On May 3rd, anyone with a copy of Halo 3: ODST will be able to participate in the multiplayer beta test for Bungie’s supposed, final Halo game, Halo Reach. Bungie has promised radical changes while still making sure that the game “felt like Halo.” I was fortunate enough to spend the last few days in the “friends and family” portion of the beta test, and I’m here to tell you, the changes are indeed radical, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less fun.
The first thing we need to talk about are the controls. For those of you who have Halo 3’s controls committed to memory, you are in for a surprise as the default controls will definitely throw you for a loop. It took me at least two hours to get used to the new control scheme. Melee combat is a huge component of Halo; it can be your strongest attack, and if you manage to get behind an opponent without them noticing, you can one hit kill them with an assassination. However the button for the attack has been moved from B to the right bumper. For some people; that won’t be a big deal, but for me and my muscle memory, it was a nightmare. I failed spectacularly in match after match as I fired rounds into my opponents, got in close and mashed the B button to find that not only was I not melee attacking, but I wasn’t doing anything. The B button is now the button you use to change grenade types. That was previously the left bumper, which now controls armor abilities.
Armor abilities are a completely new feature in a Halo game, and there are four, so far, on display in the beta. The first is sprint which, as you might imagine, makes your Spartan run faster for a short amount of time. Is it a new groundbreaking feature for a first-person shooter? No, not at all, but it’s a welcome addition to Halo, especially in objective game types.
The second, and most controversial, armor ability is armor lock which allows you to crouch and become invulnerable for about three seconds while emitting an EMP field that saps the shields of anyone foolish enough to get near you. It may sound unfair, but about half the time, using it results in your death anyway. You usually armor lock when all hope seems lost, but your shields and health don’t regenerate while using the ability. If your foes keep a safe distance as soon as you come out of the lock you will just get picked off. You either have to coordinate with a teammate or hope someone else comes along and kills that person for armor lock to be truly effective. It wont help you get kills, but it can prevent you from having to respawn.
Active camo is now an armor ability, but it’s also gone through an overhaul. The less you move, the less visible you are. Stand perfectly still, and you can’t be seen. Start moving at full speed, and you become visible. To counter that mechanic, you now scramble nearby players radars, making about a dozen red dots appear all over. There’s also an interesting audio cue for the player who is activating the camo. While invisible, things go eerily silent as if you are concentrating, waiting for an enemy to walk by you so you can take them out without them noticing. It’s really dramatic while defending a flag or other objective. It also balances things out, as it makes it harder for you to hear enemies approaching. So you must rely entirely on sight since you’ve taken that ability away from your opponents.
The final armor ability in the beta is another one that is sure to cause quite a stir, and that’s jetpacks. Here’s what you need to know: Jetpacks are fun, easy to use and add verticality to the combat. In previous Halo games, vertical combat had to be built into maps. Now, every map and every game type will have you keeping one eye on the ground and one eye on the skies. There isn’t anything more satisfying than assassinating someone in mid-air, so watch your back.
Armor abilities are changeable with each spawn thanks to a loadout system. This loadout system is more like Battlefield than Modern Warfare. You don’t make your own class; you choose from a set of predetermined classes. Each class contains one of the armor abilities, a starting weapon and a starting grenade type. The number and type of loadouts also change based on game type and even map. The Scout loadout’s armor ability is sprint. See…get it… you can sprint ahead and scout. While the loadout system is definitely an interesting addition, it does make it hard to do well the first time on a new map, or even the first time in a new game type. You’ll spend most of the match trying the different loadouts to see how they work. Once you figure out which one works, and in what situations, loadouts are just fine, especially when you know where better weapons are on the map. It’s also fun that everyone has an armor ability and can choose which ability to take with them. However, they are jarring the first few times you have to choose and learn how to use them.
In Halo games of yesteryear, assassinating an enemy was just performing a melee attack to the back of their head. In Reach, assassinations are now a full 2-3 second animation. The camera pulls back from your first-person view, and you get to watch your avatar deliver a devastating killing blow. Some of these even seem context sensitive, like pushing a perched sniper over the edge of the cliff they have been sniping on or kicking a Spartan out an open window. The first time you do it, you will cheer, but honestly it never gets old. And even though it leaves you more vulnerable to attack, you will never hesitate to assassinate an enemy.
There are also plenty of new game types to play. However, they haven’t all been added to the beta so I can’t tell you about the largest of them, Invasion. I can tell you about stockpile, covey slayer and headhunter. Stockpile is an interesting twist on capture the flag, a game mode that I don’t normally enjoy, but it is a lot of fun. Both teams have a goal, and there are about six neutral flags scattered across the map. Every 60 seconds, the goals “go off,” and when that happens, any flags in the goal count towards your teams score. First team to score 10 points wins. Neutral flags that only count when they are in a small cylindrical sized goal is a great new wrinkle in what can be a stale game type. It also creates new types of play styles. In normal capture the flag, you can either be offensive, and try to get flags, or hang back and be defensive to protect your team’s flag. Stockpile allows players to take another role, that of a robber. You can hang at the other team’s goal and throw their flags out of their goal, so that when the timers tick down on the goals, those flags won’t count. Right now, in the beta, it’s 4v4, but I imagine that as the beta rolls on, the teams will get bigger. And bigger teams will mean more hectic games, with giant battles taking place at the goals being a common occurrence.
