Although I have never played the Halo games in the past, my husband is an avid fan and put together a bit of a party with a few of our friends during which we went through Halo: Reach in entirity – switching off between people as we died.
Thankfully, we set the difficulty at normal, so we could actually get through the game in a decent amount of time – not to mention that only two of us would really have played much had it been set any higher since myself and one other person were rather inexperienced with First Person Shooter (FPS) games in general.
Overall, I learned two things – shooter games can be fun even with really badly strung together stories (I think DOOM spoiled me a bit) and I am bad at FPS games. The run and gun method I picked up from playing DOOM was both helpful and a handicap since Reach’s layouts seemed less conducive to continuously running around in circles like a manic parkour monkey but had AI’s that often reacted pretty slowly to someone sprinting past them. This was, of course, made all the worse by my lack of knowledge of the controls, so half the time, I would end up running right past some Covenant alien I could have bashed in with the butt of my gun, although I would inevitable find the correct button whenever my only target was a wall.
Still, it was overall pretty fun to run through, although the story was a bit lackluster. I find myself only really remembering when various memebers of the Spartan team left the story, and as far as I am concerned, those are the only really important parts anyway. The only part that bothered me a bit is that the one female character went out in a less than interesting manner. The other characters were suitably valiant or useful or badass, but the lady hacker type not so much. For how much I liked her character, it was a bit disappointing.
All in all, it was an interesting introduction to Halo, and the husband had quite a lot of fun spouting random lore whenever I asked questions. And it was incredibly hilarious to watch the shenanigans my husband and friends got up to. Sticking grenades to each other accidentally was always great, and how awfully the APC Warthogs handled was funny. I feel obliged to tell whoever designed the “physics” for that particular peice of code that they clearly grew up on the moon; realistic vehicles with a high center of gravity do not – I repeat, DO NOT – flip over every time you sneeze.