Halo: Reach

How Bungie went back to the beginning for its Halo swansong.

- Alex Spencer

How do you say goodbye to the series that defined your studio, and helped launch and sustain an entire console platform, after nearly a decade? If you’re Bungie, on the cusp of leaving Microsoft to embrace its own Destiny, you go back to the beginning – 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved – and then back further still.

The developer’s final Halo game abandons the ongoing storyline of Master Chief, last of the armoured super-soldiers known as Spartans. Instead, it opts for a prequel set, Rogue One-style, in the moments immediately before the first game.

Human colonists living on the eponymous planet of Reach make first contact with the Covenant alien forces. They do not come in peace. Noble Team, a squad of Spartans, is deployed to fight back. It is, ultimately, a doomed mission. The game makes no secret of this, opening on a shot of a Spartan’s helmet – neatly colour-coded to match your own customisable character – abandoned in the dust, its visor terminally cracked. Just like Rogue One, the story’s one of a small group of soldiers who give their lives to set the events of the main saga in motion.

And it’s not just Reach’s story which winds back the clock. The prequel setting allowed Bungie to erase some of the factors that had complicated the games since Combat Evolved. Gone are the zombie-like Flood and floating Sentinels, enemies that upset the delicate balance of Halo’s gunplay. The dual-wielding of sidearms introduced by the second game, and the incendiary and spike grenades added in the third, are also dropped. It’s a streamlining of the formula, refocusing around the core ‘golden triangle’ design. This is how Bungie refers to Halo combat’s mix of shooting, grenades and melee attacks – all interlinked in a twitch reflex game of rock, paper, scissors.