Halo: Reach

I normally find myself responding to the release of a new Halo game in the same fashion, with a resounding "Ughhhhhhh...", then remembering that I should not be surprised at the fact that people who like their games as bland and unoriginal as a cinder block exist, and exist in force. Since 2001, we have all been drowned in the mediocrity of Halo and it's crowd of middle schoolers corpse-humping people between shots of Ritalin pills administered by parents too lazy to notice that their son, whose balls have not dropped yet is thoroughly telling a grown man off who just wanted to unwind after a day of work, and instead has to listen to some little pissant go on about fucking his mom in all the octaves that Justin Beiber will no longer be able to reach once the hormones for his gender reassignment surgery take over and he will finally be a real boy. Ten fucking years and that boy still has somehow not grown up, or he has cloned himself ad nauseum into some sort of barely pubescent army that has infected the world of online gameplay. Honestly this type has been around since before Halo. But somehow the union of console online gameplay and the console first person shooter have made some sort of scary singularity that pulls in all the dickheads with a headset and brings them directly into the realm where a normal sane person just wants some time to face other players in a competitive game. Fuck, nowadays it is a risk playing Uno on XBL. Uno...really?


Now until recently, I had never been big into competitive multiplayer in games, especially ones with a single-player mode. Fighting games may be the only exception, but honestly if you buy a fighting game just to slug it out with the computer until the end of time, then it really is high time you go outside and see what the sky looks like. Pushing that fact aside though, the whole idea of testing my ability against other people was never something that I found satisfying. Even in games like WoW, competitive multiplayer was never anything I took to as more than a passing fancy. I think I did maybe two arena matches, then promptly wanted to jam an icepick into my eye socket in an effort to find something more fun to do.

Now between the last two paragraphs, we have established I am not the biggest fan of two things: The Halo series and competitive multiplayer. So what the frak was I doing buying Halo: Reach? By simply looking at the box, one could easily tell it's a Halo game; it has a Spartan, fuck it has many Spartans, it has vaguely futuristic-looking weapons, and it even goes so far to have the word Halo boldly proclaimed on the box, like this is supposed to be a good thing. Well in my infinitely shrinking amount of personal time, with all this bullshit of trying to be an adult, I find myself having not the free time, nor the patience to sit down with the traditional turn-based RPG's I have loved in the days of olde. So this problem has made me decide to go back to genres and series I have written off in the past in the hopes of finding something fun that can accommodate the fact I very rarely have 8 hours straight to sit down and play a game. So really...how is this experiment starting for me? Am I going to be flocking to the world of XBL with gusto, getting headshots like prostitutes get STDs? Or will I cower back to my RPG's, resigned to the fact it will forevermore take me months to finish a game simply because I need to grind experience points endlessly?

Well if Halo: Reach is any indication of my ability to like shooters, both single player and multi, then I may have a future in this. While not the best game by any stretch, hell no, it is a game under the Halo banner sporting a story that at least looks like it was written by someone with an education past the fourth grade in a school made fully of lickable lead paint chips. It is a story about sacrifice, duty, guns, tanks, dog tags and other manly things. And these things are spoken about...sometimes, by characters with more personality than a piece of pvc piping, but less than...a mentally challenged deaf cat. The voice acting is flat, full of that manliness that such a game should have I guess. It's less Saving Private Ryan and more Saving Private Ryan done by an acting class of people fresh from their frontal lobotomies. Thankfully though, Reach does do away with the paint chips, and replaces it with asbestos insulation, so while it is still not an ideal change, your will not become retarded and die quickly from the sheer stupidity of what is going on, it is a lot more gradual now.

But story...psh that is simply a holdover from my RPG days dammit. I don't play a shooter to deal with pussy things like narrative, I play them to put bullets into things that want to put bullets...or plasma into me. As far as this goes, at least from my novice perspective, Reach does this pretty well on the single-player front. The missions, at least compared to previous Halo games where all you do is point your wooden Master Chief man at things and hold down right trigger till nothing besides you in the room can move, are actually pretty varied. There are plenty of vehicle sessions that do not feel totally shoe-horned, the best being the space fighter level. Fuck, this may be the best part of the game, and it has absolutely nothing to do with shooting from a first person perspective. If Microsoft took that one level and made a whole game out of it, I would be first on line to pre-order it from my local Gamestop/Pawnshop (synonyms). But besides vehicles which may or may not doing excessive barrel rolls, while thoughts of mentor-ish rabbits dance through my head, the missions are varied and do actually pull the plot forward. The sense of progression, while samey in the sense that most of the time you are shooting the same types of enemies ad nauseum, is present by impressive set-pieces and areas to run around and gun-butt grunts.

The multiplayer is...fun. For the most part. Some of the types of play I just cannot wrap my head around, like King of the Hill. In the end I just wanna shoot guys with my shotgun, or my DMR. This is more of me and how I like to play games though. Teams also never really work well for me, probably for the same reason they do not normally work on XBL. People on the service (including me) are fucktards who cannot coordinate a trip to the bar, let alone an attack plan that involves many people. So I tend to find myself sticking more to solo slayer style festivities. Also I get that all games, including shooters are looking for ways to keep players coming back, but this RPG leveling up shit that comes with all mutliplayer needs to stop. Probably the only rewards I could possibly give a crap about in Reach multi are the varied helmet styles. But no, on top of that we have to add arbitrary pipes to the existing helmets, if nothing else to pad the amount of time the most grind happy idiots spend on the multiplayer, corpse-humping each other. Why do I need to be a Warrant Officer to wear certain types of wristguards? And are there really any added benefits, like ones that fucking matter? My pink and seafoam green Spartan would love to know, as it feels right now like I am only playing out 'manly' Barbie dress-up. Now excuse him while he hops in his plastic Corvette and heads back to the Dream House.

Probably my biggest complaint about Halo: Reach is the lack of any proper boss fights. All the challenges in the game at least on a normal setting come from me simply being impatient and not looking around to see all threats. Instead of boss fights, the game just seems to throw hordes at you, large ones. However the field is always arranged to where groups or even individuals can be cut off from each other, making the takedown steady and easy. Unless of course if you get too close to an elite and the motherfucker whips out an energy sword that he was storing for a rainy day and cuts you to ribbons. But that is not even a bossfight, that is a cop-out as sometimes he will pull out the sword and sometimes not. Tries 1-3 he will sword up, try 4 he will not but ill die because I jumped on a plasma grenade, then try 5 I am being pureed by Elite asshole again. Eventually I will just whip out my own fuck you button and stick him with a blue spider, but in the end that does not make me feel like I accomplished something, it feels more akin to me hitting the "Skip level" option after dying a lot in Splosion Man...which I have never done...no siree.

In the end though, I bought the game on sale back in November, and I have to ask myself...did I get forty dollars worth of game? The answer is yes, although barely. If nothing else Halo: Reach has made me curious in the genre, if not its own parentage. I can have fun with a shooter, and I did in Halo: Reach, but I feel like there has to be something better out there than what Bungie presented in their last rodeo with the Spartans. And through me not hating this game, maybe I will have the patience to slog through some other manly cock-extension toting games and see if I can warm to the genre. But until then, I will try another game series I have previously written off as utter shit. Fable 3, I'm coming for you.