Bungie surrenders the reins to Halo, but not before unleashing Reach, their Six Million Dollar Man incarnation of the franchise that put the Xbox on the map. It has every feature you could possibly hope for, but is it really Halo without Master Chief?

"Reach is too damn important!” growls Noble Team’s commanding officer, UNSC Colonel Holland, in Halo: Reach’s opening moments. He’s referring to the planet’s strategic location within the Covenant-infested universe — not to mention the fact that it’s home to the Spartan program, better known as the key to humanity’s survival — but he might as well be talking about the game itself. On Xbox, Reach is damn important.

Few franchises (be they videogames, films, or otherwise) can sustain their cultural impact, relevance, and quality after five iterations. But Reach pulls it off, perfecting the magic Halo combat loop, raising the bar on the series’ already unmatched multiplayer suite, fleshing out one of console gaming’s most powerful editing tools (Forge), and recasting the visuals so that Halo is once again one of the most beautiful sights on Xbox. It’s an incredible package, if not quite the “best of all Halos” amalgamation it’s been heralded as.

Spartan-II Jorge (right) is our favorite of the Noble teammates.

SIX OF ONE, HALF-DOZEN OF THE OTHER
It’s a bit strange that Master Chief — an essentially faceless Spartan super-soldier and a man of few words — is the character we know the most about after 10 years of Halo games. That seven-foot-tall badass sure casts a long shadow. The anonymous Rookie in Halo 3: ODST never spoke a word, and the nameless Spartan-III hero of Halo: Reach, known only by his call sign of Noble Six (nicknamed “Six” by his teammates), spouts only a few lines of dialogue before the closing credits roll.

Clearly, the focus in Reach isn’t on you, the armor-clad hero with a top-secret background and a penchant for lone-wolfing it. Instead, the planet the game is named for and the war being waged on it are the focal points. This is reflected even in the moment-to-moment action, as it’s almost never up to you to single-handedly ride in on your white Warthog and save the day. You’ve always got at least one of your Noble teammates to help you in battle, be it one-armed hacker Kat, stealthy sniper Jun, gentle heavy-weapons giant Jorge, hard-nosed combatant Emile, or order-barking Noble team leader Carter.

As always, the suicide Grunts can be used as your own personal C4.

And though none of these characters ever resonate as much as the baritone-voiced “demon” in green armor or his purple A.I. pal, they certainly earn their keep on the battlefield. Without a doubt, one of Reach’s biggest victories is its A.I., both friendly and otherwise. Team Noble will not only smartly flank behind Hunters and tag-team Elites with you, but they’ll also pilot vehicles ably and, perhaps best of all, they’ll use Reach’s new Armor Abilities (more on these shortly) to realistic effect. We repeatedly witnessed our Noble comrades executing Armor Lock — which turns you into an immobile, invulnerable object for a few seconds — to survive the blasts of nearby grenades they didn’t have time to get away from. These guys aren’t fodder, by any means — thankfully, they play smart.

Trash it or board it? That is the eternal question.

Reach continues the Halo tradition of being best experienced in co-op.

1337 ELITES
Meanwhile, across the battlefield, the intimidating Elites are back at the top of the Covenant pecking order thanks to Reach taking place early in the Halo timeline (before the events of the first Halo). And they’re as dastardly and devilish as ever. It’s like they’ve studied the “Five D’s” from DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge), which makes them difficult to put a constant stream of bullets into. And they’re not to be trifled with up-close, either, as it takes multiple melee strikes to bring them down if you haven’t already dropped their shields — meaning you’ll be dead if you simply try to rush them. (And if you’re playing on Legendary difficulty, you’d probably be toast before you even get within spitting range anyway.) They are truly a terror and a treat to tangle with.

Grunts are still the Elites’ meatshields, of course, and even though they don’t provide quite the comic relief we’re used to (since they’re only just meeting the humans and haven’t learned their language yet), they make up for it by dying in spectacular ways — notably by turning into fleshy firecrackers when you shoot their methane breathing tanks, sending them soaring recklessly around the area before the tank finally explodes and kills them.

You can play the Generator Defense mode on any Firefight map.

In fact, most of the Halo bestiary is present and accounted for. Brutes dominate a few of the game’s middle missions (the ultimate reward being the evil grin you’ll sport the first time you pick up a dead Chieftain’s gravity hammer); Jackals still flail frightened through the air when you drop a grenade into a group of them; Hunters remain a double dose of challenge; and even the supremely annoying Buggers are back — although fortunately, their appearances are limited.

The notable absence, of course, is the Flood. They wore out their welcome in Halo 3, and we’re delighted that they’re nowhere to be found on Planet Reach — which we expected, given the Halo timeline.