Covey slayer is normal team slayer, but everyone plays as Elites. However, this time, the Elites do play much differently than Spartans. First of all, they start with Covenant weapons like plasma grenades and the new long range needler, but they are also faster, much faster, than the Spartans. While they don’t have an armor ability per se, the left bumper in conjunction with a direction will make your Elite do a jumping-dodge similar to what they are capable of in past single player Halo campaigns. The faster movement and dodging makes for a much more exciting variant on vanilla team slayer.
For about a day, covey slayer was my favorite new game type in Halo Reach until I finally managed to get into a game of headhunter. Headhunter is slayer taken to a whole new level of ridiculousness. Every time someone in the game dies, they leave behind a flaming skull which you can then collect. Meanwhile, two goal areas constantly shift themselves around the battlefield. You score points by entering the goal area while “holding” skulls. Kills don’t count, only how many skulls you deposit. Adding another layer of strategy to headhunter is that you can hold any number of skulls, but if you get killed, you drop all the skulls you were holding, allowing your opponents to grab them and score the points you just missed out on. I witnessed this in my game first hand as I managed to kill a Spartan that was holding 10 skulls just as he was about to cross into the goal. I did him a favor and cleaned up his mess, scoring all 10 points for myself. I think headhunter is going to be a very popular game type when the game is properly released later this year.
Halo 3 introduced the concept of armor permutations which were unlocked by either ranking up in multiplayer or unlocking achievements. Once unlocked, it was up to the player to decided how they wanted to piece together their helmet, chest, and shoulder pieces. This is purely cosmetic, but since each piece can be colored differently, it means that every Spartan in a free-for-all game looks different. Reach changes things up a bit by replacing EXP with credits that can be used to buy the pieces of armor. It’s actually a little confusing because earning credits also ranks you up. So credits are credits, but they are also experience, make sense? So how does rank tie in to buying new pieces of armor? Well, you can only buy certain armors if you are at a certain rank. So just because I have the 5000 credits it might cost to buy X helmet doesn’t mean I’m at X rank to be able to spend those credits on it.
My only real beef with this system is that it doesn’t seem grand enough. In a single game of Modern Warfare 2, you can literally earn tens of thousands of XP, but in most games of Reach, you will find yourself earning less than 100 credits which, in the end, is fine because it’s all relative. The most expensive item I’ve seen in the beta is a 5000 credit helmet. That’s equal to about 50 games, something most Halo players can get done in a couple of nights. Now this may only be in the beta, but these numbers seem so small in comparison to the numbers I can rack up in Call of Duty. It just doesn’t feel as satisfying. It doesn’t help that I don’t actually see how many credits I’m earning until a post game report. It breaks down where you earned the credits into three categories, but never tells you why you got X amount of credits or HOW you got those credits. In BioShock 2 and Modern Warfare 2, you get the instant gratification of seeing XP earned as you earn it. Playing a 15 minute match of 1 Flag CTF only to find out you earned 82 credits can really mess with you mentally. Maybe this will all make sense in the retail product, but in the beta, it’s not very exciting.
We should also talk about graphics because, graphically, this IS Halo 4. If you’ve already read beta impressions on other sites, you know that most of the talk is regarding the motion blur, and for good reason. It is super impressive. It’s up there with the motion blur we saw in God of War III. The way your gun looks in your hand as you move, and the LED screen that shows your ammo count blurs just enough, is quite an impressive sight. You have to take my word for it; the UI in Reach is stunning. There’s also new animations for when characters in multiplayer are killed, and they are much more varied and realistic than any death animations in previous Halo games. There’s also great attention to detail placed on things in the distance, something we first saw in firefight maps in ODST. If Reach suffers anywhere graphically, it’s when you get close to things, which is where a lot of games fall apart, so it doesn’t bother me too much. Plus, this is the beta; theoretically things could get better in the finished product. Not that I’m counting on it. However, prepare to be impressed as this is the best looking Halo game yet.
If you’re already a fan of Halo, this latest iteration of the series’ multiplayer will take some getting used to, but once all the newness wears off, it’s still Halo at it’s core…and it’s a heck of a lot of fun. I’m sure it will be even more fun once I can play it with a group of friends. Speaking of, make sure you keep your eyes on our Twitter page because we will be making a game night out of the Reach beta, and we would love to have you tag along with us. The Halo Reach beta will last about two weeks, and you can bet I will be making the most of it because it’s going to be a long haul from here until the game’s release this Fall.