Reach out and touch somebody!
Visually, Reach is beautiful. Very detailed environments, detailed enemies and allies, and detailed weapons. Not only that but the Reach Armor Variants look awesome. I find myself constantly trying to earn more and more points to unlock the coolest looking armor. Well... Coolest to me anyways.
The gameplay is classic Halo. If it ain't broke, don't fix it and there was nothing wrong with the original gameplay in the series, so why change it? However, the game is quite hard. But in a great way. I'm doing my first playthrough solo and on Heroic, and the name heroic definitely fits the difficulty. It takes 3 direct headshots from a sniper rifle to kill a gold elite. If that's not heroic, I don't know what is. And that achievement for completing Legendary solo... Yeah, I don't even wanna think about it. But the level design, character design, the AI, the story, I could go on but I'll stop here. The game is amazing! The campaign will continue to leave me coming back to play missions over and over again.
The story is fun. I haven't finished it, but I'm well on my way to being close. However, they do a great job of trying to develop the personalities of each member of Noble Team and that translates to their gameplay. I love how in mission 3 you work the whole time with Kat and then in Mission 4 (which is a stealth-ish mission) you spend it with the Noble Team sniper. Allowing for this class interaction is amazing. And the AI on them is really good. I have been saved on numerous occasions by one of my allies so thanks Bungie.
The multiplayer is Halo Multiplayer. There's really no way around it. Its fun. Its a blast. And I will continue to waste countless hours of my life with my controller in my hands, sneaking around the map trying to assassinate people. The community is what it is. There are annoying people, and people that talk to much, and people that suck that think they're amazing, but that's nothing new. The multiplayer is just right and is a blast to play.
The leveling system presented in Reach is FAR superior to the one in Halo 3. The fact that you never lose ranks, and the fact that you can level up from either campaign, or matchmaking, or firefight is frickin awesome! And the whole point to leveling up is that you must earn cR points to be able to unlock the coolest armor in the game. It's ingenious! I think that the leveling system is far superior to and much more logical than anything that has been presented to date in the CoD franchise.
Firefight is just plain fun. There's no way around it. It was the highlight of ODST and I'm so happy that they included it in Reach. If you haven't tried it, stop reading my review and go do it NOW!
Overall, Reach is the fulfillment of quite possibly the largest video game hype I have ever seen and it definitely lives up to it. It deserves the $200 million and much much more. This game is a must own for any self-respecting 360 player and anyone can enjoy hours of senseless killing in the comfort of their own home. Go out and get it!
Visuals: 9.5
Gameplay: 10
Story: 9.5
Multiplayer: 9.5