"Same guns, same story, same enemies, same levels with a few minor tweaks and adjustments."
Yup. That completely describes my single player experience too.
What's really funny about the whole "space combat" thing? UT2004 did this Six fucking years ago. and it was just about as good to boot.
"Jet packs?" Tribes did it far better 10 years ago.
The other abilities are a reasonably cool mish-mash of the other Tribes 2 Pack equips, but with refined gameplay enhancements to bring them into the modern era (for those who couldn't tell, it's the one part of the game I actually like). Armor Lock is much more useful than I thought it would be, and the Bubble Shield is basically a "I've got a shotgun, and I will man-rape you with it regardless of your wishes."
However, this leads into my main problem with Reach, and Halo in general: It was built from the ground up to be multiplayer and multiplayer ONLY. If you aren't jumping online, you are essentially wasting your money unless you happen to love the story.
The Firefight mode was only able to hold my attention for so long; fun as it was initially I eventually got tired of it since every encounter turned into "Snipe snipe snipe, swap, grenade, spam spam, melee, retreat, reload, repeat".
So for me, the only good thing to come out of Reach is that it looked pretty damn good on my new 55 inch TV.
For those ready to improperly wield the hypocrite card ("If you didn't like it, why did you play it?" My favorite circular-logic chestnut) no, I don't own the game. I would never willingly part with my money for a Halo title; every other gamer on the planet owns it by now, and a few of those many people happen to be my friends.