All of those great additions that made it into the campaign? Well they're here too. Likewise, you can play the Firefight mode, a single map test of skill and endurance against waves of Covenant enemies, with a few friends cooperatively. The campaign can be played alone or with up to four-players on a split-screen or online. It's difficult to separate out the core components of Halo: Reach because they all sort of blend together into one massive experience.
Even so, there are times when the epic battles don't quite feel so incredible thanks to a lack of detail or the occasional framerate stutter while the engine can't keep up with what's happening. You're fighting amidst a war that rages across an entire planet, and Bungie doesn't let you forget it.
The alien vistas and color palette are striking, and the sense of scale is oftentimes off the charts. While that music pummels your ear drums, your eyes get to feast on one gorgeous looking game. Marty O'Donnell, the lead sound guy at Bungie, has once again delivered an epic soundtrack that is so good that it elevates the entire game. That sense of immersion is helped along quite a bit by the amazing audio work and the new graphics engine built for Halo: Reach. Halo: Reach is a tough game on the harder settings - easily the most difficult in the franchise - and it only gets more challenging as you add co-op players thanks to a scaling difficulty. While playing I found myself slipping into that state quite often, only occasionally ripped out by nasty difficulty spikes. These new features and refined, classic design work in concert well enough that Halo: Reach often meets that gaming ideal of pure immersion - the core components that can remind you that you're playing a game are a nonentity while you focus on the action at hand. The result is a faster, more acrobatic game that affords the player more flexibility in how they'd like to approach each fight. These temporary but reusable extra abilities add things like sprinting, jet packs, and invincible armor to the franchise for the first time. These are an evolution of the equipment found in Halo 3 and drastically change the way you play in their updated form. Halo Personality Quiz - Find out which Spartan you are. The action is always moving through one combat scenario to the next, with plenty of gameplay and scenario twists to keep things fresh. Little successful elements of old Halo games are sprinkled here or there while a newfound sensibility in level design and pacing is wrapped around the core. Now, though the Halo formula is intact and there are plenty of wink-and-a-nod references to past games, Reach is a big step forward. I don't want to spoil anything, but just know that the space combat Bungie used to tease Halo: Reach is only the beginning. The ending in particular left a huge impression on me. The last third of the game is just one big thrill ride, and the revelations that occur during that part of the game are sure to make any Halo buff go ballistic. The tale starts out simple enough, but it quickly escalates to stunning set pieces before pulling out all the stops. And don't worry if you haven't played the other Halo games yet – though Reach will feel a lot deeper and more compelling to longtime Halo fans, it can stand on its own as a self-contained story. This is the most straightforward and enjoyable tale of destruction the franchise has yet to produce. Though past Halo games were filled with repetitive landscapes and circuitous, difficult to follow plots, Halo: Reach does not suffer from these problems. That means plenty of big battlefields, crazy vehicles, lots of aliens to fight, and tons of weapons to help make the Covenant pay. During that time you'll find a lot of tried and true mainstays of the Halo formula. The whole shebang will last you about nine or ten hours on your first play through on the Heroic difficulty (less if you're real good and more if you aren't). You'll get to know each of the other team members through the course of Halo: Reach as you work with them to complete various missions, but the action always follows Noble 6's adventure.
Noble 6 is the rookie member of Noble Team, a squad of Spartans stationed on Reach. The war with the Covenant is already raging, and things don't look good for us humans. The events of Halo: Reach take place as a prequel to the main Halo trilogy and - though they take small liberties with the established fiction - help to tell the story of the events that lead up to events of Halos 1 through 3. This colony is the center of humanity's military might, and home to the Spartan program that produced Master Chief himself. Noble 6's tale begins with an introduction to Planet Reach.