Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51.
Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52.
Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53.
Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54.
Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55.
Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56.
Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57.
Cocoron (Famicom)
58.
The Darkness (PS3)
59.
Haze (PS3)
60.
Animaniacs (GB)
61.
Lair (PS3)
62.
Bionic Commando (PS3)
63.
Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64.
Darkwing Duck (NES)
65.
Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66.
Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67.
Metroid II (GB) *
68.
Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69.
Eggerland (FDS)
70.
Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71.
Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72.
Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)
73.
Legendary Starfy (GBA) *
74.
Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)
75.
Tales of the Abyss (PS2) *
76.
Tales of the Tempest (DS)
77.
Tales of Eternia (PS1)
78.
Nier: Replicant (PS3)
79.
Tales of Symphonia (PS3) *
80.
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (PS3)
81.
Tales of Zestiria (PS3)
82.
Tales of Berseria (PS3)
83.
Gargoyle's Quest II (Famicom)
84.
Bionic Commando: Rearmed (Steam)
85.
Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3)
86.
Resistance 2 (PS3)
87.
Killzone 2 (PS3)
88.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (PS3)
89.
Jak & Daxter (PS2)
90.
Kileak: The DNA Imperative (PS1)
91.
Legendary Starfy 3 (GBA)
92.
Medal of Honor: Frontline (PS2)
93.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PS3)
94.
Battlefield: Bad Company (PS3)
95.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (PS3)
96.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (PS3)
97. Halo: Reach (Xbox One)
I couldn’t rightly be doing a big overview of PS3-era FPS games without checking out a Halo game, now could I? Truthfully, this is effectively one of the FPS series I’d had the most experience with up to this point. I played through Halo 2 and 3 with friends (who were much more into FPS games than me) when I was much younger, so even though I’ve virtually never played them as an adult, I’ve had a relatively solid idea of what “Halo” as a series is before this year’s spate of playing FPS games. This one, however, is the one of the old Bungie-developed Halo campaigns I’ve never had any experience with. All of the others I’ve either watched someone else play or have played myself at least a little at some point, but despite so many of my friends loving Reach so much, it’s the one game in the series that I’ve never so much as seen footage of the single player mode for. That made it seem like a great candidate for this marathon of FPS stuff, so I picked it up as quick as I could. It took me around 7 hours to beat the Japanese version of the campaign on normal mode playing a 360 copy via my Xbox One.
Halo Reach is a prequel to the other 4 Bungie-developed Halo games. Based on an early Halo novel, it details the events surrounding the Spartan team Noble during the fall of the human colony on Reach. You play as Six, the newest member of the team. You go on missions with the rest of your squad during the month or so that Reach falls to the Covenant. You know for certain that Reach will fall, but will your team be able to turn this into a victory regardless?
I’d always heard a lot of praise for both Bungie’s Halo narratives as well as this game in particular, but to be frank, I honestly don’t understand all the hype around this game. You’ve got quite a crowded cast of characters for one of these kinds of games, but the game doesn’t really do anything with them. There’s a fair bit of chatter during missions and a handful of cutscenes, but those don’t really serve to build up fleshed out characters or anything. They’re just there to relay mission objectives and the literal events of the story more than anything. What we’re left with is just a cast of memorable designs set up around you to both assist you on missions, give exposition, and then die in tragic set pieces one by one. The flat storytelling only really made sense once a close friend told me of this being an adaptation of a novel, though I’m not sure which aspect of that is more confusing: The fact that they adapted a novel at all, or the fact that a studio as prestigious as Bungie left their biggest series on the note of such a weak adaptation of a novel.
This is, in effect, a story about what soldiers on a doomed mission will nonetheless do for the cause, but the story isn’t really saying anything about that or doing anything with that. Them dying for the cause is more a literal description of the events of the game rather than an elaboration on some great theme or narrative message. This certainly makes the way Sony’s Resistance games are put together make a lot more sense in retrospect, as those are also games whose main narrative thrust seems to be putting together a sci-fi world novel enough to be compelling on its own with little support beyond that. Overall, I found the narrative very boring and hard to care about. It’s a competent enough put together blockbuster action movie-type story, I guess, but even then, compared to something with stronger set pieces and pacing like a contemporary Call of Duty, I wouldn’t say this holds much of a candle to those.
