Halo: Reach – the only shooter you’ll need till the next generation

The new squad focus is more than just an excuse for bouts of roguish joshing, Campaign Designer Niles Sankey remarks to us as he plays: your comrades serve as tactical feelers, alerting you by their movements to the many ways you might approach a situation, without butting in heavy-handedly over the comm.

Rocket launcher + unlimited ammo = 'SAY HELLO TO MY LEETLE-'

What a snippet of storyline can only hint at, the experience of playing Firefight confirms. Reach’s take on ODST’s best-received feature is dauntingly open-ended, far eclipsing spiritual forebears Timesplitters 2 and GoldenEye in its wealth of things to toggle, reposition, over-cook or nerf. There are pre-fabbed sub-modes, among them the objective-driven Generator Defense (also available as a competitive mode) and the Never-Ending Story’s worth of smoking propellant that is Rocketfight, but why bother with an official Bungie template, enthralling though it may be, when you can craft your own playground?

The customisable facets extend well beyond match lengths, how many lives you get or which weapons are available, allowing the host to set jump height and movement speeds, how often a player can use ‘Armor Abilities’ (secondary skills or gear such as Bubble Shields and a sprint) and how susceptible enemies are to headshots, which Covenant troops appear and the precise effects of Skulls, among dozens of other variables.

Want to throw down with ten over-clocked Elites at once, armed only with knives and pistols, on a map with no weapon drops? You can. Fancy fielding a team of aerial snipers against a sea of trigger-happy Grunts wielding the new Focus Rifles, each capable (sayeth the wiki) of poaching a fully-shielded Spartan in 1.5 seconds? Go for it – just don’t come crying to us for ointment afterwards.

Hopelessly green, and want everyone to know it? Try a jetpack.

Armor Abilities, grouped with weapons into what are effectively classes, and chosen at the outset of a match or (providing the relevant preset is toggled) every time you respawn, are immediately gratifying. The fan favourite, and the one which will get an inexperienced player killed the quickest, is the jet-pack: Reach’s dynamic AI is never more impressive than when you’re fifty feet up, scouting out the troops forming up on the other side of the river in Overlook, an uneven countryside map.

Active camo, meanwhile, will make you invisible when stationary and is thus an infiltrator’s secondary of choice, particularly in a competitive objective mode, where all that’s required to claim the prize is a minute or so’s quiet time inside the capture zone. The sprint seems a bit homely alongside these high-tech toys, but justifies its presence at the start of a match, as nippier players scuttle out to beefier weapon drops ahead of the incoming wave.

The ability we had least success with was Armor Lock, which drops your Spartan into an immobile He-man crouch and seals his or her defences against all that bullet, plasma bolt, shrapnel, berserking Brute or out-of-control Mongoose trike can do. In practice this is only a trick worth pulling if your attackers are distracted while you’re locked down; otherwise, they’ll simply take the opportunity to reload and wait for you to open the hatch. Disengaging the lock throws out a short-range energy blast, instant death to any nearby object, which should help skilled users put a stop to any vehicular killing sprees.

Taken together, Armor Abilities suit the inexhaustible Halo formula to a tee; with a full suite of them at the player’s disposal, there will always be a means of avoiding a thrashing, digging in behind a Bubble Shield if the other side has the lion’s share of big boom weapons, or sending jet-packers to coax out Covenant snipers when heavily suppressed.

A few of the objects available for editing in Forge 2.0. Some day, my son, all this will be yours.

Were Firefight and the campaign all there was to Reach, we’d still be calling it one of the most comprehensive games you’ll ever play. But the finished product will also turn in a slew of new competitive modes, including a couple that see Spartans battling Elites with their own, species-specific Armor Abilities; a virtual currency that can be spent on accessories for your single and multiplayer avatar, amongst them the voice samples of Sgt Johnson, Cortana and even Mr Chiefy himself; and, of course, the Forge 2.0 editor and Forge World, lurking beneath the surface of the official maps and modes like a pair of hungry killer whales in an Olympic swimming pool.

There will be many stellar shooter releases over the next few years – Killzone 3 is shaping up marvellously, and if Starhawk does indeed turn out to be Colony Wars PS3 I may have to start scoring on an 11-point scale – but if you’re looking for the safest bet so far, the game that will deliver the amplest return on your investment, 14th September is the big date.

Halo 2 was finishing top of the XBLA charts long after its original host hardware left the stage; if what we’ve seen is representative of the whole, Reach will be jockeying for first place well into the lifespan of Xbox 720. Those Grunts don’t give up easily.