Okay.
Reach does a
poor job providing feedback to the player, in a number of ways. When I get shot, I can't tell from what direction. This means I react poorly, which means I die more. In every other Halo game, turning to face (or flee) incoming fire became instinctual because the visual feedback upon receiving fire was clear, so this is no small thing. It often makes my death feel random.
When I melee or am on the receiving end,
I have to look at the text in the corner to see what happened. The visual feedback is just messy and unclear. The shield delimiter - no matter how much shield is up, a melee with pop it and no more - is, for lack of a better word,
stupid. It really breaks close quarters combat, and coupled with the already poor melee feedback and lack of clarity, it makes close combat feel like a complete mess. Melee fights are confusing, hectic and have what feels like arbitrary outcomes.
The shield delimiter applies to other weapons as well; it takes half a ream of needles to pop the shield, then another to pop the player beneath them. The entire idea of making the health/shield system so separated, no connection between them, disrupts combat greatly.
Some targeting reticules, such the pistol, are very hard to see in many situations; this not only makes aiming hard, but timing the rhythm of the shots difficult.
Grenade damage, and the way if blows out the sound. The
fuck?
The feedback loops on the guns are entirely forgettable. Remember how great it feels to shoot the Halo 1 AR and pistol, or the Halo 2 and 3 BR? None of the guns in Reach are anywhere close. The pistol is apparently a beast, but it feels like shooting a cap gun. It's not fun to shoot in this game.
Of the two maps, I simply hate one of them.
Sword Base is a poorly designed, arbitrary,
bland and confusing mess of a map. I put it among the worst in the series.
Player movement feels more like Oblivion than Halo.
Gone are the joyful, smooth jumps, the elegance of the strafe, the feeling of agility in close quarters movement.
I feel like I have weights tied around my waist (or am constipated, as someone else said). I keep saying this, but it just does not feel anything like a Halo game to me. It's not the movement speed or the jump height, it's that they simply redid how the game plays. I don't know why and can't really articulate it. But playing Reach is simply not fun.
In all the previous Halo games, the simple act of leaping around and shooting was fun. I recall vividly my first day of playing the Halo 3 Beta, in the F&F kick off. The first thing everyone did was jump around shooting, getting a feel for the weapons. It was euphoric. Doing those things are not fun in this game. I don't feel like the game is a playground. It feels like work.
Most of the expansions to the game work well. Menus, much of the UI, the armor abilities, the audio, the graphics. Some of the abilities, like Sprint, are pretty great. Most of the stuff they added just
works. But the underlying core is broken. Melee, jumping, shooting, moving. Important stuff, and none of them feel anything like Halo any more, and more importantly, they feel likes something that's not fun to play. The heart and soul of the game is just gone. I'm sitting here, after two days of playing the Beta, and I don't have a strong desire to play it again.
I feel like an ass ripping on the game so hard, but as a longtime fan of the series, and thus Bungie, I'm just crushingly disappointed. I'm clearly in the minority on this stuff, I haven't found anyone that's had as negative a reaction as myself. But that's where I am with the game. FWIW.
It's funny, I played the game on the same days as the Activision announcement. I read that, and my first thought was, "that's very un-Bungie-like." That's what the game feels like as well; this is very un-Bungie-like to me.
