I spent some time with Halo: Reach last night. First off, the game's good. It has a focus on story and teamwork more so than the previous games that I played (I skipped out on ODST, so I dont' have a basis of comparison for that one). With that said, Noble 6 (the character you play) feels a whole lot weaker than Master Chief ever did. Shields drop quicker, shots don't seem to have the same impact on the Covenant, and the elites can really tear into you. Maybe it's me, maybe it's because they're still considered a new threat, but you can not go in to this game with a "one man army" mind set.
With that said, I find it interesting that they didn't implement some sort of cover system into the game like nearly every other shooter out there right now. Keeping alive isn't easy, the game encourages you to work with team mates, so it would seem to make sense to be able to be able to hide behind cover to pop out and take a few shots to provide cover fire. Maybe Spartan training never covered that, or something.
Speaking of team mates, they're still pretty dumb. The first couple areas it didn't show so much, but as soon as you get vehicles in the mix, it's like they find a cooler in the trunk full of margarita mix and go to town. The prime example would be when I'm working with Kat and they air dropped a Warthog for us. The first time, I jumped into the drivers seat having learned my lesson from previous Halo games, and she did a pretty good job of keeping up with my driving with her shooting. To see what she could do as a driver, I let her take over (mostly because I wanted to shoot stuff). Her tactics were generally "drive slowly towards what I was shooting, while pretending I have the same invulnerable bubble shield around me that she does". Needless to say, I took away her keys.
Lastly, I spent some time unlocking achievements in a multi-player Firefight mode. The game ran extremely smoothly and we had no problems with the net code, and on a launch day, that's really impressive. I feel that the multi-player will be the meat of the game, and I'll be able to report more on it after this weekend where we'll be putting it to a real test with a lan party.
So my initial impressions of it are pretty good, if you were at all on the fence about picking it up, I would recommend it
. Keep an eye on the site for my full review after I finish up the game.
