063247/battlefield-bad-company-2-20100125115102739.jpg" width="300" height="250"]
Wait for it...
[img src="http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/102/1027467/battlefield-bad-company-2-20090922085246733.jpg" width="300" height="250"]
No, No, don't tell me! I got it!
[img src="http://dustygamer.mcmuumio.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/battlefield_bad_company_generic_cover.jpg" width="200" height="300"]
...Eh, I don't got it. Probably just my imagination.
[b]Bottom Line:[/b] I didn't have a very strong opinion of [i]HALO: Reach[/i] one way or the other, but in the interest of truth and reconciliation I will admit that it's actually pretty good in places. It's hardly as good as the exploits of the [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Republic_Commando]Delta Four[/URL], but it may very well be a pillar of autumn entertainment this year. Apprach it with a grave mind and you might be dissapointed; approach it as a hardcore fan and you'll love it. Sometimes it feels like a monument to of all of Bungie's sins, but despite its numerous flaws, this game has a spirit of fire and is, on the whole, worth waking when you need it.
...Could've used more mythology gags, through.
[b]Recomendation:[/b] It was flawed, but I liked it in the end. But then again, I liked Punisher: War Zone, and I can tell you I'm pretty much alone in that. I also got it for cheapy chips, so whether it's worth the sixty dollar tag is your call.
[i]This Review is based on the standard edition of the game.[/i]
[i]H.T. Black thought he'd try writing he way out; mix things up a little.[/i]
*cracks knuckles*
[HEADING=1]TARGET ACQUIRED:[/HEADING] [HEADING=2]HALO REACH[/HEADING]
Given that this is www.Escapistmagazine.com, chances are, if you're reading this, you don't have a terribly high opinion of HALO. Chances are you're also fifteen, an atheist, and kind of a douchebag[footnote] If those words don't apply to you, pretend I wrote something nice instead.[/footnote], but that's not the point; the point is that many of us, myself included, have had something of a tumultuous relationship with the Xbox's prized franchise, and for good reason: Halo 1 was an exercise in tedium and boredom marketed as a game; Halo 2 was a slightly more refined version of the same; Halo 3 was actually kind of good but brought down by a pathetic campaign and some awful design decisions; ODST was genuinely decent, but universally disliked for some inexplicable reason; and Halo Wars was so mind-bendingly awful that I don't like to admit it exists.
Given that, it's hard to believe that I like the franchise as much as I do: but try as I might, the stylish post-Liefeldian space opera aesthetic and immensely satisfying run-and-gun gameplay override my dislike of the often-lazy storytelling and the punishing bullet-Hell difficulty. So it was with a decidedly neutral stance that I awaited HALO: Reach, the last entry in Bungie's work on HALO, and possibly the last HALO altogether.
...And now, after beating the campaign twice over (once on hard, once on super-hard; once in co-op, once on my lonesome), earning oodles of in-game commendations and achievements, creating a pimp SPARTAN, and blowing just over six hours on online matchmaking, my neutral stance has yet to change.
To put it plainly, HALO: Reach is simply...there. It pushes no envelopes, but on the other hand it cuts little slack. In the grand scheme of things, it's largely insignificant, and had it not borne the HALO name, it would've sat on the shelves for a few months and been swiftly forgotten. As a tactical shooter, it sits about even with Modern Warfare 2; as a run-and-gun shooter, it's a step below Serious Sam and a step above HALO 3; as a story, it's worse than ODST but better than Bad company; and as a Bungie title it's still made a mockery of by Marathon.
Nearly all of Reach is, in one way or another, a mistake; I can't think of a single opportunity it didn't waste or miss, with the possible exception of the extremely amusing armor customization feature.
