7) Halo: Reach – Death Of Any/All Noble Team
Bungie’s farewell to their much beloved Halo franchise was a fine instalment. Terrific, in fact. It played wonderfully, looked great, and received a flawless critical reception. In many ways, it was the perfect swansong. In some other ways, however, not so much.
Bungie purposefully absolved themselves of Master Chief’s story arc by ignoring his plight (and that of his jabbering, blue helmet-wife) altogether, instead choosing to construct a brand new tale based on the history of the original title. Now, we get that they were sad about leaving Halo behind, but what they came up with was so over-the-top sentimental that if you removed the shooting elements, it wouldn’t have looked out of place as a segue on Oprah.
The idea, I suppose, is that we would be struck by the poignancy of the deaths of Noble Team Six, as one by one they perish against ever increasing odds. The problem with that though, is that we’d never met them before this game, and they barely even took their helmets off. Emotionally connecting with interchangeable colours of Power Ranger is difficult enough, and that those ‘ever increasing odds’ boiled down to ‘shooting more purple aliens’ meant that, if anything, their deaths were a good thing for the player as it was one less name to try and remember.
