by 
Halo: Reach is a bad game – a very bad game, in fact. But at least the port to PC is fantastic…mostly.
The Master Chief Collection is coming to PC! This is very exciting – I’ve spent hours upon hours playing Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 on my computer, and it’s always frustrated me that I’ve never gotten to play Halo 3. But soon, I’ll be able to – and in the meantime, most of the other Halo games are being ported as part of the Halo Master Chief Collection. First in line is Halo: Reach, the first game chronologically and the last game developed by Bungie before they left Microsoft Studios to develop Destiny. This Master Chief Collection first came to the Xbox several years ago as part of an effort by 343 Industries (the division of Microsoft dedicated to Halo), and is now being ported to the PC.
Unfortunately, Halo: Reach is a bad game: mechanically, graphically, and theatrically. The script is mediocre – where prior games (the ones I’ve played, at least) have sensible throughlines and a careful revelation of new information, Reach’s plot is … boring. Both Halo CE and 2 had incredible moments of terror and moments of triumph. Here, you’re jerked from location to location (hey! You’re in space now!) while the Covenant invade the planet.
This is mostly because it tries to cover too much ground, literally and metaphysically: there are five other members of your team, an alien invasion, and your own mysterious past all vying for your attention. That’s too much to care about in such a limited (6-7 hour) campaign. I’d care when members of my team die if I’d seen or heard from them for more than about 10 minutes (five of that in a cutscene). But that doesn’t happen. There are two events that stand out in my mind as a perfect example of what went wrong. First, you blow up an Covenant carrier – a vessel hundreds of times larger than any human ship – and you’re supposed to feel accomplished. Next, you see a transport ship being blown up and you’re supposed to feel sad. On both occasions, I felt nothing because neither had been built up during gameplay. When Foehammer dies in CE, you’re sad because she’s shown up several times throughout the campaign to help you out. When Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, you’re sad because he’s been the unflappable rogue for so long, until he was betrayed.
Though it’s a 9 year old game, the visuals aren’t terrible – at least quality-wise. From an understandability perspective, it’s a different story. The biggest impediment to my progress in the campaign for the first couple minutes was my inability to tell the enemies from the ground. And it’s not that they were camouflaged, it’s that the environments are so messy that it’s hard to distinguish between Grunt and grass. Once I found the night vision, I left that on for significant parts of the game because it added a faint green highlight to enemies – and there was no downside (other than daytime colors being a little too green).
But that gets in to the final, and in my opinion worst, part of the game: the mechanics. The flaws of the original Halo and Halo 2 are amplified and some of the improvements seem lost. While health packs seem to have made a return (something I think is integral to the challenge of Halo CE), it’s really just regenerating health with extra steps since your “health” regenerates in addition to your shield. And, as one of my pet peeves, enemies are bullet sponges even on normal difficulty (sometimes because they are resistant to actual bullets, but that’s not really the point). Hunters, for example, have smaller weak spots and multiple times the hit points. Even disregarding the almighty M6D Personal Defense Weapon, it took about five seconds in Halo CE to figure out that “Hey, these enemies have huge orange bits underneath their armor – I should aim for those.” In Reach, I’m still not entirely sure I’m hitting the right weak spots because there’s very little knockback and quite a lot of HP.
Additionally, the number of insta-death options is far higher. In the original Halo, you could be insta-killed by a sniper shot (only in multiplayer where TTK is lower), a rocket launcher (which only a few enemies carry), a sticky grenade (usually easy to dodge), or a 1-2 punch from a pair of Jackals (rare and not technically an insta-kill, but did feel unfair). In Reach, in addition to these possibilities, there are suicide Grunts, rocket hammers, enemy snipers, fuel rod cannons (deadlier than Halo CE), and melee attacks from Hunters (also deadlier than Halo CE), and at least a few others. Insta-death does not add challenge – it adds difficulty.
Speaking of difficulty, I’m not sure what happened to the AI between Halo: CE and Reach, but it seems to have been flushed down the toilet. In both Halo CE and 2, I could pretty confidently get in to either the driver’s or gunner’s seat of a Warthog and let the AI fire at enemies or drive me around. In Reach, the gunner would either sit watching enemies without firing or fire in brief spurts, rather than sustaining a constant rate of fire on a weapon that doesn’t overheat. Fine, I’ll let the AI drive. Well, then the spartan driving my Warthog decided to drive about 5 mph, get stuck on some rocks, and then flipped the vehicle after almost falling off a bridge. Needless to say, I avoided vehicles that required two people after that whenever possible. Of course, the enemy AI is fine (more mediocre actually, but fine when compared to the friendly AI).
That’s about it for the game of Reach. I’m sad I have to criticize the campaign so harshly, given the heights of prior installments and my anticipation to finally play the rest of the series. The port itself, on the other hand, is fairly well done. The game minimum requirements are basically nothing, which is quite impressive. Though the graphics haven’t really been upgraded from the original release for Reach, they will be upgraded for Halo CE and Halo 2. My only real complaints about the port are the silly number of achievements (over 700, including ones for….using the zoom on your rifle. What’s next, achievements for pressing “W”?), the lack of graphical options, and the requirement that you have an Xbox account to even start the game (which may be a bigger complaint in the future if it turns out to be impossible to play offline indefinitely). Still, for $40, getting six games isn’t a bad deal – especially when one of them is Halo: CE.