Mediocrity in its rawest form, take the shit level design, easy difficulty and bad hollywood-esque storytelling from Halo 3, then strip out half of the weapons and vehicles, dress it all up in the ugliest form of pointless grit, and you've got Halo: Reach.
I won't deny it's one of the better looking games in the series, but that's purely because they pumped more out of the consoles and devoted more time to fleshing out armor customization, and as a by-product (AFAIK) comes the shitty motion blur in the original, nothing about the dirt and scratches on every single wall and armor and muted colors makes the game look better.
Anyways, the campaign is shit, the levels are garbage, which gets a double "fuck you" for being both shit in the campaign and multiplayer, presumably because they had to be re-used for both, the weapons handle far worse because apparently being old-school like the original games means having guns that are RNG machines the moment you shoot more than once a second, and I really want to know who thought the shit mechanic of fall damage and the useless one of health-packs were worth bringing back.
Multiplayer is extra shit, again, most if not all of the base maps are recycled from the campaign and play like shit, there's far more verticality that makes gunfights a REAL match of who saw who first, and they are DAMN ugly, the RNG bullet spread is way more noticeable now, and it was so bad 343 had to patch it out, the armor abilities range from useless (decoy) to insanely poorly designed (sprint, armor lock, roll, jetpack, active camo)
Armor Lock and Jetpack tie for both being some of the worst designs ever put into a multiplayer game, Armor Lock lets you say "time-out, time-out!" so you can wait for your teammate to arrive, or just explode a vehicle if it crashes into you, and Jetpack just breaks map design, which they thankfully designed around... wait... what's that? They added CE maps into Reach's matchmaking pool? Well that's a fucking stupid idea? Surely they'll disable jetpacks so players don't jetpack up to and grab power weapons balanced around being risky to grab..... and the enemy team just snagged the Battle Canyon Rocket Launcher, great.
Having to have all the maps be padded out in length due to sprint and combat roll (sometimes? in some playlists it goes super fast and if you jump carries you long distances, and others you go nowhere and it's useless) is obnoxious, because nobody uses sprint because it's BORING!
Forge for the second time was turned into an actual map-maker, but the developers at Bungie were too busy picking their asses to do a good job so the creation tools suck and all the assets are grey, have fun.
Remember when I said they removed a bunch of content that was in 3? It goes deeper, they also have SHIT new content, like the Focus Rifle, Plasma Repeater, Needle Rifle, Concussion Rifle, and the Plasma Launcher, if you noticed, most of these are covenant weapons!
For the good things the game does? For one thing there's Invasion, really really well designed mode, Spartans vs Elites, with different UIs, their sides weaponry, and it scales over time as more objectives get captured, unfortunately in MCC it was put in the ranked playlist, so it's perma-dead, also the spawning behavior of having one teammate who is marked as your spawning buddy is stupid, and some of the objectives are a little ridiculous.
Forge being opened up to a large map was a large plus even if it was wasted on ugly assets and the modern industry style of not having specially designed kill-barriers that can be brute-forced to get past anyways, but just having a shitty "TURN BACK DUMBASS DEATH IN 10S" timer.
There's also.. uhh... finishers? I guess? They're a cool system, animated really well and none of the animations take too long.
As a final note, the story is complete and total tire-fire garbage, not only being a long fat shit all over the book The Fall of Reach, but just being a story about 6 chucklefucks having a competition of who can have the most heroic death possible, but no girls are allowed, the only character with any personality was Jorge, the ending "Objective: Survive" thing was a cool gimmick but that's about it, other than that it was just kind of neat to see a better model of Keyes, and an actual model of Halsey.
Third worst Halo campaign, only ahead of 4 and 5 because they're criminally boring.
Second worst Halo multiplayer, only ahead of CE because everything about CE aged like shit, including the things they brought back in Reach.
I won't deny it's one of the better looking games in the series, but that's purely because they pumped more out of the consoles and devoted more time to fleshing out armor customization, and as a by-product (AFAIK) comes the shitty motion blur in the original, nothing about the dirt and scratches on every single wall and armor and muted colors makes the game look better.
Anyways, the campaign is shit, the levels are garbage, which gets a double "fuck you" for being both shit in the campaign and multiplayer, presumably because they had to be re-used for both, the weapons handle far worse because apparently being old-school like the original games means having guns that are RNG machines the moment you shoot more than once a second, and I really want to know who thought the shit mechanic of fall damage and the useless one of health-packs were worth bringing back.
Multiplayer is extra shit, again, most if not all of the base maps are recycled from the campaign and play like shit, there's far more verticality that makes gunfights a REAL match of who saw who first, and they are DAMN ugly, the RNG bullet spread is way more noticeable now, and it was so bad 343 had to patch it out, the armor abilities range from useless (decoy) to insanely poorly designed (sprint, armor lock, roll, jetpack, active camo)
Armor Lock and Jetpack tie for both being some of the worst designs ever put into a multiplayer game, Armor Lock lets you say "time-out, time-out!" so you can wait for your teammate to arrive, or just explode a vehicle if it crashes into you, and Jetpack just breaks map design, which they thankfully designed around... wait... what's that? They added CE maps into Reach's matchmaking pool? Well that's a fucking stupid idea? Surely they'll disable jetpacks so players don't jetpack up to and grab power weapons balanced around being risky to grab..... and the enemy team just snagged the Battle Canyon Rocket Launcher, great.
Having to have all the maps be padded out in length due to sprint and combat roll (sometimes? in some playlists it goes super fast and if you jump carries you long distances, and others you go nowhere and it's useless) is obnoxious, because nobody uses sprint because it's BORING!
Forge for the second time was turned into an actual map-maker, but the developers at Bungie were too busy picking their asses to do a good job so the creation tools suck and all the assets are grey, have fun.
Remember when I said they removed a bunch of content that was in 3? It goes deeper, they also have SHIT new content, like the Focus Rifle, Plasma Repeater, Needle Rifle, Concussion Rifle, and the Plasma Launcher, if you noticed, most of these are covenant weapons!
For the good things the game does? For one thing there's Invasion, really really well designed mode, Spartans vs Elites, with different UIs, their sides weaponry, and it scales over time as more objectives get captured, unfortunately in MCC it was put in the ranked playlist, so it's perma-dead, also the spawning behavior of having one teammate who is marked as your spawning buddy is stupid, and some of the objectives are a little ridiculous.
Forge being opened up to a large map was a large plus even if it was wasted on ugly assets and the modern industry style of not having specially designed kill-barriers that can be brute-forced to get past anyways, but just having a shitty "TURN BACK DUMBASS DEATH IN 10S" timer.
There's also.. uhh... finishers? I guess? They're a cool system, animated really well and none of the animations take too long.
As a final note, the story is complete and total tire-fire garbage, not only being a long fat shit all over the book The Fall of Reach, but just being a story about 6 chucklefucks having a competition of who can have the most heroic death possible, but no girls are allowed, the only character with any personality was Jorge, the ending "Objective: Survive" thing was a cool gimmick but that's about it, other than that it was just kind of neat to see a better model of Keyes, and an actual model of Halsey.
Third worst Halo campaign, only ahead of 4 and 5 because they're criminally boring.
Second worst Halo multiplayer, only ahead of CE because everything about CE aged like shit, including the things they brought back in Reach.