I've never been a big Halo fan to begin with. The first game bored me to tears and frankly I thought it looked like shit. The music was good, but that was about it. Halo 2 had far superior graphics, and personally I think it's the best out of the original trilogy. A lot of people thought it was shit, and I know why, but it was the only one that wasn't just a copy paste (which is now going into ODST). It actually had some new stuff in it. Halo 3 was $60 for a 5 hour campaign that was piss easy on the hardest difficulty and had a ton of bloom.
Then we come to Halo: Reach. The final game by Bungie in the only series that the Xbox 360 has going for it since they just lost Mass Effect to PS3 owners. This game is just crap, even for a Halo game.
The voice acting sucks, especially the asshole that gives you commands. He says everything with no emotion and sounds like he's reading from a script. Which is pretty much like everyone else, from the hardcore Marine girl in the squad to your character that sounds about as tough as a box of Puffs Plus tissue paper. More so, and something that surprised me, the music is terrible. Usually the one thing I can always say the Halo series had was a good, memorable, soundtrack. Not in this game. So far as I can tell, the main Halo theme is gone, or it's so low key you can't even hear it. The music has no idea when it's supposed to come in, and it's almost non-existent in action oriented areas.
The graphics compared to other games on the system look god awful. I have a 32" 1080p HD TV. Mass Effect 1 and 2, Killzone 2, Bioshock, all look fantastic on my TV. This game looks like a mess. Usually designers use bloom in a game to hide low res textures so you can't tell they skimped. That's basically what Halo 3 did. It seems to me Bungie did away with most of the bloom and now the shit shines through. Grass looks like crap. Textures are blurry and low res. Sure the general outlook of the world is kind of cool, but it still looks like a standard def picture that's been stretched. It's a bad sign when a game that's over 2 years old looks better and is by the same company. I admit, there are some cool things, like when you shoot a grunt and he starts spinning around in a circle from the exhaust on his backpack, but it's not enough.
The gameplay is still the same as it ever was. Weapons that take a million billion bullets to kill anything except grunts. The same weapons we've been using since Halo 2. The same enemies we've seen since Halo 2, do the same things they did in that game. All they really did was re-skin some of them (like the grunts), but they do exactly the same thing as their older looking versions so it doesn't matter. Did I have fun at all? Meh, kind of. But attaching a sticky grenade to someone and watching them run around before they explode got old after the first game. The new gameplay features, and by features, I mean the one thing that changed, is being able to mod your suit. You really only have two options though, speed and shield. Shield sounds nice, but upon use you realize that it's fucking stupid and go back to speed. What's the point of a shield if I can't move at all and can't fire? It makes me think of Serenity when Summer Glau is praying and says, "Please, God, make me a stone." Good, I'm a rock, now what? (And yes, I know there are other ones, but they're stupid, like the Hologram mod.)
As far as multiplayer, I don't care and if you want to whine about how it's a great multiplayer experience, piss off. A game cannot stand up on multiplayer alone unless it's specifically designed as such. Servers shut down after a while and people move onto the next game, rendering the game useless if the single player campaign sucks. And if you think Bungie cares more about the multiplayer than single player watch their interviews. The guys at Bungie actually think they have a fantastic story and talk more about their single player campaign than their multiplayer experience.
Over all I think Bungie is tired of this series. It seems like they tried slacking on this game so people will stop buying their games and they can go onto something new. But of course IGN gave it a 9.5 and every idiot out their thinks it's a 10/10 game with little to no justification. If you had fun with it, more power to you, but in general it's a bad game that's poorly designed. And if you're wondering why I didn't talk about the story at all, it's because it's still the same damn story except we already know what happens. Hey Bungie, it's usually shit story design when you tell us everyone is going to die in the beginning of the game. Kind of leaves no reason to feel anything for the characters. Just a pro tip.
No comments:
Post a Comment