Halo: Reach Beta – First Impressions

Just a short post tonight – As you no doubt are aware, the Halo: Reach Beta went live this evening (approximately 6pm GMT). After waiting a ridiculous 2 hours 25 minutes for the download to complete, I was soon in and linked up with two Team Gash members for our first game. Well, not quite – I spent a few minutes looking at the armour configurations, sorting my emblem and armour colours out – you know, the really important bits.

Once I’d faffed around, we jumped straight into our first game – Team SWAT. No grenades, no motion tracker, Sprint only, Spartan vs Spartan. I must say, a great way to introduce myself to Reach. The weapons definitely feel like they have more ‘oomph’ in them, which is good. Controls feel pretty solid, although there are a few button changes to get used to (but then, I always feel that games should either allow you to re-map your own controls, OR have a standard layout across all games (ie: Reload is always X, crouch is always click the Right Stick etc).

I must say, I enjoyed SWAT, although after this game we struggled to find another match due to server load (which we’d expected), so after some messing around in Theatre (or Theater… *sigh*) mode, we finally got into a second game – Team Oddball, which was over pretty quickly. Oddball involves a single Skull on the map which, when carried, grants the holding team points. The first team to 150 points wins the match. Although the match was fast, I was able to see a few other weapons in action – they’re looking pretty solid in terms of noise/hitting power, something which I’m pleased Bungie have done. Tragically, they still haven’t gotten rid of the annoying ‘stand up and zoom out when you’ve been hit’ feature (a term which I use extremely lightly). See my previous ‘Halo Hangup’ posts for more info on how I feel about the previous Halo games and my expectations for Reach – The Halo Hangup: Part 1, Part 2.

One thing I do like is the persistant character creation – what you look like in Campaign will carry over into Multiplayer and vice-versa. Also, win or lose, you gain Credits (rather than XP) with which to upgrade your character’s appearance (and that’s the key here – it’s all cosmetic – no new abilities/weapons are unlocked – everyone’s on an even playing field when it comes to your toys in game).

Unfortunately, after the Oddball game finished, we were stuck waiting for the servers to come back online (hardly surprising, given the popularity of the franchise), so we headed off for some Modern Warfare 2. However, I’ll be adding another post (or two) as more game modes become available and as the servers settle down.

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