Despite the absolute magnitude of the rock I’ve been living under, even I already knew how this game’s story was going to go. Even if I hadn’t seen it all over the internet already, I’d have known from the references to “remember Reach” in the previous games, particularly ODST. Knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t deter me though, because the experience of actually playing it myself is more important than worrying about whether or not I see a spoiler. Unfortunately…
This is, to me, the Ace Combat Assault Horizon of Halo games.
I cared more about Rookie than Noble Six, and Rookie was 100% silent. I liked Buck more than Carter, and I really didn’t like Buck. A lot of effort went into making these characters deaths, watching them drop one by one, carry emotional weight… and absolutely none of it landed for me. Jorge blows himself up, and it’s business as usual. Kat gets sniped and I am merely reminded that I never cared about her. Carter gets shot off screen so he can do a heroic kamikaze attack that does next to nothing anyway. Emile gets stabbed and… well, at least he yelled a bit and fought back, that was the first interesting character moment in the game. Jun, meanwhile, just flat out disappears because he’s so uninteresting and so unused that he wasn’t even worth killing off I guess.
The characters in all the previous Halo games were interesting because they actually had personalities, and a lot of them were either funny or simply cool. They all had their moments to stand out, and they all had something to pull me in and get me to take an interest and care about them one way or another. Not a single character in Reach has any of that. Everyone is dry, plain, matter of fact, straight business, no nonsense, no emotion, no personality, stale white bread. Kat and Jun being the worst offenders, with voices flatter than cardboard cutouts even among the deadpan cast. Heck, even the nameless expendable AI soldiers in previous games were more likeable than these people.
I get that the story of Reach is a tragedy, but all of Halo is a series of tragedies, so why couldn’t Reach have some levity and personality too? Even the grunts are flat and boring now! Even without changing anything else – and I do most definitely have other issues with this game – just adding some color to the dialogue would have gone a really long way. As it is, the dreary, gray, deadpan presentation from start to finish didn’t just prevent me from caring about a single character, but it also prevented me from caring about the story at all. Can’t get invested in a game that doesn’t appeal. I don’t understand why they felt the need to turn everything so dark and serious and “gritty” in a series known for and built upon… you know, not that.
Now let’s set all of that aside for a moment, because I have another reason that I couldn’t bring myself to care about the story. The pacing. This isn’t just the worst paced campaign in the series so far, it’s shockingly worse. Halo 2 had a huge difficulty spike, and it had its repetitive moments, but it never dragged on for too long (as Chief at least) and it didn’t feel unfair. Reach, however, dragged on for too long in every mission and regularly felt unfair, and I do strongly believe that “unfair” is the correct word to use here, because while I do openly admit to my own lack of skill in FPS games, I also don’t think it’s very nice to drop the player in a room with 20 enemies in it, only to throw in another 20 when you finish, and then another 20 for good measure. It’s just a slog, and one that’s very likely to lead to unexpected deaths when more than one of those enemies are capable of one hit kills, obviously making it even worse.
It feels like fake difficulty, something intended to simply make the game take longer without putting in the actual design work to do it right, even considering the apparent variety in mission types… which is odd, considering that there’s also plenty of plain and simple padding for time. The part where you do space combat should have been awesome, I liked controlling it and I love flight combat, but it goes on for three times longer than I wanted it to, remaining flatly one-note the entire time, and has no element of challenge at all. The part where you fly a helicopter around a city for 20 minutes moving from boring room to boring room to clear on foot, however, was never going to be awesome no matter what they did, and I wish that mission didn’t exist. Missions are also all full of waypoints and objective markers, making an already extremely linear and streamlined game feel even more brain dead.