Mechanically, this is very much more Halo, at least as far as I remember the older games being. You’ve got regenerating shields as well as a health bar beyond that which you’ll need med packs to heal back. You’ve also got a big assortment of guns, both human and alien, to choose from, and they’re all great fun to use. The time to kill is quite long, which certainly took some getting used to compared to other shooters of the era, but it’s ultimately a really cool change of pace in how it makes you rethink your strategies in taking on tough enemies. There are a couple new additions compared to earlier Halo titles via a couple new guns as well as a new activatable abilities system, but it’s not too different to Halo as I recall it being, at least.
The game does have some very odd design choices compared to contemporaries though. On the accessibility front, I don’t really mind that there aren’t language options. Playing the Japanese version, I was stuck with the Japanese dub, which is pretty standard for the time. What’s a lot less standard for the time is how awful the subtitles are. There aren’t any subtitles for the loads of dialogue spoken outside of cutscenes, and it made the narrative and more importantly my mission objectives far harder to follow than they needed to be. CoD had been giving full subtitles for since before the last major Halo title at this point, so I find it quite difficult to excuse how they’ve done things here. Heck, they don’t even specify who’s talking for the subtitles they do have in cutscenes.
Outside of particular subtitle grievances, there are just a few other very odd changes. Checkpoints range from either comically frequent to bizarrely rare depending on the mission, and I’m not sure I’m a fan of how it’ll bump you back to a checkpoint beyond the one you’re currently at if you die enough times. Level design is usually pretty good, but the lack of objective markers can get very annoying with how open some levels are and how poor the game can be at relaying your mission objectives to you (as earlier mentioned with the subtitles thing). There’s even the most baffling point that the game has no option to turn off *rumble* of all things. I’ve got bad joints in my, well, everywhere, hands included, so I prefer to turn off rumble. It is absolutely unimaginable to me that a game published by Microsoft in 2010 for their biggest flagship series lacks a feature so basic there’s virtually no game of the previous console generation that is without it.
I’ve rambled a lot about stuff here that’s fairly particular to me, and I’ll be the first to admit that most of it is quite minor complaints. However, with how big my other grievances with the game have been, the subtitles, objective markers, and rumble stuff are just insult to injury. The whole game feels so clumsily put together at times, which is just so inexplicable to me given where Halo was in importance to not just Microsoft, but the gaming landscape as a whole at the time.
The presentation is very... Halo, I suppose? XD. The music is really good, and frankly it often felt *too* good for the action/scenes it was accompanying. The graphics and such look quite good and Halo-y though, even if I’m sure no small part of that is the shot in the arm that they’re getting from the Xbone version enhancements. This has all of the fixin’s that Halo is usually known for in its aesthetics and music though, so it really doesn’t disappoint in that regard whatsoever.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This was a really hard verdict to come to. At least some of my lukewarm reception to this game was definitely down to it just not being my cup of tea, but there’s also so much weak or underwhelming design in other places that I can’t cut it *that* much slack in good conscience. If you already care a lot about Halo, then I’m sure that this is a great entry in the series (and I’m sure the multiplayer was and is great fun too), but as far as a stand-alone campaign experience is concerned, this will likely leave you sorely wanting compared to modern or even other contemporary alternatives. The note I’ll end this on is that, as much as I’ve had incredibly varied and mixed times with Battlefield, Resistance, or even Killzone games up to this point, I’ve still got quite a bit of curiosity to keep exploring those series to see what makes them tick. Halo: Reach, however, was an experience so middling that it actually made me cancel my plans to pick up more Halo games to play after this, and I think that sentiment is so damning that it adequately speaks for itself.
