Halo: Reach (Xbox 360) review "There’s success to be found in Reach but the conclusion is forever fated to be bitter-sweet. It’s your role to watch the planet you set out to defend burn, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. All you can do is try to make sure that before the cities are crushed and the surface turned to glass, that the invading army knows fear the way you do. And if that’s not enough, that they also know that a 5.52mm bullet to the head is universally fatal independent of race."

Reach is a dead planet that just doesn’t know it yet. It’s a graveyard to millions, a catalyst to the supposed genocide of humanity. Reach was the metaphorical doorstep to Earth -- a planet as well defended and as well populated as the mother homeworld; the last defendable obstacle to overcome for an invading fleet. It’s doomed. For those not keeping up with Halo lore, Reach was effortlessly taken by an unstoppable wave of Covenant in the midst of their religious crusade cunningly disguised as xenophobia.

From the moment you set foot on the planet, it doesn’t seem right. It is, as they say, quiet. Too quiet. Blind assumptions about rebel insurgents are blamed for the strewn civilian corpses and the dog-eared remains of military personnel. As your small squad of prototype Spartans emerge from wrecked homes still stained with their former inhabitant’s blood, they’re met with a litter of plasma fire.

It’s almost surreal how casually they record the covenant’s presence on Reach, but the first holding party of jackals and grunts are seen off relatively easily. You are backed by two other Spartans, after all, one with a ridiculously large minigun, and a third ally raining down death from above in a pelican attack craft. Aliens fall with relative ease and you can start to understand your team’s lack of urgency. The covenant are on Reach -- so what? You just wiped out an entire platoon without breaking a sweat.

You move on through ruined fields flush with sniping grunts and heavily armoured elites. Dropships deposit more targets to mow down, which you do. A rally of elites makes this stretch your first worthwhile battle; they group together, firing new laser mortars into your ranks, bolstering the lower order’s confidence and adding a sense of deadly cunning. On Reach, the elites are no longer a race of warriors wrongly enslaved to an unbreakable religious doctrine. They are not to be pitied or reasoned with; they are to be killed before they kill you. They are sadistic, merciless and intelligent foes that want you dead, and they will climb over the corpses of their fallen brethren to achieve this single-minded goal.

But they’ll fall with enough bullets, like everything else. Their hardy energy shields will falter, their armoured frames will puncture and their purple blood will flow. With the countryside cleared of hostiles, your air support will collect you and transfer you to a farming storeroom on the edge of the territory. Here, your team need hold position against a few advance squads until your obligatory tech can fix the hanger doors. There’s now six of you against an enemy invasion force that has so far been casually dismissed as a slight nuisance. The small contingent laying initial siege goes down so easily they may as well press the nozzle of their plasma pistols to what passes as their temples, and give the trigger a squeeze.

Then a dropship deposits reinforcements. Then another. And another. Then banshee fighter craft descend from the clouds, ploughing you with heavy plasma fire from above. Then another dropship arrives. Whenever you drop a grunt, whenever you overpower a jackal’s riot-shield-like defence or concentrate enough fire to put an elite down, they’re replaced almost immediately. You go from stalking the enclosed courtyard like a predator to huddling together with your squad in a storeroom, yelling at your tech to close the bloody doors. This happens in seconds. There’s no time to rally, no time to offer up a counter strike. There’s only fall back. Or die.

It’s instantly sobering. Take a look around you and look at the hardened warriors at your side. In all the Halo titles such a destructive force has yet to be constructed, yet they have been forced to run. They all stand on a planet that suggests that, when all is said and done, they, along with every solider that has your back, every civilian you encounter, will all be long dead before Master Chief so much as headshots his first grunt.

It’s a sharp reinvention of the series, scaling everything right back to its roots while, at the same time, evolving things in such a drastic way, you kind of have to forget that Reach is a prequel. Jackals are faster and smarter, able to jump fifty-foot gaps to gain better sniper positions or to try and dissuade concentrated fire. They even have a meaner cousin in scavengers who wear energy shields like bracers and tend to be bigger and tougher. Warhammer-swinging brutes show up like they’ve always been there and the days when you could hide quietly in a corner and snipe down hunters are long gone: nothing short of an orbital nuclear strike will take these guys out now.

You meet all of these in staggering number as you’re thrown all over Reach in your futile effort to save the planet. You could be scouting a desolate rocky region at night in one mission, only to find yourself space-bound in the next at the helm of a fighter craft trying to board an enemy destroyer. One level might have you snaking around the edges of a huge scale battle taking out AA guns, while the next could see you deep in the heart of a research facility, trying to protect anti-personnel turrets from wave after wave of commando-class elites.

My greatest memory in Halo 3 was a level in which, after a brief firefight, I was given a huge Scorpion tank to drive into the heart of the enemy. Encased in armour and feeling very smug, I destroyed everything that stood in my path effortlessly. The soldiers that, a few second ago, were being annihilated by covenant forces sat on the sides of my tank, cheering and mocking every explosion, every enemy death. It was a moment of pure retribution: a moment where, just a for a while, humanity had regained the advantage. We had the upper hand, and we were going to engulf you in flames -- there was nothing that could be done to stop us. In stark contrast, my most poignant memory from Reach is on another vehicle. A Mongoose ATV, a light, fast quad with no offensive capabilities and no armour. On it, a teammate and I sped haphazardly through enemy territory knowing that one stray shot, one unlucky explosion, one meaningful glance, would overturn our flimsy ride and leave us at the mercy of forces we had no hope of even denting. And then, when it looked like safety was a possibility, we weaved through the legs of multi-storey walking tanks, and prayed they didn’t notice us while we unashamedly fled.

There’s success to be found in Reach but the conclusion is forever fated to be bitter-sweet. It’s your role to watch the planet you set out to defend burn, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. All you can do is try to make sure that before the cities are crushed and the surface turned to glass, that the invading army knows fear the way you do. And if that’s not enough, that they also know that a 5.56mm bullet to the head is universally fatal independent of race.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (September 29, 2010) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.