The gameplay itself also got clunkier. Vehicles, while faster, feel worse to drive, especially the tank which is actually much slower and vastly worse handling than ever before. For some unimaginable reason, there’s a delay on reloading now, so if I do a melee attack and then hit the reload button, it doesn’t happen, I have to wait a whole second after the melee animation ends for the reload button to work. Even if the gun is empty and should automatically reload, it doesn’t happen until a full second after whatever interrupting animation is over. Sprinting was added, which I can only imagine was done as a result of outside pressure to conform with genre trends since Halo had never needed it before and still doesn’t benefit from it now… and sprinting is actually part of a different mechanic, being armor abilities, which also includes things like temporary invincibility, creating a hologram of yourself to draw fire, or shields, and all of these are physical items you have to pick up. The assault rifle is worse than it’s ever been, and the new gun, the DMR, is absurdly powerful, while also being almost completely outclassed by another new gun, the needle rifle, which for some reason is the loudest gun in the game despite being related to the needler, which is anything but loud. The sound design is louder in general, and I don’t mean volume; The increased aggression and grit of most sounds in this game could have made the game feel more impactful by adding punch and weight to your actions, but all it actually succeeds at doing here is making me uncomfortable, because it’s not punchy, it’s all just noisier.
Even the soundtrack fails compared to the previous games. Not because the music is bad, per se, it’s just… boring. So much of it only makes me think of generic war and action scenes, not Halo, and there’s so much more of it than there should be. The amount of time the trilogy spent with no music at all was an equally important aspect of what made their soundtracks so great, and while ODST played music more often, it did so thoughtfully and always set a specific strong tone with it, made even better by the fact that so much of the music was so mellow. In Reach, the tone is pretty much always just “action” with little to nothing else. Most of the times that the soundtrack does try to set a tone is in the death scenes that had no weight to me anyway.
Do you see why I see parallels between Reach and Assault Horizon? Music that’s not bad but definitely isn’t good considering the history, gameplay that’s slightly worse all around with a few questionable-at-best choices for good measure, boring and repetitive pacing made even worse by extended unwanted vehicle segments, and a story that chucks out everything that made other stories in the series great in exchange for something drab and painfully uninteresting, many of these choices likely resulting from external pressures to follow trends rather than focusing on the existing and beloved identity. Broad mass appeal was priority. Call of Duty-ification.
Even with all of that in mind, at least Reach is better for Halo than Assault Horizon was for Ace Combat in one way. I don’t regret playing it. Once. I feel like I learned from it. But I definitely don’t want to play it again.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-reach)
This is, to me, the Ace Combat Assault Horizon of Halo games.
I cared more about Rookie than Noble Six, and Rookie was 100% silent. I liked Buck more than Carter, and I really didn’t like Buck. A lot of effort went into making these characters deaths, watching them drop one by one, carry emotional weight… and absolutely none of it landed for me. Jorge blows himself up, and it’s business as usual. Kat gets sniped and I am merely reminded that I never cared about her. Carter gets shot off screen so he can do a heroic kamikaze attack that does next to nothing anyway. Emile gets stabbed and… well, at least he yelled a bit and fought back, that was the first interesting character moment in the game. Jun, meanwhile, just flat out disappears because he’s so uninteresting and so unused that he wasn’t even worth killing off I guess.
The characters in all the previous Halo games were interesting because they actually had personalities, and a lot of them were either funny or simply cool. They all had their moments to stand out, and they all had something to pull me in and get me to take an interest and care about them one way or another. Not a single character in Reach has any of that. Everyone is dry, plain, matter of fact, straight business, no nonsense, no emotion, no personality, stale white bread. Kat and Jun being the worst offenders, with voices flatter than cardboard cutouts even among the deadpan cast. Heck, even the nameless expendable AI soldiers in previous games were more likeable than these people.
I get that the story of Reach is a tragedy, but all of Halo is a series of tragedies, so why couldn’t Reach have some levity and personality too? Even the grunts are flat and boring now! Even without changing anything else – and I do most definitely have other issues with this game – just adding some color to the dialogue would have gone a really long way. As it is, the dreary, gray, deadpan presentation from start to finish didn’t just prevent me from caring about a single character, but it also prevented me from caring about the story at all. Can’t get invested in a game that doesn’t appeal. I don’t understand why they felt the need to turn everything so dark and serious and “gritty” in a series known for and built upon… you know, not that.
