Halo: Reach

[Nick Kuhn]

Who else will be playing this? I know some of you will be. There were 200,000 players online last night at 12:30, which is pretty good considering it wasn't on sale in half the country yet.

I picked it up at Walmart at midnight last night (why wait outside when you can wait in the electronics section of a 24 hour store). Walmart was kind enough to toss in a free poster, stocking cap, and $20 gift card for the midnight release buyers.

Just remember to look at your control layout before your first game, as it's not the same default as other Halo games. I'll have more once I get a chance to play for more than 15 minutes.

[B. Amish]

all my friends are nuts for halo, so i'll get it. maybe tonight. got some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket.

[DTro]

I might pick it up for the single player game, but I really lost interest in the last couple as far as online play goes.

I still think the original might be one of the best games ever. My dogs name is Halo

[JP Z]

Completely forgot this came out today.........and I preordered it. I'll have to get in to Best Buy in the next couple of Days. Tonight I have a tournament so I can't get it.....oh well wouldn't be playing now anyways.

[TruthWalleyes]

I saw the comercial for Reach last night and i thought about buying a 360.. I remember my college dorm days when Halo was new and Awesome!! I would also just play if for the single player game, but when i weighted pro's and con's...i just couldn't get past it cutting into my fishing time, and how many crank baits i could buy with the money i'd spend on a 360

[Scott K]

I picked the game up last night at Walmart, and still got the $20 gift card with it. Im not a huge Halo fan, but I will give it a whirl this week.

[Nick Kuhn]

Well I played through the campaign. Legendary is pretty tough this time through. Watch out for the turrets on the phantom, they mean business now. Before they were just an annoyance.

[Bigbartguy]

have any of you tried online/team deathmatches yet? is it alot faster than the older Halos?

MW2 and the COD series just seems to move much faster than Halo 2....wondering if Halo Reach is any better?

[Nick Kuhn]

Depends on the game type. If you use sprint effectively it is a lot faster (or if it's covenant slayer the roll dodge). If you are using something like armor lock then it'll play about the same speed as most Halo games. I haven't played enough with the new weapons in place to know how well it'll play out. But with sprint you are definitely fast enough to evade concussion rifle, plasma launcher, and grenade launcher rounds. Haven't run into a rocket launcher yet but unless they slowed the rockets down they are pretty much impossible to evade. You can armor lock rockets though, but you have to predict when it's going to be fired.

[DTro]

I hear there is a deal that you can create a "clone" of yourself that is just an image. So if you are pinned behind cover you can send the image one way and run the other.

That sounds pretty cool!

[Nick Kuhn]

dtro, haven't seen that in matchmaking yet (then again I only have 2 games played there), but it comes into play in the campaign. I can tell you that just because they have a fake target to shoot doesn't mean they'll ignore the real you.

[Larry FlatCaster]

Ordered mine online from Best Buy. It was delivered before Noon on Tues and I get a $20 dollar gift card!!!! What a deal..

I'm gonna go play campaign now. My kid has been working it over pretty good. Looks sweet from the little bits I've watched him play.

[Nick Kuhn]

So I played a little more. Most of the maps I played were based off the Forge World. While I haven't used it yet, it looks to be far more flexible than the Halo 3 forge. Hemorrhage (Blood Gulch/Coagulation) is back as a forge world map. SWAT on the big team battle playlist was a really stupid idea (why people vote for that gametype I have no idea), as SWAT is a very ping dependent gametype and BTB games generally have poor connections.

[Shack]

Any updates yet on how good the on-line version is?

My son bought Halo Reach at game stop today. Wal-Mart still has the $20 gift card deal going and if it is still going in the morning (they did not know when I just called them) we are going to return it and pick it up with gift card.

Since he has an over night stay with an un-opened game, it is giving him some time to think about the purchase. The guy at Game stop compared the multi-player speed to that of MW2. Halo 3 is slow. They have Halo 3 and play it like never compared to MW2. We will be getting Black Ops in Nov. and I just feel maybe the $60.00 is better spent on a new Turtle Beach head set to replace the 6 Xbox headsets they have destroyed in the last year or so. The new one he bought in July is almost toast.

The few on-line reviews I just read from players do not sound that attractive about the multi-player and also some aspects they were waiting for from the campaign.

[Nick Kuhn]

The multiplayer is fine for the most part. The new gametype voting system does often result in the same games getting played a lot. I will say they need to lengthen the respawn time on CTF games.

Online forums are like online product reviews, people tend not to say anything unless they have something to complain about.

Also note that just about every complaint is easily fixed with an update. I think a lot of people forgot how annoying Halo 3 was to play before it was updated (remember the frag grenades - tink tink tink tink tink, then 3 seconds later they'd explode, so they were practically useless. Or the original melee system that rewarded the slower player).

[B. Amish]

i'm enjoying the campaign right now. i usually try to finish the campaign before i start multiplayer. i've got it set on legendary and it's pretty dang tough. i like the guns a lot better than halo 3 and i like the weapon caches that they have somewhat hidden throughout the levels.

[Larry FlatCaster]

Working the Campaign with my son... Were having a blast...

Have not tried the multiplayer as of yet. Plenty of time to do that in the near future.

[T.S128]

Halo... used to love it them MW2 came along. Bought Reach for a change of pace and something new. online is sooo slow compared to COD but halo 3 was the same way. I do like this game though. COD is an easy game compared to this and all my friends i have talked to say Arena is really competitive, I havn't tried it yet. Time will tell how long this keeps my intrest but I never really got sick of halo 3 as COD has gotten kinda boring.

[SalmonSlayer]

Anybody still playing Reach? I just picked it up a month ago. I think it's the best release since the original. Let me know your tag if anyone wants to play.

[Nick Kuhn]

I still play, usually a mixture of multiteam in matchmaking and Arcade in Firefight. I prefer multiteam as things like armor lock are a lot less annoying in FFA formats. And I play firefight because it's pretty much the only way my rank bar progresses these days.