Reach’s needle rifle is basically the Covenant version of the DMR.

THE DEEP END
No matter the enemy, though, our big complaint about Reach is that it assumes you know Halo exceptionally well and have played a lot of it. Enemies, features, and vehicles aren’t so much introduced as thrown at you as if you should already know what to do with them. If you’re a new Xbox 360 owner and this is your first Halo game, you’re bound to be scratching your head early and often. It’s strange — a few features are accompanied by tutorial instructions, but not many.

For instance, the Armor Abilities (AAs) we mentioned earlier — one of Reach’s most significant additions — build off Halo 3’s half-baked equipment items by giving you reusable MJOLNIR skills that you can swap out often in nearly every level. Sprint gives you a short burst of speed, the jetpack grants you brief moments of flight, active camouflage replicates the Arbiter’s invisibility cloak from Halo 2, the drop shield recharges the shields of anyone standing beneath its bubble, and the aforementioned Armor Lock turns you into a human boulder. Yet, with just two exceptions during the 11-hour Heroic campaign (a first-level sprinting tutorial and a mid-game jetpack sequence), you’re never formally taught how to use the Armor Abilities, nor are you encouraged to try different ones. It’s puzzlingly inconsistent. You can press the Back button anytime to display a text description of your current weapon and AA’s functions, but you’re rarely given tangible gameplay examples of how they work.

The cinematics are pretty, but the characters never quite develop nor endear themselves to you the way our old buddy Master Chief did.

Sanctuary (now Asylum) is among the Halo 2 remakes.

Because you’re left to figure all of this out for yourself, we found ourselves rarely using AAs, despite their intended significance to Reach’s gameplay. After four previous Halo games without them, we’re simply not used to deploying them. You could argue that this is part of Halo’s so-called sandbox design, but by never showing you the benefits of each AA, Bungie inadvertently minimizes their presence.

On a broader level, Reach’s mission design is, for better and worse, both safe and predictable. Though the game eliminates the “one horrible level” syndrome that plagued the previous three mainline Halo games (see: “The Library” in the first two Halos and “Cortana” in Halo 3), it also never soars to the heights of Combat Evolved’s Warthog escape finale, Halo 2’s vehicle-gasmic arrival on Delta Halo, or Halo 3’s dual-Scarab battle. Reach wows most when it puts you in the cockpit of the combat-ready Sabre spacecraft and has you dogfighting Covenant Banshees, Seraphs, and Phantoms. It would’ve made for a mind-blowing surprise had it not already been spoiled by being prominently featured in both the game’s unavoidable TV marketing campaign and accompanying media blitz (including OXM, to be fair).

As for the storyline itself, it’s as unmemorable as it is a downer. Following ODST’s rain-soaked sadness, Reach tasks you with destroying many, many AA gun batteries. It also accepts its planet-is-doomed fate and never gives you any hope of saving the day. Your only chance for heroism is to bond with your fellow Spartans to stave off the inevitable, but you never get enough time with your Noble teammates to develop any attachment to them. As quickly as you get to know them, they’re gone in a flash. And nothing in our character’s mysterious background is ever explained, depriving Six of the charisma and hero factor that oozes from Master Chief.

Armor Abilities are huge in multiplayer. For instance, hop in the Hill and Armor Lock for a few extra seconds of Hill time.

CHIN UP, LOCK AND LOAD
These criticisms shouldn’t overshadow the highly polished, exceptionally fun experience that is the Reach campaign. Even if Halo veterans have the series’ playbook memorized by now and the game does an insufficient job of indoctrinating newbies, it feels as good as ever to fishtail around in a Warthog, gallivant about in a Ghost, sock it to ’em in a Scorpion, board an enemy Banshee and bombard bad guys near the Spire, or scope in with the Magnum pistol (à la original Halo) and cap a Grunt. Try as they might, no other game has come close to replicating the magical Halo formula that so seamlessly blends on-foot and vehicular combat. That recipe is as endlessly entertaining and replayable as ever.

In addition to the perennially popular two- to four-player cooperative mode, campaign scoring returns from Halo 3, and Reach also continues the post-CE tradition of including optional gameplay-modifying skulls. Here, though, they’re all available from the outset; you don’t have to search every nook and cranny to hunt them down. (Instead, countless other Easter eggs dot the landscape, such as side-story–telling data pads and the skull visible in the side of one of Forge World’s distant peaks — we call it “Mount Skullimanjaro.”) The über-challenge of Legendary mode also returns, this time with scaling difficulty based on how many players are in the game (yay!), but minus a special post-credits cutscene for finishing the game on its highest difficulty (lammmmmme!).