Now let’s set all of that aside for a moment, because I have another reason that I couldn’t bring myself to care about the story. The pacing. This isn’t just the worst paced campaign in the series so far, it’s shockingly worse. Halo 2 had a huge difficulty spike, and it had its repetitive moments, but it never dragged on for too long (as Chief at least) and it didn’t feel unfair. Reach, however, dragged on for too long in every mission and regularly felt unfair, and I do strongly believe that “unfair” is the correct word to use here, because while I do openly admit to my own lack of skill in FPS games, I also don’t think it’s very nice to drop the player in a room with 20 enemies in it, only to throw in another 20 when you finish, and then another 20 for good measure. It’s just a slog, and one that’s very likely to lead to unexpected deaths when more than one of those enemies are capable of one hit kills, obviously making it even worse.
It feels like fake difficulty, something intended to simply make the game take longer without putting in the actual design work to do it right, even considering the apparent variety in mission types… which is odd, considering that there’s also plenty of plain and simple padding for time. The part where you do space combat should have been awesome, I liked controlling it and I love flight combat, but it goes on for three times longer than I wanted it to, remaining flatly one-note the entire time, and has no element of challenge at all. The part where you fly a helicopter around a city for 20 minutes moving from boring room to boring room to clear on foot, however, was never going to be awesome no matter what they did, and I wish that mission didn’t exist. Missions are also all full of waypoints and objective markers, making an already extremely linear and streamlined game feel even more brain dead.
The gameplay itself also got clunkier. Vehicles, while faster, feel worse to drive, especially the tank which is actually much slower and vastly worse handling than ever before. For some unimaginable reason, there’s a delay on reloading now, so if I do a melee attack and then hit the reload button, it doesn’t happen, I have to wait a whole second after the melee animation ends for the reload button to work. Even if the gun is empty and should automatically reload, it doesn’t happen until a full second after whatever interrupting animation is over. Sprinting was added, which I can only imagine was done as a result of outside pressure to conform with genre trends since Halo had never needed it before and still doesn’t benefit from it now… and sprinting is actually part of a different mechanic, being armor abilities, which also includes things like temporary invincibility, creating a hologram of yourself to draw fire, or shields, and all of these are physical items you have to pick up. The assault rifle is worse than it’s ever been, and the new gun, the DMR, is absurdly powerful, while also being almost completely outclassed by another new gun, the needle rifle, which for some reason is the loudest gun in the game despite being related to the needler, which is anything but loud. The sound design is louder in general, and I don’t mean volume; The increased aggression and grit of most sounds in this game could have made the game feel more impactful by adding punch and weight to your actions, but all it actually succeeds at doing here is making me uncomfortable, because it’s not punchy, it’s all just noisier.
Even the soundtrack fails compared to the previous games. Not because the music is bad, per se, it’s just… boring. So much of it only makes me think of generic war and action scenes, not Halo, and there’s so much more of it than there should be. The amount of time the trilogy spent with no music at all was an equally important aspect of what made their soundtracks so great, and while ODST played music more often, it did so thoughtfully and always set a specific strong tone with it, made even better by the fact that so much of the music was so mellow. In Reach, the tone is pretty much always just “action” with little to nothing else. Most of the times that the soundtrack does try to set a tone is in the death scenes that had no weight to me anyway.
Do you see why I see parallels between Reach and Assault Horizon? Music that’s not bad but definitely isn’t good considering the history, gameplay that’s slightly worse all around with a few questionable-at-best choices for good measure, boring and repetitive pacing made even worse by extended unwanted vehicle segments, and a story that chucks out everything that made other stories in the series great in exchange for something drab and painfully uninteresting, many of these choices likely resulting from external pressures to follow trends rather than focusing on the existing and beloved identity. Broad mass appeal was priority. Call of Duty-ification.
Even with all of that in mind, at least Reach is better for Halo than Assault Horizon was for Ace Combat in one way. I don’t regret playing it. Once. I feel like I learned from it. But I definitely don’t want to play it again.
(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/oh-yeah-halo-exists/#halo-reach)