Halo Reach

Date Acquired: 9.15.2010

Date Completed: 9.17.2010

Thoughts: Wait, I beat this thing in 2 days over 2 months ago and I'm just now posting my thoughts? Well....yeah. I beat the game initially on normal on one playthrough via 4 player online coop. Not a lot of challenge, and really not a great way to experience the game. I didn't create a lot of lasting memories except for getting 'accidentally' team killed by my buddy and finding out that I was allowed to boot him out of the game. That was good times. After beating it, I played around with the single player on legendary which is slow going. For whatever reason over a month went by before I could finally get my friends to all sit down and play multiplayer with me. Halo isn't like Call of Duty for me, the online mode is very important and it's the reason it's an automatic purchase. If the game was strictly single-player I'd have rented it and been done with it, but it's multi player has been a huge draw for me in it's last 3 iterations, and thus it earns an insta-purchase.

Pros: Firefight. Yes, there was firefight before in ODST, but it was very bare-bones, something I complained about in my ODST thoughts. You had no control over anything in those modes. Enemies, weapons, skulls turned on, nothing. (Skulls represent adverse effects that make the game harder such as making the enemies throw more grenades, taking away your map, getting less ammo from weapon drops, etc) You just had to play through the same mode every time with no way to customize it. Thankfully Bungie has retooled this feature with a vengeance. It starts with 2 separate firefight modes: Classic- the old version where you had a set number of lives and fought till you were dead (but you can now customize weapons, enemies, skulls, etc) and the new mode where you're just trying to get through one wave before the half hour timer expires, which is actually pretty difficult. On top of this there are different variations of firefight such as rocketfight which is awesome, everyone gets unlimited rockets to rain down on the covenant. You will kill yourself many many times, and you won't care, and sniper fight: Wave after wave of enemy and you only get sniper rifles? Eh, not as fun.

Adding onto this is the new ranking system represented by commendations. This is a deep and addictive mode in and of itself. Seemingly everything you do is recorded and goes towards earning you a commendation. There are 5 different levels: Iron, Bronze, Sliver, Gold and Onyx. Did you get a multi kill? That's a commendation. A Head shot? Commendation. Did you assassinate a member of the covenant? Commendation. Did you kill a member of the covenant while your teammate was in the middle of the assassination animation, cheating him out of the assassination? (Jon, I am looking at you) Even that qualifies towards a commendation. And there are commendations for each of the game's 3 main modes: Campaign, Multiplayer and Firefight. Getting these commendations and kills in general earn you credits that can be used to buy new armor for your character. The armor doesn't do any thing, it's purely cosmetic, but hey you get to differentiate yourself from the other players.

Cons: There's not a lot not to like here to be honest, but if I'm picking something to pick on, it's probably the campaign mode. It's not terrible, but it's not a giant improvement over what we've seen before. It's better than ODST's Campaign, but that's not saying much. I am not sure it's better than the campaign mode in any of the first 3 Halos, I'd definitely take the first 2 over this, and don't really remember 3 well enough to decide. That's not really a slight, those were all fantastic games, and this still has a good single player campaign, but it's not the star of the Halo Reach Experience

To Do: I sit at 510 achievements at the moment, I have a few more that will unlock for sure after I finish the game on legendary. This will continue to get a lot of play time in the months to come on game nights with my friends, but probably won't be in my XBox when we're not playing together.