Halo: Reach

Halo: Reach Major spoilers for the campaign and Noble Team's losses. Reach puts you in a difficult position from the beginning. You’re fighting for a world that the rest of the series already tells you is going to fall. The question is how long the people on it can hold out, what they can accomplish, and who they can get away before that happens. That gives the whole game a different feeling. It released on Xbox 360 in September 2010 and takes place before Combat Evolved. You play Noble Six, joining Noble Team as the Covenant invasion begins to reveal how serious it actually is. At first you’re investigating trouble on the ground. It doesn’t stay a small problem for very long. The team gives you several different people to get to know. Carter is trying to keep everyone moving toward the objective. Kat is working through the technical side. Jorge has a personal connection to the place they’re defending. Emile and Jun bring their own personalities into it. Six arrives as the new member of a group that already has a history together. You spend the game moving between very different parts of Reach. Rural areas, military facilities, cities, and eventually the fight above the planet. The place has enough variety that you can see how much is being lost as the invasion spreads. It isn’t one base or one battlefield that can be written off and left behind. Long Night of Solace makes that especially clear. You go into space, fight in a Sabre, board a Covenant ship, and take part in an enormous effort to destroy a much larger enemy vessel. Jorge gives his life to make that plan work. And then more Covenant ships arrive. That’s such a brutal thing for the game to do. You’ve achieved something enormous, at an enormous cost, and the enemy has more to send. The work mattered. Jorge’s sacrifice mattered. But it still wasn’t enough to end what was happening to Reach. From there, the campaign keeps putting you in situations where you’re trying to salvage something. Get civilians out. Keep a route open. Hold a position long enough for somebody else to finish what they need to do. There are still victories within that, but they keep getting smaller compared with the scale of the disaster around them. The combat gives you plenty to work with. Armor abilities let you change how you approach a situation, whether that means a burst of movement, a jetpack, camouflage, or something defensive. They aren’t all useful in the same circumstances. Choosing an ability and knowing when to use it can make a big difference to a fight. The DMR gives the game its own familiar precision weapon. The Covenant's Elites are dangerous again in a very immediate way, and the different environments give them plenty of opportunities to make getting past them difficult. Then the game puts you in a vehicle or sends you up over New Alexandria, and you have another set of problems to deal with. The ending brings the campaign into the beginning of the first Halo. Getting the package to Captain Keyes and getting the Pillar of Autumn off the planet becomes the job that has to be finished. The people doing it don’t get to see everything that will come from it. Then Six is left behind. Lone Wolf is such a fitting final section for this story. There’s no comfortable escape waiting at the next marker. You can keep fighting, but the planet is gone, the team has been torn apart, and the game lets you feel the difference between surviving another encounter and actually having a way out. That doesn’t erase what they accomplished. The Autumn gets away. Something gets carried forward. It gives the beginning of Combat Evolved another history behind it, full of people whose part in getting there deserves to be remembered. Reach has a huge amount outside the campaign too. Firefight returns. Invasion gives Spartans and Elites a larger, staged objective mode. Forge World gives people an enormous space to build within. Armor customization also puts your version of Six into the campaign, which helps connect the character you’ve put together with the story you’re going through. There’s a lot of guide material here without having to invent filler: the data pads, Legendary encounters, armor abilities, the vehicle sections, Firefight and the specific achievement challenges. Some data pads have difficulty requirements, so a useful route needs to tell you that before you start the mission. Reach deserves the time. It shows you a catastrophe through the people who keep working inside it, even when the chance of getting themselves out is disappearing. That gives all those missions a weight that carries through to the end.