For those of you who haven't obsessively read the HALO novels, comic books, and websites, compulsively played all the previous HALO games, and committed the HALO encyclopedia to memory, allow me and my incredible knowledge retention abilities/power to guess like a nut to explain:
Reach takes place before HALO 1, on the planet Reach during a massive attack by the race of Scientologist fundamentalists known as "The Covenant". Reach is the planet where the SPARTANS (the big lads and lasses in powered armor you play as) are trained and outfitted, as well as one of the few planets that's as strategically important to the human race as Earth itself. Given that the siege of Reach is a well-documented event in-canon and the game's tagline is "Remember Reach", there's nothing I can really spoil about the plot; and as such I will not use spoiler tags when I tell you that *MASSIVE PLOT SPOILER AHEAD*
Reach is eventually nuked, vitrified, and purged with fire and salt while most everyone on it dies horribly and violently and you commit suicide by Bolivian Army.
You play as the nameless "Six", who aside from being the spawn of Kratos and Princess Shera (as far as I can tell) is the newest addition to the six-man SPARTAN team of Noble Squad.
...Unfortunately, every single member of your team is so token that they could give the boys from Mass Effect 2 a run for their money. Additionally, they're all one-note to the extreme. First, there's Carter, your ostensible commander, who is voiced by the omnipresent Nolan North and says maybe nine things in the entire game. Then you have Kat, the ambiguously Slavic token hacker girl with a robot arm; and Jun, the ambiguously slavic token sniper guy. After that you have Emile, the ambiguously Australian psychotic killer who inexplicably is voiced by someone who I can only identify as Shaquille O'Neil; and Jorge, the most well-realized of the characters in the sense that he is Hungarian, large, and apparently had some kind of romance with the lady in charge of the SPARTAN program.
Bringing up the rear is your player avatar, the newly inducted Noble 6, who is ostensibly a highly trained assassin versed in the arts of akimbo firearms, heavy demolitions, and all those other things PCs like to be good at. Interestingly (for a HALO game), Six is created from the ground-up in the single-player and multiplayer. At the start of the game, you dictate Six's gender, armor color, and armor ensemble; and as you score points and gain ranks throughout all of the game modes (a bit like the newer Tom Clancy games), you unlock new pieces of armor which you can apply as you would. To give Reach credit, it's a fun and well-designed system, even more so because the changes you make to your character are reflected in cutscenes as well as gameplay.
It's really a shame that nobody you meet is memorable; ODST had more personality and flair than Reach does, and at least Master Chief had that eargasmic disc jockey voice. I doubt the average Joe will even remember your team members' names (I know the average Jane certainly doesn't), and this is supposed to be the deep, meaningful, character-driven finale! It's not like Bungie can't tell a good story or write a character arc--I mean, they've done both of those with this very franchise (to an extent). All it would've taken is a few cutscenes, a flashback or two, or even some in-mission dialogue to round the cast out.
It should be noted that, in a nod to Half-life 2 and...well, too many games to count, really, you spend at least one mission with each of your team members in what I assume is a tragically inept attempt to make you feel an attachment to them. What Bungie failed to realize was that players enjoyed the company of Alyx Vance and Elena Fisher because they were more than just a few extra guns you didn't have to carry; both of them were developed in their own ways, so they felt less like clouds of ones and zeroes and more like living, breathing people.
I--and I think I speak for everyone--don't want to play a game where I work as a team with Kat, an ambiguously russian cyborg with a gun. I want to play a game where my teammate is Katherine Tchaikovsky, a native of the Russian-dominated agricultural planet Byway, where she had a promising career as a ballerina before being kidnapped at age seven and brainwashed into becoming a SPARTAN; and I want to know that one day she hacked into her personal file and rediscovered her past, to find out that her mother had died in a tractor-related accident shortly after she was taken and her father had joined the army; and I want to learn about how she realized, horrified, that her father had been gunned down while she watched two months previously, and how ever since she's been wrestling with her torturous existence as a living weapon of mass destruction who is also, under that mask, a breathing, thinking human being.
