Introduction
Today we will be stepping foot into a new series of reviews, the Halo main series and who knows, maybe also some spin-offs! The first game in the Halo Franchise might not be Halo Reach, but the events in Halo Reach take place before Halo 1. Halo Reach does not feature the Master Chief, but a group of Spartans that protect the planet called Reach. Will this team be able to stop Reach from being captured by the alien forces known as the Covenant?
What did I think before playing Halo Reach?
It has been a long time since I played any Halo game. There were some requests for a variety of Halo games and I decided to review every main Halo game! My wife and I recently acquired the Xbox game pass, and it contains all the main Halo games! I did not know what to expect from Halo Reach, thus I went to the Microsoft store page!
The Microsoft Store page
https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/halo-reach/9nlgw5mxwkj6
There is not much gameplay information available except that it is about a group of Spartans, follow their story as you shoot up aliens from outer space that want to destroy earth. If you play this game in the Master Chief Collection, you will have the option to get enhanced graphics! There is also an alternate game mode called the Halo Reach firefight mode!
Rating
I rate Halo Reach with a 7.6 before playing.
I was very interested in playing this game, but it has been so long since I played any Halo game that I did not know what to expect. It is most likely ten years ago!
Story
The story follows the events viewed from Noble Six that joins the noble team before events are set in motion. Your first mission is to find out why a communications relay has gone offline, what could possibly go wrong?
These events take place before Halo 1 and ends at the beginning of Halo 1!
Rating
I rate the story of Halo Reach with an 8.1.
The story is quite amazing, and the game has a great mission at the end! If you are going to play Halo, story wise this is where you need to start for the main series, if you want to learn more of the events before Halo, you should play Halo Wars, this game is not a first-person shooter though!
Gameplay
Halo Reach is all about shoot and run tactics, even though you are a super soldier, you cannot sustain infinite damage! You have a shield and when it is depleted, it will need to recharge. There are some useful powers that you can use like sprinting, running feels so good! A major defensive power is armor lockup, this power prevents any damage while you are regenerating your shield and health!
If you do get damaged, you can find health packs all over throughout missions! You will be able to find multiple weapons to take down the covenant, either human or alien weapons. You can carry two weapons and swap at will. If you run out of ammo, you can still smash enemies, if you are holding a melee weapon, you will inflict additional damage. The small aliens can be killed easily with melee to save bullets!
There are also vehicles, some of them have turrets that you can use to kill enemies, in one mission you also have a dogfight in space! While completing missions, you encounter checkpoints in case that you die. This game also has co-op, this makes the game easier but also harder than more enemies will appear! That is, if you can get the offline co-op to work! Can you stop the covenant and save Reach?
Rating
I rate the gameplay of Halo Reach with an 8.3
The best thing about Halo Reach is the powers that you can use, next to that there are some awesome weapons to use!
Sound and Graphics
Graphics
The graphics in Halo Reach are amazing and look stunning, when you own 4K equipment, You will be able to run this game in 4K! We sadly do not have any 4K equipment in our house, despite that Halo Reach still looks breathtaking! The story cut scenes look good, as does the dogfight in space! The grunts from the covenants explode in awesome ways when you snipe them, you should use the skull that makes their skulls shoot fireworks when you hit a grunt with a headshot! Skulls can alter your gameplay in various ways.
Sound
If there is something that Halo does extremely well, it is the soundtracks and sound effects! The voice actors also do a great job! Are you ready for some epic music!?
Rating
I rate the sound and graphics of Halo Reach with a 9.0
What did I think after playing Halo Reach?
I had a lot of fun when playing through the missions of Halo Reach, as the story progresses, everything seems to go wrong! I liked using vehicles to run over any aliens in my way! It was very useful to see how much health I had left next to my shield. The health bar indicated if I needed to be patient or could rush in and beat up some grunt aliens!
The levels were linear enough to simply follow the route to get to the end of the mission while finishing off the covenant forces! I also enjoyed the jetpack and armor lockup skills, however I disliked not being able to run around. My wife and I did want to play co-op however it was very hard to even get the co-op working in split screen, We still did not manage to get split screen working.
Rating
I rate Halo Reach with an 8,6 after playing.
I enjoyed the campaign and that it can be played in co-op. The skills that you can use are great!
What are my personal thoughts about Halo Reach?
There are many weapons to choose from, the elite sword is a melee weapon that can instantly kill aliens! However, you are bringing a sword to a gun fight, better stay sneaky! Talking about sneaky, the sniper rifle is great to overwhelm the alien forces!
Rating
My personal Rating of Halo Reach is an 7.1
Using a sniper rifle to score headshots is amazing!
Last Words
Pros
- Experience the story of what happened before Halo 1!
- Amazing graphics and soundtracks, also avaialble in 4K!
- Many different weapons to choose from!
- Use many vehicles to destroy the alien force!
- Use different skills to survive the onslaught of the aliens!
- Many different themed missions, some require stealth while others require vehicles!
- Combine items and solve puzzles or upgrade your weapons!
Cons
- The sprinting ability only works for a very limited time.
- The jetpack looks cool but is quite useless
- It is hard to get co-op working
Halo Reach is a very fun game if you can get co-op working. We had a hard time to even get the co-op working. This did lower rate for us since we spend hours to get it working, even YouTube videos did not safe us.
Final Rating
8.3
Let me know what you think of Halo Reach in the comments!
I hope you enjoyed reading this review, I hope to see you in the next review!
If you liked reading this review, maybe you would like to share this review with your friends!
It seems good game but hard i suppose
I’m not a fan of Halo
the co-op was annoying to me
It’s been so long since I played a Halo game! Keep ’em coming! 🙂
We have a whole slew of Halo reviews in our pool ready for launch!
hope i can get in my hands too 🙂
Never paid much attention to Halo but actually looks cool.
Halo Reach, what a great game!!
Heck yeah!
Seems like a cool game, always wanted to play and try one from this series (Halo) however never played yet.
You should get started, Halo games are great! There are a few bad apples though, no worries, we will review them as well!
Just want to say that it’s a cool game which is really worth while playing
It has a very good campaign, maybe not the best of the Halo series but it might be in the top 3!
Halo Reach, aka the best Halo game… Or so I’ve heard. (and you seem to disagree)
Didn’t get to play them yet (apart from Halo Infinite multiplayer). ^^’
Nice review!