Halo: Reach -- DSmooth's Multiplayer Review

Okay, yeah, DSmooth isn't an ultra-competitive Halo-playing psychopath like some of us on the site, but he is what I'd loosely call a "Halo enthusiast," and he has been playing the franchise on and off for like nine years. Here's his 19-game take on Reach's Multiplayer offerings. And no, it isn't fair he got to play it before you did.

The Halo: Reach multiplayer experience seems to me to be one of flawless execution on Bungie’s part. Although the beta showcased this to an extent, in the final release it’s all that much more improved. Playing pre-release for this review, some of the features were not enabled, like Arena, so I wasn't able to try them out. 

The one feature I loved in the beta was the Active Roster, and it is even more tweaked in the full release. This is what Bungie calls the "embedding-of-your-online-friends and-parties" right in the menus and lobbies in the game, so you can see what games your friends are in, party up and join them as soon as you get online.  I exchanged friend requests with a couple other reviewers to check it out, and it’s as intuitive and convenient as it was in the beta. It makes it so much easier to hook up with your friends, allowing you to queue up there party and automatically join once their current game is finished.

The voting system is pretty similar to what we saw in the beta, but for those of you under a rock, this is where, instead of being given the choice to veto a map & game-type, then being stuck with another random map and game-type, you are given a choice of three different map/game-type combinations. Players vote on these and highest votes choose the game (or none of them, in which case they are given three new choices).  I find that I get more games I actually enjoy using this system.

The character customization is also more amazing than any previous Halo game. The Armory is loaded with just about anything you could want to make you standout, up to and including different voices. These are all unlocked with the in-game currency of credits. Everything you do in Reach rewards you with credits, and you use these to buy different customizations for yourself.

Now it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t talk about some of the weapons in Reach.  Old favorites like the BR may be gone, but the new ones are amazing. Many have seen tweaks since the beta, so I’m going to just assume you have no knowledge of the various weapons and cover all I had a chance to use.

• The DMR is the go-to weapon of choice.  It’s basically Reach’s equivalent of the Halo 3 BR. It’s fast, accurate, can be single zoomed and can now take down someone in four shots, unlike five in the beta.
• The Plasma Launcher has been nerfed a bit since the beta, but it’s still lethal. This is a lock-on type weapon where, after holding the trigger down, four homing plasma grenades attack the target. It’s designed mostly for anti-vehicle use, but assuming you can stay in range and keep the lock-on for long enough, it’s also super useful against other players.
• The Plasma Repeater is the Reach equivalent of the Halo 3 plasma rifle. It’s got a familiar feel, but packs a much bigger punch.
• The Grenade Launcher is a beast, but I’ve yet to master its complexity.  It basically launches 'nades that have timers based on how long you held down the trigger to fire them. I saw a couple people work some magic with it, but a lot were still faltering like me.
• The Covenant Focus Rifle replaces the covenant sniper rifle, but shoots a continuous beam that packs a punch (unlike the old Halo 2 “Ghostbusters” gun).  If you are good at maintaining a bead on your target, it works its magic quickly.
• The Target Locator is like calling in an airstrike. You mark your target after locking it in, then the next trigger pull rains in hell from above. Instant overkills in Firefight…
• The Fuel Rod Gun is like the Covenant equivalent of the missile pod, but shoots a big glob of green shit that does amazing damage.
• The Needle Rifle is like the needler meets the DMR.  Single needle shots from this quickly take down someone assuming you are laying in good headshots.

Also back from the beta and added to/enhanced are the armor abilities. Different load-outs offer you different abilities, but they all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and I found myself using almost all of them in various situations. They include:

• Sprint is the most basic of the abilities, but also one of the most useful, especially at the start of objective games, or quickly getting into or out of the action.  It basically gives you a quick speed boost, but sometimes that’s all you need.
• Evade is the Elite-only escape version of Sprint.  It basically makes your Elite tuck and roll to get away from close-quarter combat.
• The Jet Pack is exactly what it sounds like. A short-lasting ability to take your Spartan take to the air. It can be useful for ascending a map vertically in a quick manner, getting the drop on someone, or making an aerial attack.
• Armor Lock should be called Armor Rock. You slam your hand to the ground and ball up like a rock, and you are invincible for a short period of time. Great for escaping shitty situations and letting shields recharge. Also emits an EMP pulse when it runs out, which disables nearby vehicles (and opposing players' energy shields).
• Drop Shield is like a bubble shield with healing properties. You toss it down and your team can hop in and recover inside.
• Active Camo makes you invisible, as the power-up did in previous Halo games, but moving makes you slightly less invisible. Also, it jams your radar and the radar of anyone around you.
• Hologram might be my new favorite. It basically tosses out a fake you. In close-quarters combat you can deploy one then escape as other players tend to react to it as another player.  It can also make a good decoy to send in first to get opponents to expose their positions. I’m still using it in lots of different ways, but all are tremendously useful.