But, as it is, Noble team is essentially:
_______
[color=white]________________[/color][b]Left to right: Heavy Weapons Guy, Nathan Drake, Space whale, Skeleton hat, Miss Ingarm, and Baldy
[color=white]_______________________[/color]Not Pictured: [s]Nomad, Preston, Gordon, Fixer, Soap, the Green Ranger[/s] Noble Six[/b]
The premise itself is also wasted; more noticeably, even. Just think about it--there you are, one of the greatest warriors who ever lived, surrounded by five of the same, fighting for all that you know and love against an overwhelming enemy force over the course of a month and a week (give or take). [i]Reach[/i] should, for all intents and purposes, be a long, arduous, and trying bloodbath of a game, that allows you to witness first-hand everything that is being undone by your foe. As it is, it's a paltry and generic ten-mission campaign with plenty of timeskips, which doesn't create the feeling that you're fighting for the sake of an entire planet as much as you are bracing yourself for the competitive multiplayer.
As far as gameplay goes, the game can be more readily forgiven. The many weapons at your disposal have been redesigned, rebalanced, and generally refined: all of them are satisfying to use, satisfying to listen to, and are useful for enacting satisfying degrees of violence. The sniper rifles are snipey-er, the assault rifles are assault-rifley-er, and the perennially useless energy carbine has been replaced with the extremely accurate and stupidly high-powered needle rifle.
The guns are, in case it isn't clear, a major step up from [i]HALO 3[/i] and [i]ODST[/i], but at the end of the day they're basically just retreads of what we already had. What Bungie did change about the increasingly stale [i]HALO[/i] formula, however, is conspicuous in the extreme.
First and foremost, [i]Reach[/i] introduces us to "armor functions". An armor function is, essentially, what would happen if the marketing guys got to design the powerups for the game; by holding down the left bumper, you can use whichever function you have equipped, and each one is wildly different. One finally serves as the much-needed "Sprint" command; another freezes you in place but makes you completely indestructible as long as you use it; another sends out a holographic decoy of you to draw enemy fire; and my personal (spectacularly ineffective) favorite activates an active camouflage function and allows you to Agent Texas your way through entire armies if used properly.
Oh, and there's also those jetpacks that the marketers keep banging on about, but really who gives a toss.
...Come to think of it, there's a lot of things about the hype that really don't matter. The space combat that everyone made such a huge deal out of only appears for a very short stint halfway through the game (but is immediately followed by a decidedly superb zero gravity firefight); the [i]Modern Warfare[/i] style stealth sections--that you know, the ones that were also advertised as being in [i]ODST[/i] way back in 2009--are all unfailingly awful; the AI still eats shoes and licks windows; the vehicles handle slighty better than they did in [i]ODST[/i] (but those were never really trouble for me anyways); and the campaign denies you access to the "jump slighty to the side and don't get hit my that missile" power, which would be about a million times more useful than anything it actually gives you.
The level design is (usually) much more open and expansive than previous titles--they're often more reminiscent of [i]Crysis[/i] than [i]Doom[/i]. There's usually a dozen or more ways to approach any given situation, with the exception of the insufferable frequent miniboss encounters, all of which railroad you into a direct (and usually very painful) confrontation.
Speaking of, one thing I noticed was that Bungie has apparently gone soft on the players: the difficulty curve, even on the infamously brutal Legendary difficulty, is much less pronounced than other [i]HALO[/i] games. Even with several the difficulty enhancers on, [i]Reach[/i] is fairly easy. It's certainly no Veteran difficulty, and it makes [i]HALO 3[/i] look like [i]I Wanna be The Guy[/i] in comparison.
...Of course, that might be due to the fact that you can actually do stuff now, so I won't complain too much.
In a nutshell, [i]Reach[/i] is just a slighty-tweaked model of the HALO 1 formula, because Bungie has apparently realized that next to nobody liked [i]2[/i] or [i]3[/i].
The multiplayer is more of the same, to nobody's surprise. It's all there: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, etc. All of the new maps are well-designed, though, and most of them are pulled pixel-for-pixel from the campaign. The iconic Blood Gulch map makes a return, as does Bungie's trademark Easter egg Tourette's. The only genuinely new additions to the mutliplayer are the aforementioned armor functions, the redesigned (and much, MUCH, deeper) Forge system, and a new gametype called "Invasion".
