Ok so, I finished the Halo MCC campaigns in co-op a while ago. Because I couldnāt remember anything from Reach, I did a second play-through with some CBT/ I Wanna Be the Guy modifiers and I want to talk about it.
If itās harder, Iām gonna spend more time on the locations, maybe Iāll actually remember them this time? Hereās the enabled skulls, on heroic difficulty:
Black Eye Skull - shield wonāt recharge unless you perform a melee
Tough Luck Skull - Enemies always make every saving throw, always berserk, always dive, never flee. (Every enemy will dodge slower attacks, like needles and grenades. Grunts will suicide attack and Brutes will charge)
Catch Skull - Enemies are grenade happy ā 2x as often and 2x as fast
Cloud Skull - No radar
Famine Skull - Weapons drop 50% less ammo
Thunderstorm Skull - Major rank upgrade to all enemies
Tilt Skull - Enemy weaknesses and strengths are amplified, like Elite
shields are heavily resistant to everything but Plasma Pistols
Mythic Skull - Double enemy health.
I tried this for a while, but the Ultra Elite bois are impossible to kill like that.
First impressions are fantastic, natural open environments and a broader style, tons of new and varied equipment. The first quarter of the game is structured with chapters as an open-ish straight road that connects 3 samey arenas. Each arena is called a different rally point, but they are all circular open spaces surrounded by a few buildings connected to each other. I didnāt remember this part because itās the same fight 9 timesā¦
The end of Nightfall is when the maps start to do new stuff, a wide valley with arches; snipers and turrets on top of them . The extra difficulty transformed this chapter from āthat fanservice-y sniper gimmick night missionā to āthank you Spartan Number for this sniper with 50 rounds, the mission would be impossible without itā.
Tip of the Spear is my favourite map of the game. Itās like a Borderlands map, a large open desert with varied objectives, like planting bombs to disable artillery, assaults on bases that extend underground, hunting down individual enemies and vehicular combat. Infrastructure is visible in the background, along with the enemies currently bombing it.
Hereās the thing: Iām a Halo noob, I played the campaign of 2 in ~2013, and that was it. Even by the time we finished the MCC on heroic, I was still moving stiffly, barely using grenades, never melee and relying too much on waiting in cover for the shields to come back up. An away-run&shotgun style, if you will.
So the skulls really pushed me to interact with all of Haloās sandbox, and getting shields for punching feels great. The extra difficulty even gave a purpose to Reachās backstab executions mechanic: a one-hit kill is very welcome when the enemies are this unyielding, and makes me work with the invulnerable friendly NPCs: the elites need to aggro on someone other than me for the game to let me execute. It added to both the story and the gameplay, since the story is all about working and relying on Noble Team, and they actually are a major help in combat. Hell, minigun boy going down in a blaze of glory, face-tanking fire from 12 Ultra Elites to allow me to stab them, because I had run out of ammo, is a better story than ākamikazeād one carrier ship, then 100 more teleported inā.
The Ultra Elites are the stars of the show with the Rank-Up skull, fighting them feels like fighting players in Apex, that dance of low damage, heals and double shotguns in the back of the head. Made me change how I played, since I absolutely could not burst them down with the shotgun like I did in all the MCC campaigns, I had to learn to fight them and abuse animations to stick any grenades. Or use frags to launch them into the air so they wouldnāt roll away from stickies. Or point needler/needle rifle like a cat laser to make them roll down cliffsā¦
Also the sword-wielding Ultra Elites are the biggest losers, their sword deals less damage than their normal melee hoof kick.
Long Night of Solace: Going into the game again, I was thinking about how the only moment of ludo-narrative synchronicity story affecting gameplay was the Objective: Survive ending. Well, it wasnāt. So far, it was just me attributing meaning to invulnerable story NPCs. Butā¦ Winter Contingencyās final rally point and Solaceās beach assault have moments where the waves of Covenant keep coming and characters are telling you to retreat with them in a fortification. You can actually ignore the objective and stand your ground. The game supports this. Winterās defence is 3 waves of grunts and Jackals, with Banshees in the final wave. You get resupplied with medkits and ammo between waves, and the game will say āObjective completeā after the third wave. This is where I learned that plasma pistols are homing and can EMP flying vehicles.
Solaceās beach assault is a brutal map with precious little cover that can be moved by explosions. You have 3 medkits and plenty of weapons which you have to ration yourself, as the reinforcements helicopter does not deliver more items, but normal mortal human grunts to help you. 5 waves of increasing numbers of Jackals and Ultra elites, protected by their dropship and its huge mortar canon. I struggled with this for an hour before noticing an Elite shooting my guys from a rusty chain-link gate behind us. So I went through the gateā¦
There was a Wraith tank with a Grunt at the turret. One Magnum bullet later it turned into confetti to celebrate my new way out.
Tank donāt fit through door. I had to go around, boosting through the water. This game has that annoying āReturn to the battlefield 10 9 8[ā¦]ā modern shooter fail state. I managed to find a nice gloomy place on the beach to park the tank until the seat belt alarm calmed down. You can barely get it back into the map last second, through where it spawned you initially.
While the defense is easier riding in the Wraith, the Ultra Elites still have EMP grenades that disable it, and my shield along with it, so I had to get off and go for a medkit. The elites managed to capture the tank, and with nothing else that I could do here, I went with my squad to fight another elite at that chain gate. When we were done, the rest of the UNSC grunts managed to capture the tank right back! Best bots ever!
That was by far the best moment in the game for me, the rest of the campaign after is pretty linear and focuses on gimmicks, from tower defense to space-jet dog-fighting and low gravity shootouts. After the beach fight, me and the grunts entered a space-rocket facility, fully modeled but empty, as all the warriors had left to assist with the fighting outside. This is where youād normally see a bored marine shooting rockets at the Wraith if I hadnāt taken it. With the cosmo-port operations properly facilitated, weāre Soldiers in The SPACEE~ 
Next up:
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go fight ships in space, Optimus Prime/Multiplayer announcer talks to you on radio
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have another small defense at the landing breach on the Covenant ship if you want to save some marines, they open up loot lockers like in Half-Life.
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the Hunters do not count as part of the missions, you can kill everything except them, and the game will congratulate you with an āObjective Completeā and let you move on.
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blow up the ship and
titanfall from space into a low-poly atmospheric city straight outta F.E.A.R. Thereās a fun bit, while you blow up things you can hear Sgt Johnson react toā¦ his own fighter failing to take down enemy ships on the radio. -
a tragic last stand turret sequence, where multiple evacuation teams ask dispatch for help, but thereās no one left to help them, so they crash and sink.
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and the push through the hardest direct assault in the game, this is where golden rod
boiBOB made me Alt+F4 the game, 6 shots with the Spartan Laser did not kill him
I like how every chapter in the game starts in Rally point Alpha, but the final mission starts in āOmegaā. The Objective: Survive combat scenario itself is kinda cheap, after a while it starts spawning in lots of Wraith tanks that shell you from outside of the play area, āturn back now 10 9 8 [ā¦]ā.
In the end, this second run became a very memorable experience for me. The difficulty drove home the theme of squad tactics and working with Noble Team in a ābattle you have no chance of~ winningā. I did fulfill that goal of understanding the Halo sandbox, but I donāt think Iāve ever seen a single player game require this much of a shift in mentality to āclickā with me before. In the meantime I learned Elitesā names, Sangheili, and found another game where I needed to āBe the Guyā just to progress on normal difficulty, Young Souls (it aināt very good).
