Halo Reach – Conquered

I finished up Halo Reach last night.  Overall an excellent game.  I loved the Space Flight battles the most (reminded me of Descent Freespace).  I am a big fan of the Halo universe so having this prequel to the story was excellent.

My only complaint is about the game difficulty.  It was HARD.  I contribute most of this to having to use a gamepad to play a game that you should be using a mouse and keyboard for.  Two or three standouts in my mind took me 20-30 times to complete.  Its just plain hard.  It usually would end up with one rogue Brute or Elite with a super powerful gun taking me out.  Granted I did play the game at a higher than normal level of difficulty but I only did this because (1) Bungie states that playing at Heroic level is the way the game was meant to be played and (2) I didn’t want to miss any plot points.  That is probably my only resentment about some shooters; forcing the player to play at a higher difficulty in order to experience the entire story is not fair.  It doesn’t make me want to play the game more or try harder.  In a world where there are hundreds of games to play one simply just doesn’t have the time to play a game at a super high level of difficulty to experience the whole package.

Don’t get me wrong, I like hard games; to a point.  When it gets needlessly hard like this one level where you have to take on 15-20 Covenant troops while a Covenant Tank (The Wraith) is flinging shells into the area is not fair.  It only takes one shot from a Brute’s fuel rod gun to take you out.  If Microsoft releases this for the PC I will be sure to buy it and play it again and post back my thoughts once I have a proper controller in my hands.

So in the end, great job Bungie!!! I hope this isn’t the last I see of the Halo universe.