Halo: Reach

Preview - The last word...

Worried that Reach will be your last chance to play a Bungie Halo game? Don't. It may be the last one you'll ever need.

With a campaign that promises to cherry-pick the best elements from the entire canon, and multiplayer that cleverly builds on years of innovation, Bungies farewell to the series they created a decade ago may just be the definitive Halo experience.

You could be playing it for a long, long time.

And whats more, it's tantalisingly close. Our recent look at the opening 15 minutes of the campaign, tour of the astounding Forge World, and hands-on time with a beefed-up Firefight, is likely the last well see of Reach before it starts appearing on shelves across the world. It's almost time to start the fight.

So lets begin with the campaign. The opening cinematic is a tweaked and lengthened version of the in-engine cut-scene Bungie released a while back. Introducing the player to Noble Team - the squad of bad-ass Spartans you'll be fighting alongside - it's a hulking, macho, snarl-fest of knife-sharpening and muscle-flexing, announcing itself not with Halo's customary choral harmonies, but with a giant guttural belch that sounds like an ocean liner with a sore throat. The message is clear, this is serious business.

And it is. Scrambling to investigate a distress beacon, Noble Team are about to set into motion a sequence of events that will ultimately result in the destruction of the entire planet.

In a nod to ODST, this is a far more human outing than Halos 1, 2 and 3. "No more of that Lone Wolf stuff," barks your commander. That's not how Noble team operate. Bungie's hope is, by getting you to engage with your team-mates' characters, Reach will provide a more grounded story, ultimately accentuating the loss and tragedy of their fates.

For similar reasons the opening section of the campaign itself is sprinkled with life. Bungie have clearly aimed to create a sense that Reach is a real world. Rather than just rolling green fields, rocky outcrops and sterile military installations, this part of the planet is populated by civilians, indigenous wildlife and the trappings of civilisation. It's not just a battleground, it's somebody's home. You'll want to protect it.

It's pretty too. While unmistakably Halo, Reach is a little more muted in its palette than previous outings. It still has more green than the last five years worth of other shooters combined, but it has lost that slightly over-saturated, hyper-real look. The terrain, complimented by an impressive draw-distance, is gorgeous.

We'll give none of the story away, but suffice to say that Noble Team eventually come into contact with Covenent forces. When they do, the first thing to strike you apart from the fact that the Grunts are infinitely less annoying than in Halo 3 are the audio effects. Guns crack, bullets fizz, and explosions rip through the speakers with a genuine force. No doubt reacting to Modern Warfare's audio bombast, this is Bungie's meaty riposte.

Next, community manager Brian Jarrard was on hand to show us Forge World, Halo: Reach's map-editing tool. For a console-based editor it's ridiculously powerful. Indeed, it's impressive regardless of the platform. Building on the achievements of Halo 3's Forge, a dizzying amount of objects can be placed, merged and manipulated anywhere throughout an area Jarrard says is exponentially larger than Sandbox.

With the potential to create limited only by the players' imaginations, Forge World looks likely to throw up some fascinating creations once the community gets their hands on it. Thankfully, for those of us with no flair for map editing whatsoever, there are five pre-designed Forge maps available straight out of the box.

Later, left to our own devices to tinker with the all-improved Firefight mode Bungie's answer to Gear's of Wars co-operative, enemy wave defending multiplayer element - the dizzying amount of customisation options continue. Just about every aspect of Firefight can be redesigned to suit your tastes.

You can change the composition of squads, create custom skulls, change the rules during each wave, toggle strength-buffing or handicapping stats, dictate which enemies you'll play against, decide on load-out options, respawn times, enemy AI and behaviour... Basically, any aspect of the gameplay.

So, if you want to create a mode where everybody has just one life and is perilously weak, but can gain extra lives by downing big, powerful Brute Chieftains, then you can do so. Similarly, if you want to increase your speed, power and jumping range to 300% the normal amount and populate the waves with weedy Grunts, then you can do that too and run amok. As with Forge, you are only limited by your imagination.

It's impossible to overstate the sheer amount of tweakable options on offer here. Just impossible. One day somebody with more time than us will sit down and calculate the total number of unique game modes this unprecedented amount of variables offers. It will be in the tens of thousands. All of which you can share online with the world.

Again, however, if you can't be arsed, Bungie provides a few tailor-made options of their own. As well as the vanilla Firefight Classic from ODST, there's also a Versus option allows players take turns as Spartans and Elites, switching at the end of each round.

More inventive twists on the formula come in the form of Gruntocalypse and Rocketfight. Gruntocalypse in particular is just plain silly fun, throwing wave after wave of Grunts at you, all of whom explode in a mess of confetti when you shoot them, accompanied by the sound of children shouting, "Yayyyyyyy!"

If Popcap made an FPS, this is exactly what it would look and sound like.

Rocketfight, meanwhile, is equally barmy, equipping you and your team with infinite ammo Rocket Launchers and allowing you to unleash endless carnage. It's wonderfully cathartic.

Ultimately, it's the feeling that Halo: Reach represents the very best aspects of its forebears that lingers after our time with the game. If Combat Evolved was the series exhilarating debut album, and Halo 3 its stadium-filling unit shifter, then Reach is the 'Best Of' compilation. If Bungie can manage to bring together all of these parts into a cohesive whole, you simply won't need to play another Halo game again.