6 • The Daily Beacon
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
ENTERTAINMENT
‘Halo: Reach’ fails to meet high expectations Wiley Robinson Staff Writer From a developing perspective, “Halo: Reach” is an example of what to do and what not to do. Either way, it’s incredibly clear what Bungie’s philosophy has become over this last decade of Microsoft ownership and time in gaming’s brightest spotlight. Where Bungie has exceeded all expectations with “Halo: Reach” is gameplay mechanics, that is, the foundational function and interaction of characters, base artificial intelligence, weapons, supporting items and physics. It can be said with great confidence that Bungie has stuck with and seen the gameplay of Combat: Evolved through to the very end. Consider them packrats who have trashed almost nothing about the subsequent additions throughout the years, kept the most satisfying manifestations and refined them to their keenest edge. The weapons, the player’s primary form of expression, include an assortment of new and old favorites, including the venerable “Halo 1” pistol. Fleshed out are all of the existing weapon roles and archetypes, while new ground has been made in effective new directions. For example, the old Needler is back in what can only be described as its most useful and balanced form (perfect for melee chargers), and included is a new Needler rifle that actually does penetration damage (potential for head shots) while making unshielded enemies explode with enough body shots. In classic “Halo” style, weapons are tailored more than ever to fill a gameplay role rather than predict a futuristic accuracy; while this becomes highly problematic regarding vehicles in cinematic cutscenes (Is humanity’s highest military presence really going to use
amassed jeep charges?), the rest of the arsenal fills its role wonderfully, without redundancy. The detailed graphical overhaul given to most weapons roundly improves upon and refreshes their iconic images. Perhaps the most dramatic innovation is a simple recoil system applied to all semi-autos which puts an unprecedented emphasis on marksmanship, all but requiring controlled bursts on top of more acute targeting trajectories and lack of autoaim. People on multiplayer still haven’t figured it
use of limited resources has been the prime mover of the series, and Reach’s enemies demand your constant vigilance as never before. Every old tactic against each enemy caste still applies as much as it did in the early 2000s, such as shooting the notch in a jackal’s shield to make it flinch and pull a quick head shot, but the aggressive new AI creates an exciting sensation of comfortable familiarity and lethal unpredictability. Elites now actively evade your shots, hide and retreat. When finally advancing, they maneuver
• Photo courtesy of IGN
out, and the psychological control the recoil demands from going toe-to-toe to with AI and human players alike adds an intoxicating new element to fights. The greatest evidence of Bungie’s touching commitment to its ancient (by game standards) gameplay is the effectiveness with which it rejuvenates the usual gang of suspects. More surprisingly still, challenge seemed to be at the forefront of their minds; especially in “Halo” and “Halo 2,” critical situational assessment combined with the reflexive
with a speed meant to push reflexes and can easily bulldoze over you. Both behaviors stimulate the brain into perceiving a satisfactory sense of their self-preservation, which is ground breaking. Elites and Hunters boast a responsive 360-degree melee range, and Hunters actively block with their shields, on top of having fewer exploitable weaknesses, even from heavy weapons. The indecisiveness and suicidal tendencies of the lower castes is quite lore appropriate, and their lethality and specialization has seen great improvement. Brutes, the special heavy infantry, while slower than elites, offer an almost individual behavior set, sometimes charging, sometimes hanging back or probing. The Brutes’ presence in this prequel, although debatable, manages to be chronologically accurate for the most part — “Halo” has never been known for its attention to continuity. Some continuity with elements and design concepts of the Halo world that “Halo Wars” introduced would have been welcome, but there is little to none. It’s these kind of immersing gameplay improvements that universally appeal to human perception and, through immersion, push the potential of what we expect from interactive software. While plot in games is usually treated as an excuse for mindless fun, we’ve come to expect more from “Halo.” Compared to most first-person shooters, “Halo” has offered well-done narratives that satisfactorily drive the already solid gameplay forward. As it is, “Halo: Reach” takes the very adequate sci-fi goodness of the Halo world, a decade in the making, fueled by the enthusiasm of millions of fans and ignores everything that made the series appealing in the first place. “Halo: Reach” is at a narrative disadvantage from the beginning because of its retreat from a decade’s worth of investment in the story of Master Chief, the oddly empathetic and reasonably complex figure through which we’ve seen this world. Likewise, “Reach” assumes that merely because the game takes place in the Halo universe, emotional investment is automatic, and this isn’t necessarily false. In the hands of the right director, “Reach” could