[color=white]____________________________[/color][img src="http://www.gamereactor.eu/media/20/lyssnahalo_202086.jpg" width="300" height="470"]
[color=white]______________________________________[/color] [b]LET'S DOOOOOOOO IIIIIIIIT![/b]
The armor functions have a dramatic impact on combat; more than you'd think, in fact. In most gametypes, you select a class that comes with predetermined weapons and an armor function to match. For example, the Elite-exclusive "Assassin" class carries a close-range high-powered needler and a shield-destroying plasma pistol to go along with his radar-jamming active camo; while the SPARTAN "Scout" class uses a magnum and an assault rifle along with his sprint ability. Players can act as medics using their healing-and-damage-negating "drop shield" power, while others can use their jetpacks to casually rain death from a hard-to-reach location. If used properly, clever players will have their opponents chasing after ghosts, wasting ammunition on an indestructible (or perpetually mobile) opponent, and walking into backstabs.
Speaking of, another big part of the hype was the new "assassination mechanic". As always, if you get behind an opponent, you can press the melee button to make his vulnerable and nublie rear feel the furious penetration of your weapon for instant satisfaction; but if you hold down the button, you'll trigger an elaborate three-second animation where you hop on your victim's back and get fancy with your knife, which is sure to leave you ecstatic and your opponent screaming from the pain and humiliation.
Said backstabs come in many varieties; land on an enemy from a great height to knock them over and stomp on their head; assassinate an enemy mid air to suplex them and throw them into the ground; or assassinate an enemy about to turn around to duck under their initial blow and introduce your weapon to their innards.
...However, while performing one of said assassinations, you are immobile and extremely vunerable to damage, making them into nothing more than showy, impractical insta-kills (that are, albeit, extremely satisfying).
[color=white]_[/color]
Forge World is supposed to work like LittleBigPlanet, but it's not very interesting to me. Moving on.
[color=white]_[/color]
For what it's worth, I think Invasion is pretty fun: it pits a team of SPARTANS against a team of Elite Covenant warriors (called "Elites", oddly enough). One team attempts to defend a series of checkpoints, while another attempts to occupy them for twenty seconds so they can conquer them. After the first set is conquered, a secondary set of checkpoints further down the map appear, and after one of those is captured, then--wait, hang on a second...
I know I've heard that somewhere before. Just gimme a second...
[img src="http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/106/1063247/battlefield-bad-company-2-20100125115102739.jpg" width="300" height="250"]
Wait for it...
[img src="http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/102/1027467/battlefield-bad-company-2-20090922085246733.jpg" width="300" height="250"]
No, No, don't tell me! I got it!
[img src="http://dustygamer.mcmuumio.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/battlefield_bad_company_generic_cover.jpg" width="200" height="300"]
...Eh, I don't got it. Probably just my imagination.
[b]Bottom Line:[/b] I didn't have a very strong opinion of [i]HALO: Reach[/i] one way or the other, but in the interest of truth and reconciliation I will admit that it's actually pretty good in places. It's hardly as good as the exploits of the [URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Republic_Commando]Delta Four[/URL], but it may very well be a pillar of autumn entertainment this year. Apprach it with a grave mind and you might be dissapointed; approach it as a hardcore fan and you'll love it. Sometimes it feels like a monument to of all of Bungie's sins, but despite its numerous flaws, this game has a spirit of fire and is, on the whole, worth waking when you need it.
...Could've used more mythology gags, through.
[b]Recomendation:[/b] It was flawed, but I liked it in the end. But then again, I liked Punisher: War Zone, and I can tell you I'm pretty much alone in that. I also got it for cheapy chips, so whether it's worth the sixty dollar tag is your call.
[i]This Review is based on the standard edition of the game.[/i]
[i]H.T. Black thought he'd try writing he way out; mix things up a little.[/i]
