Captain Mal calls sniper

Thursday April 29 was when Bungie opened up the Halo: Reach Beta to their friends and family or some quick people on Twitter. It wasn’t until the follow Monday, at approximately 1:00 EST (according to my clock when I first saw the “IT”S LIVE” tweet.) Bungie pressed the button to open up the beta to the public. By public I mean the people who still have their Halo 3: ODST campaign disc. After about a half an hour of downloading, depending on internet speed, we were able to finally play the first matches of Halo: Reach multiplayer. Or so we thought. As it so happened the Reach Beta servers were having issues. Whether Bungie didn’t expect the 1,000,000+ people logging on of day one or the there was a “fire in the server room,” whatever the problem was it was just a pain to try and find a match in those first few hours of the beta. Later that night once the servers were up and running the fun really began.

Halo: Reach plays similar to Halo 3 with a couple button swaps. For instance the default controls the melee is on the right bumper and the equipment is on the left, the reload is on the X button and the switch grenade is on the B button. At first I was happy to see the X button was once again on the X button, but for some reason my mind kept telling me that I was playing Halo and the reload and pick up weapons button was on the right bumper. Lucky for me there was the Recon button layout, which swaps the reload back to the right bumper and the melee to the B button and the switch grenades to the X button. other than that it controls just like all the other Halo games.

OK enough with the controls time for weapons.  Jumping and grenade arcs are lower due to the ‘increased gravity of a large planetoid like Reach.’ The Halo CE zooming pistol is back to the delight of many Halo fans, I’m not one of those people glad to see it’s return. There is no Battle Rifle (BR) because it hasn’t been invented yet so in it’s place we get it predecessor the M392 Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR), which is a one shot medium to long range rifle. There are also a couple of weapons new to Reach that we all are wondering “Why the hell haven’t we seen these weapons before?” The Human and Convenant got a couple new weapons like the Needle Rifle (and DMR that uses needles from the Needler instead of bullets), the Plasma Repeater (a Convenant version of the Assault Rifle), and a Focus Rifle (reminds me of the Sentinel Beam only with multiple zoom).  along with new weapons the epuipment from Halo 3 were removed and replaced with armor abilities. Some of those abilities include jet pack, active camo, sprint (Spartans only), dodge (elites only. the roll move that the elites use in the campaign), and armor lock (Spartans only. A pre-evolved form of the bubble shield, you become immobile and the shield only covers you.) You pick this abilities and weapon loadout every time you spawn. Spartans and Elities also play differently. Elities are larger, faster, and have regenerating health which the Spartans do not.

New game modes were also introduced. One of those modes was Headhunter, once one player kills another s/he drops a flaming skull. And that player has to drop the skull off in one of the designated locations, which periodically moves. But if that player is killed before they drop off the skull s/he drops the skull s/he was carrying plus their own skull. That means a player can carry multiple skulls to drop off. If a player drops off ten skulls at once that’s a Skullamonjaro and an instant win. Another one of the modes is Stockpile. It is a new version of neutral flag only instead of one flag there are multiple flags. The player takes the flag to their base but the points will only count is if the flag or flags are in the teams scoring area once the countdown reaches 0. This gets teams chances to capture multiple flags at once or steal flags from the other team. One other mode is Invasion, a multi stage tiered battle. This battle is Elites vs Spartans (as it should be). The objective is for the Elites to steal a data core from the Spartans, but to do so the Elites have to open two gates and gain access to the data core. Once one gates falls more loadouts more weapons and vechiles.

At the time of typing this there have a been three maps released to play, a fourth should be available soon. The map Powerhouse is an outdoor map on the surface of the planet of Reach, this map reminds me a bit of High Ground with a wall separating a human base and the wilderness, Swordbase is a indoor map devised of three levels, this is a very vertical map which makes the jet pack very useful on this map when you want to get around fast like on objective based games. The third is Boneyard, a large map with a huge human base on one side. Boneyard is only played on the new Invasion mode.

I really like the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta, playing this beta makes me want to go out and pre-oder the game. The problems I have with the game is that the pistol is way over powered, in my opinion it shouldn’t outpower the DMR but it does. The only other problem I have is that Invasion is way too short. The last problem I have is not with the game or Bungie but Infinity Ward, the bungie.net web tracking is the coolest and best i’ve ever seen and to add to it it’s instant. As soon as a game is over you can hop online and see the stats of the game you just played less than a minute ago added to your own personal stats. I know that Infinity Ward is tracking all this information why won’t they let us see it. I recommend getting Reach when it comes out if your a fan of FPS just from playing this beta.

Written by: Stuart Pitchford Writer