Halo: Reach - Does it meet expectations?

[maddawg IAJI]

It honestly surpassed my expectations. It is, without a doubt, the best Halo yet in my opinion. It feels more fleshed out then ODST did and the campaign is by far one of the best things I have seen from the Halo franchise.

There are a few complaints with multiplayer though, for example, ever play on Breach head game of swat while on the red team? It's not fun. That all said, I wished they did add in some more maps. Playing Invasion on 3 maps isn't all that great. Firefight is awesome as well and the fact that they put in a match making for it just makes it a lot smoother, that said, I do wish I had the option to join a matchmaking game for a Firefight game that lasts longer then one round.

It's a great game, the Multiplayer definitely needs some tweaking as far as gametypes and maps go, but with the October Patch giving Swat and Co-Op campaign it's slot, I'm sure a few problems will be fixed.

 

[Tompph]

I may have been a bit too excited - I really enjoyed Halo 3 and was looking forward a lot to Reach, having played the beta. But the game just felt... Weak. I played it through on Heroic with a friend, and by the end we were just bored. I didn't feel for any of the characters, and the story passed me by without a hint of care. It just seemed like 5 hours of Bungee coming up with ways to kill off Spartans.
What I really didn't like was the lack of anything epic. Maybe a planet being glassed is supposed to be as cool as an old ring that could destroy every sentient being in the galaxy almost getting activated but being stopped by a one-man-army, but to me, it just seemed like a game made to improve on the graphics and engine, etc.
Which I'm not even sure they did - the way that when an object is more than 100m away it loses all texture really bugged me because of how noticeable I felt it was.

The multiplayer is good, but not that much more polished than the beta. And maybe it's just because I'm so used to Halo 3, but I freakin' hate the whole "Melee depletes your shield AND YOUR SHIELD ONLY. WHETHER IT IS FULL OR AT 1%."

Anyhow, my $0.02.