Now that I covered all of the weapons and abilities, we can get down to the good stuff -- actually playing multiplayer games. We’ll start with Matchmaking…

The competitive playlists include all the usual variants: Rumble Pit, Team Slayer, Team Objective, Multi Team and Big Team Battle. The only major change to these playlists are a couple of new game types, Headhunter and Stockpile.  Both were present in the beta, but in case you missed them, I’ll quickly describe them. Headhunter is all about skulls. Every time you kill someone they drop a skull that you can pick up. You can hold multiple skulls at a time, and you need to drop them off at a randomly changing location to get points. If you are killed before you deposit them, then the skulls are all dropped for someone else to pick up and score. The other, Stockpile, is basically like multi-flag CTF meets territories… Neutral flags are scattered around the map. Bring them back to your stockpile to score at the next timed interval.  Before scoring they can be taken out of your scoring zone by the other team and brought back to their own. Provides some awesomely frenetic gameplay.

They also include Invasion, which was introduced during the beta. It’s a 6v6 playlist where there are six Spartans and six Elites, and the objective is to, depending on your side, capture or defend checkpoints that further open the map and unlock better weapons and vehicles. It’s an excellent team strategy game, and lots of fun, especially if your teammates are good communicators. 

In the cooperative playlists you have Firefight, which is just the standard Firefight variant of a team of four defending a point against wave after wave of progressively harder enemies. It’s basically what was introduced in Halo: ODST, onyl in Reach and played as Spartans instead of ODSTs. In addition to Matchmaking Firefight, it’s also available via the main menu in a more customizable fashion. You can choose the map/scenario, difficulty setting and tweak all sorts of game options, making it infinitely different each play, should you care to make it that way. The other is Score Attack, which is a single-player version of Firefight with leaderboards, so you are indirectly competing with your friends and the rest of the world.

The last component of Matchmaking is the Arena system, offering Doubles Arena for 2v2 and Team Arena for 4v4. These playlists are aimed at competitive players. You basically play three arena matches or more in a given day, and you (individually) are given a daily rating. After you have enough rated days, you qualify for a season rating and get put into a division based on your skill. At the end of each season players are ranked numerically and by percentile. True bragging rights.

My overall impressions of the multiplayer is that it’s amazingly fun. Bungie has taken what they have learned over the years, suggestions from their community (even the complaints), and tweaked it to be a fun experience. It feels so familiar, yet so wildly different at the same time. Between the various load-outs, armor abilities and new weaponry alone, it feels new, but when you combine that with the most beautiful graphics I’ve ever seen in a Halo game and some amazing map design, they have hit it out of the park. I don’t want to dig too deep into the maps, but in a nutshell they are:

• Boardwalk – This is a city/park type location. Ramps, grassy areas, trees, concourses and underground areas. Plays well for any party size.

• Boneyard – This is the huge open construction site map many will remember from the beta.

• Countdown – This is a multi-level missile silo. Lots of hallways and ramps for close-quarters fans, but an equal amount of long views across levels or from level to level.

• Forge World – I’ll get more into Forge World in a minute, but this is the giant open map provided for Forge use that can be used to build custom maps in a variety of locations and terrains. Bundled in are five maps made within Forge World (Asylum – the small Sanctuary remake, Hemorrhage – Blood Gulch/Coagulation remake, Paradiso – island, Pinnacle – a remake of Halo 2’s Ascension, and The Cage – a small boxy room)

• Powerhouse – This map was also present in the beta.  It’s a smaller map built around a hydroelectric plant

• Reflection – If you played Halo 2, then you’ve played Reflection. It’s a remake of Ivory Tower, but you’ve never seen it look so amazing.

• Spire – This is an enormous map built for the Invasion playlists.  It consists of a huge spire surrounded by beaten terrain.

• Sword Base – This map was present in the beta as well. It’s basically two office buildings connected by bridges and a lift in the middle.

• Zealot – This is a nice indoor Covenant map. Lots of ramps, hallways, bridges and lifts. Very reminiscent of favorite Covy maps of the past.

The last thing I want to cover is Forge and Forge World. With the introduction of Forge in Halo 3, custom Halo mapmaking became a reality. Although many of the custom maps were amazing in H3, you were very limited on what you could do with them. To answer that, Bungie gave us Forge World. It’s an enormous map with all sorts of different locations, terrains, etc that mapmakers can use as a canvas to build their maps. Pick a portion of Forge World, isolate gameplay to that area and build your map there. Mapmakers will rejoice.

To see if Forge was any easier to use, I attempted to make a map as part of this review. It’s still too complex for my taste, and would benefit greatly from being able to use a keyboard and mouse, but seasoned mapmakers will love it. I built a small four-man snipers-only map in Forge and it took me about 40 minutes. It (along with the snipes gametype) are available on my fileshare. It’s not impressive, but at least I tried it out.

Overall, I am amazingly happy with what Bungie has done with Halo: Reach. They have taken the already high bar set by Halo 3 (and Halo 2 before that), taken the few good things that were in ODST, combined them all, improved upon them, and laid an amazing golden egg.

Reach, for me, is the new bar by which other console FPSes will and should be judged against. Even with the limited player pool available to me during the pre-release review period, I never had a shitty game, I never lagged out, and I always had a blast.

Kudos to Bungie. Your Halo swansong is a grand slam!