Luckily, for the unimaginative among us, there's a list of pre-made Firefight games to just jump into. Rocketfight arms all players with a rocket launcher and unlimited ammo against the usual waves of Covenant soldiers. It's really fun battling on one of the new stages, Courtyard (a stage set on an ONI building on
Reach, offering plenty of nooks and crannies to cover in), with this mode as you pummel rockets into Elites with all kinds of shootiness, whilst flying around on a jetpack.
A favourite of mine is Gruntpocalypse – the only enemies you find are Grunts, and performing headshots on them produces a cork-popping sound, along with a stream of confetti and children cheering in the background. It's quite funny, but also helps you hone your skills as you try your best to get as many headshots in as possible. What's really cool is using one of the newly-revealed loadout skills – a holographic decoy that runs in the direction you're facing – to distract the grunts while you take your time to pop some heads.
Other pre-made modes include a Score Attack, which pits players in a 12-minute challenge to achieve the most points for kills; Firefight Classic, a mode that maintains the vanilla experience from
ODST and Generator Defence, which has players guarding a set of generators against waves of oncoming enemies. When customising a Firefight game, you can also select how many of these generators appear and their location, among other things.
The biggest change to Firefight is in its new Versus mode. Using the idea of the aforementioned Generator Defence, Versus is more of a competitive game instead of the co-operative matches played so far. One team consists of human Spartan players, while another team of human opponents work together as Elites to destroy the generators that the Spartans are trying to protect. The Elites have help in the form of computer-controlled Covenant bots that help storm the defences. After one round, teams swap and the group with the most points wins.
In terms of gameplay, it feels just like every
Halo game before it – tight controls, action-packed events and brilliant maps to compete on. As has been touched on already, the Forge mode – that lets you build your own multiplayer maps – has been vastly improved too, and I was given a hands-off demonstration that showed a reconstruction of Blood Gulch.
Objects could hang in mid air to allow for easier scenery construction, certain elements can phase through the ground to create something of an 'iceberg' effect, and all sorts of technical tweaks mean there's potential for some serious map creation here.
All-in-all,
Halo: Reach looks set to transform the Xbox Live multiplayer experience once more. If
Halo 2 was all about playing online, and
Halo: ODST about map modifications,
Halo: Reach is about Bungie handing fans total creative control in a world and franchise that it is about to leave behind. We simply can't wait to see the creativity that will come out of this. While getting with the shootiness, of course.
Halo: Reach will be released exclusively on the Xbox 360 on 14th September.