have been an emotionally satisfying chapter, which brought newfound integrity to the pop sci-fi scene, of the Halo story. While it’s tempting to amount the thing to the shallowest B-movie romp, it’s doubtful whether this game’s team had any writers on it whatsoever. Admittedly, the predictability of the laughable mismanagement of “Reach” was obvious months prior to its release, so any noble incredulity is somewhat affected. The first sign of trouble was when it was apparent that the Spartan protagonists were sporting armor with all sorts of fun, lore-insensitive colors and incongruous pieces. It said loud and clear that not only does Bungie not care about arbitrarily rebooting its own canon — like “StarCraft II” did — but it doesn’t trust you, the ADD-ridden fans, to stay interested in the iconic green that has always been the color of the Spartans. It may sound like nerd rage, but color is universally symbolic to our species, and suddenly changing it without explanation means that Bungie doesn’t trust the
legacy of its own creation. We were so ready to let this Halo sequel tap into our deep fan desire to meet other enigmatic Spartans besides the Master Chief, and you gave us “Transformers.” The above might be forgivable if the Spartans of Noble Team acted remotely like a decade’s worth of game and literature dictated. Why does it matter? Because the ambiguity of what humanity a Spartan has left after being trained in isolation from childhood to be turned into a superhuman, killer cyborg is the only emotional conflict that can make us, consciously or unconsciously, care about these characters. Master Chief’s mysteriousness may not be the most original character trait, but these new Spartans are a bunch of Chatty Cathys who take their helmets off to show off their boring faces every chance they get; they are quite personable. Wondering what was going on behind the helmet was an interesting character that we’ve been conditioned to for a decade — so much for that. They crack horrible jokes. Most of them have pretentious ethnic dialects that would have been impossible to develop in isolation. A sickeningly superficial emphasis is placed on their individualities: the colors, the voices, the absurd face time. It does not work. These are impersonal, cybernetic military experiments with numbers for names. Why build up what a Spartan is supposed to look, feel and act like for 10 years only to abandon it? Most Halo fans with some critical thinking skills did not feel sympathetic towards or involved with these characters. Bungie, you cannot trade foundational narrative themes — with sci-fi credibility — which have worked, for a bad war-movie dynamic and expect it to resonate with anyone. Your protagonist, being newly tagged onto this team of yawn-inducing Power Rangers, is sort of your Spartan, though more vague and empty than mysterious, which is what the developers were clearly going for by stripping away any knowable logistic pertaining to your Spartan’s existence. From the beginning we have an artificial, lazy and ineffective premise. As your drone moves through this beautifully rendered game, any back-story goodness about the Halo world or inclusion of realistic logistics about the invasion is non-existent. If futility is supposed to be a poetic device in this campaign about the defense of a doomed world, some general awareness or description of the overall human strategy, however invented, would have done Bungie’s work for it. But going from meaningless task to meaningless task, without any awareness as to your role or context in the overall defense plan, is a great way to prevent the most rudimentary motivation for an individual’s actions. Yes, the player was deployed to complete objectives in a variety of exotic and interesting locales, from a besieged city to a grand Covenant ship, but did he know that these missions could have also been introduced in a way so that he actually cared about the base being protected or location being moved toward? A bit of context perhaps? Of course they didn’t, and it’s unreasonable to demand something as rudimentary as being given a reason to care. All of their actions end up somehow delivering Cortana, Master Chief’s AI friend, to the Pillar of Autumn, effectively setting the stage for the first game. The first “Halo” did so much more with so much less to work with, in a narrative and hardware sense. With the Covenant hot on the player’s heels after a wild space-jump away from the fall of Reach, he crash-lands on a terrestrial alien artifact, which the Covenant are very interested in. Aware of what little resources he has because of Cortana’s logistical updates, the player learns the greater context of what is going on during micromanagement missions, such as rescuing scattered marines. The action becomes a race with the Covenant to unlock the secrets of the artifact in a last-ditch effort to get a strategic advantage over a monolithic foe. The player knew what was going on; going from point A to point B has narrative context, and that set the stage for emotional investment in the action. It was a blast. But “Halo: Reach” proves that professional game-making values multiplayer over campaign, which may be obvious by now, but it’s still upsetting to see such potential being purposely wasted, because the business models deem narrative to be less important to sales than online play.
Smokey wants you to recycle your Beacon!