A Few Words About Halo: Reach

Above: Me, earlier this evening, pulling off one of the sweet new Assassination moves on some guy online.

Halo: Reach has been out for almost exactly two months, a modest span of time in which I have managed to devote comfortably over 100 hours to playing it. Yes, really. I'm stating that from the outset not to brag about the fact that some 4 and an half days of my life, which might have been applied toward any manner of personal or professional advancement in a not inconsiderably critical developmental period, have instead been spent in front of the 360, but rather to establish that Halo: Reach is a really good game. I had an inkling of this going in, from my experience with the multiplayer beta (chronicled here), but the extent to which Reach has become a staple of my nights poses an interesting question: why the hell do I still care about Halo?

After all, it's not incredibly different from the four Halo games that preceded it; there's a lot of tweaks, fine-tuning, and loving care put into the game, but that all really adds up to more of a refinement of the hallmarks of the franchise than any sort of reinvention. If anything, Reach deliberately sets out to evoke the first Halo and strips away quite a few of the added features of the sequels. It works brilliantly, even when it really shouldn't.

Here's why: as a franchise, Halo understands that video games as a form live and die by their controls. After you've played a Halo game for a few hours, the controls are about as natural as breathing; and moving to the latest incarnation rarely requires you to learn more than one or two new changes, which are characteristically more intuitive that what they are replacing. (Incidentally, the decision to break with tradition by remapping the melee button from B to right bumper in Reach was a stroke of genius that almost reinvents the game). When you're playing Halo, everything you could possibly want or need to do - shoot, toss a grenade, jump, pistol-whip, etc. - is a single button-press away. The ridiculous number of effective techniques and attack options underneath the essential simplicity of the control scheme means that you start to develop a personal style pretty quickly, which you are rarely punished for doing. Even hardcore skilled multiplayer Halo junkies vary widely in their favored tactics; there's not a whole lot of unfair advantages to be had.

In all the hours I've spent playing Reach and it's predecessors, I've never felt like there was one right way to play the game. The experience of playing Halo has always struck me as similar to a giant sandbox with a bunch of different toys that are all somehow fun in their own way; there's just this sort of tactile friendliness to the game that encourages that sort of engagement. Halo: Reach is the apex of the series because it takes the Halo mechanics and lets them be the endlessly reconfigurable Rubik's Cube they always were: out of the box, you can choose to play the excellent single-player campaign alone or with friends, you can go online and play any one of a slew of competitive game-types, you can team up with other people in the Firefight mode, which throws waves of enemies at you and grafts on an arcade-style scoring mode, or you can come up with something completely unique using the Forge editor that comes with the game.

I think that more than anything else, Halo: Reach succeeds so wildly as a game because it invites you to have the experience that you want to have (as long as that experience involves shooting things, naturally, but if that's not your cup of tea, there's always reading). Since I've been playing it, it's been hard for me to really contemplate switching to another game; I may eventually pick up Call of Duty: Black Ops since it's getting good reviews, and there's those neat-looking Borderlands and Red Dead Redemption expansions, but I think it's going to take some time before Reach gets its hooks out of me.