I read recently on the Bungie.net weekly update that they were slowly getting rid of the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta screenshots. I don’t have many but I don’t want them to disappear, so here they are in a gallery:
I realise they were all taken from Powerhouse, I don’t know why I didn’t take screenshots on other maps, perhaps it’s just that Powerhouse looks the most like Halo 3. The fortified bunkers and open plains looked similar to High Ground, I felt happy to play in that familiar environment. You’ll also notice that I managed a mid-air assasination, not using a jetpack, just waiting until someone stepped off a ledge then falling down after them, they were dead before they hit the ground. Also just looking at the graphics, I’m worried that each subsequent iteration of Halo has gotten more gritty and realistic, moving towards a style more in tune with big-budget games like Modern Warfare 2 or Battlefield Bad Company 2, and I don’t like that. I want a return to the clear bright-coloured style of Halo 2.
The gameplay’s fun, if not addictive. Someone from my school said that jetpacks would make the game unbalanced, it didn’t, in fact it made the game better by introducing an element of randomness which meant you could never really determine the outcome of every confrontation.
I’ve also been playing Aquaria, little by little exploring the great depths of the ocean and battling fierce creatures while the story slowly drags you forward with a small hint of intrigue at every turn. I have to say it’s brilliant, through the introduction scene there’s a flashback of a city sinking into the water, and then later on we start discovering ancient ruins of that city and it goads the player on to explore further. The gameplay concept of using songs to cast spells is quite neat, far from being a gimmick it forces you to learn certain spells so that you can cast them quickly in the heat of battle. There’s no question of just tapping Y to launch a shield spell, you have to learn the sequence of notes to play and that introduces a new feeling of interactivity with the character.
I’ll be at the MCM Expo in London on Saturday and there’s a high probability I’ll be tweeting from the event, if not I’ll take my notepad. Before I go, here’s another feature of Halo Reach.
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