Halo: Reach Review

Reach is Bungie leaving on its own terms, and it plays like a studio spending everything it saved. The campaign is a losing battle by design, a planet that falls whatever you do, and the missions are built as wide engagements rather than corridors, with a space combat level that has no business working as well as it does. Armor abilities changed the sandbox more than any previous Halo addition, since sprint, jetpack and armor lock ask hard questions of map design and the multiplayer answered them.

Forge World and Firefight shipped with enough tools that community modes outlived the official playlists by a decade. The story is the part critics measured carefully: Noble Team are archetypes in helmets, the outcome is known before you press start, and the weight comes from the last mission rather than from anyone's character. The art direction, the crack of the DMR and the sense of a war being lost around you are what people kept coming back for.