Halo: Reach

Halo: Reach is the last Halo game Bungie will develop and sadly it wasn't the best sendoff. Reach was promised to be darker than the rest of the halo games and be more ambitious, however neither comes into context in the games campaign. In the campaign you play as noble six a spartan who is a member of noble team and will inevitably be witness to the fall of Reach. He/she (depending on if the player chooses to be male or female) is a very quiet protagonist with few lines of dialogue giving us no information on the character at all and no emotional connection to that character either. 
 
There are ten missions in Reach's campaign all leading up to the impending end of the planet. Through out these missions you meet the rest of noble team. Noble team is comprised of  very generic military characters ( Leader, Sniper, Heavy weapons, Tech guy, and lone wolf) and by the end of it you don't care one bit about these characters because once again there is no real emotional connection with these characters. The actual game play of these levels is decent, but nothing is really new or groundbreaking in them. They are standard Halo levels which is fine, but Bungie had promised more and didn't deliver. The only new feature is armor abilities which are a cool game play variables that add a new twist to the mechanics of Halo like flight or sprint for example. These are similar to equipment found in Halo 3.
 
The story of Reach is also very predictable and I'm not talking about the planet's end. SPOILER ALERT!! The game uses the storytelling trick of killing all of noble team off one at a time. This trick works in the fact that it makes a narrative darker and more dramatic.  However, this isn't the case in Reach because, as I stated earlier, There is no  emotional connection with the characters, so when they're killed you don't feel sad or crestfallen because you lost a friend, but you merely shrug it off as another loss of war.
 
With all of that said the multiplayer in Reach is exceptional. There are new maps including a remake of the classic blood gulch map from Halo: Combat Evolved. It also includes new game play modes and an improved forge system. Also, the firefight mode from Halo: ODST has been included as well with firefight specific maps that are derived directly from the games campaign missions.  This is definitively the best part of Halo: Reach
 
Halo: Reach overall is mechanically  and graphically superior to most shooters. The Shooting in the game feels very good as well. The story is better than most FPS, but that isn't saying much. I would recommend Halo: Reach to anyone who is a fan of past Halo games or is a fan of good FPS.