The massive Paradiso was built entirely within Forge World.

Reach's level of detail is much higher than Halo 3's. This game is gorgeous!

WHERE RIVALS CAN'T TOUCH
Like its predecessors, the infinite value of Reach is mined primarily from Halo’s signature feature: its multiplayer suite. If the campaign disappoints at all, the multiplayer is a swift, undeniable apology. A lucky 13 maps are included out of the box, including stellar remakes of Halo: CE’s Blood Gulch and Halo 2’s Ascension, Ivory Tower, and Sanctuary battlefields. The series’ best elements have been distilled to perfection here, with Halo: CE’s pistol, a single-shot version of Halo 2 and Halo 3’s Battle Rifle (dubbed the DMR), Halo 2 and Halo 3’s boardable and destructible vehicles, and ODST’s Firefight mode. Other parts, meanwhile, have been purged for balance, such as Halo 2’s dual-wielding and Halo 3’s Brute Chopper. Between all this and the Armor Abilities, Reach reinvigorates the series’ brilliant competitive play, taking a bigger step forward than anything since Halo 2.

And somehow, a franchise well-known for its multiplayer options ups the bar into the stratosphere, letting you tweak nearly every element of the gameplay experience. Perhaps the best example is in the four-player, you-versus-the-A.I. Firefight mode, where you can now create entire new variants with ease. We got a taste in Bungie community guru Brian Jarrard’s “Skeet Shoot” on the Outpost map (as with ODST, all Firefight spaces are taken from campaign levels, though they’re all unlocked straight away this time). In it, our default sniper rifles did 200% damage against our lone enemies: wave after wave of Heretic Elites. Lining ’em up and running a single bullet through two or three of them was a hoot.

Elites are back to being bad mofos in Reach.

Better still, the Theater returns, allowing you to go back and watch any match or campaign playthrough you’ve completed. But the crown jewel is Forge World, a vastly expanded version of Halo 3’s map space editor. Forge World itself is a gargantuan map (in which Blood Gulch, Sanctuary, Ascension, and two brand-new maps have been built with the editor’s tools), and you really can create a unique play space within it, placing spawn points, weapons, building structures, and more. Patient, dedicated, and talented Halo players will truly be able to craft magic here. We eagerly anticipate the geometrically perfect remakes of other classic series maps the community will inevitably conceive. We managed to build “Tiny Town,” a small four-on-four area high atop Blood Gulch (now dubbed Hemorrhage for Halo: Reach) in just one hour. Far Cry 2 took a shot at a user-friendly multiplayer editor two years ago, but Forge World is simply leagues above anything the Xbox has seen in terms of approachability and flexibility.

This doesn’t even take into account the player-investment system, Armory, and extended community features. Terrific Forge World maps can be easily voted up or down online now, and Bungie can actually add them to matchmaking at their discretion for all to enjoy. So when the first awesome fan-made Battle Creek remake pops up, it won’t be a secret that only its creator and his Xbox Live buddies know about. And online or off, anything you do in Reach awards you Credits (cR) that you can cash in at the Armory for fan-service player-appearance items like chest plates, bionic arms, and even Firefight voices from old favorites such as Master Chief, Cortana, and Sgt. Johnson. Bungie will be rolling out daily and weekly challenges that award extra cR, such as winning five Invasion matches in a day, getting 20 sword kills in a week, and so on. Reach has so many carrots dangling from so many sticks that you’re never going to go hungry.

The Buggers can't bugger off fast enough as far as we're concerned!

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER
While it’s not flawless, if Reach had somehow turned out poorly, it would’ve been easy to associate the game’s setting — a world that is ultimately burned to glass — with the fact that this is Bungie’s final game in the franchise they built and are now moving away from. But because Reach is so jammed full of alluring content aimed at keeping its dedicated Halo fanbase happy and invested for months and years to come, that community service will be its true legacy. And it always has been, really — from Halo’s frat-friendly, four-player split-screen mode to Halo 2’s unparalleled online matchmaking and party systems, up through Halo 3’s Forge and Theater modes and Reach’s Armory and Forge World possibilities.

Halo will live on, of course, but for better or worse, it will be different from here on out. It’ll look different, play different, and feel different. That’s what makes Reach so damn important. Through its successes, it ensures that we’ll always remember the first decade of Halo history with nothing but fond memories. Here’s to the next 10 years.

On Xbox 360

+ Unfathomably deep, customizable, user-friendly, and straight-up engrossing multiplayer modes.

+ Forge World extends Reach's life indefinitely, whether you're creating content or just consuming it.

+ Halo is visually arresting again! It's so pretty!

? Why no special Legendary ending? So sad...

9.5