Now, I'm no Yahtzee, but I feel his problems are more of a deal of personal preference (which is ok, this is a subjective medium in games reviewing). But its not like the camera is universally bad or the controls are unresponsive. We're not talking about something universally regarded as bad.
For instance...
As I said in the review, all the members of Noble Team have all become engaged in a "Who Can Die The Noblest Death" competition, but none of them show the slightest emotional connection to anyone or anything (one of them has a mum, but their interactions are so cold and loveless she might as well have been his driving instructor), so the sheer regularity with which they knock themselves off is closer to comedy than tragedy. I guess the only reason Master Chief was the last Spartan was because he was out sick while everyone else was at Kamikaze school.
Carter gets hit pretty hard with the 2nd death in the team. Listen to his voice before, and then after the incident, and its pretty evident that he's just trying to stay together.
Or Jorge, ya know, trying to comfort the researcher's daughter.
There are other instances during the game when various characters will speak out of desperation in a firefight. Its not like we have mindless killing machines here, and it wraps into an experience where you feel like you're an unstoppable armored badass.
The other thing is that if you're making a first person game, you need to make a decision - are you going to characterize your lead, cutting away from the first person perspective for cutscenes and zooming into the back of their head when gameplay resumes, or will you take the Half-Life/Bioshock route, stay in first person permanently and let the player project their personality (don't say that sentence out loud 'cos you'll get saliva all over your computer screen). Halo: Reach's habit of switching between first-person and third-person cutscenes feels undirected. There were moments when I felt staying in first-person would have made a scene much more effective. Particularly the bit when your mate throws you off a space station as part of his Noble Death competition entry and you fall through space watching the ship drift off into the distance before silently exploding. It felt immersion-breaking to keep cutting away to reveal that, yes, you're still falling through space, and have you noticed this skybox we made? Nice, isn't it?
This is something I will happily rip Half-Life for. The whole "silent protagonist, projecting your personality to the main character" is pretty much a copout. If we're going to be using that as one of the golden standards for immersion, its existed since Wolfenstein 3d, and even before.
When I play a silent protagonist in an FPS, I do not feel immersed. I feel like I'm controlling a floating camera. This is especially problematic in something like Half-Life 2, where you can look down, and you have no body. Halo: Reach, being my first Halo game on 360 (I'm probably the furthest you can get from a fanboy) I greatly enjoyed looking down to see the rest of my character model. It was... immersive.
On the flip side, Yahtzee argues that bouncing between different cutscenes feels undirected. I felt that it was simply the usage of the first-person perspective as another tool. This is another problem I have with the "first person perspective and ONLY THAT" school of game design, namely, I'd much rather watch a more cinematic cutscene, from a third perspective, then sit there watching two heads yammer on and on as in HL2. This usually leads to the player growing bored, and indignant, and running around said room in which talking heads have their discussion, mutilating things and whacking everything with a crowbar.
There are other examples, but I don't think I need to expound on them.
It should also be noted, that until recently, I absolutely HATED Halo. Blind fanboy hatred of the series. Thought it was overrated, generic, terrible terrible stuff. Then I got just a little bit interested in Reach, and bought a 360 bundle (something that, myself being a self proclaimed PS3 fanboy, nobody EVER thought I'd do), and I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I realized something else in the process as well, namely, If you're going to be calling Halo games generic, you're going to have to be doing it to just about every shooter under the sun. There just isn't enough variety in the genre to go about proclaiming one game Legendary and place it on a pedestal, and others as generic fecal matter.
