But it's not just the campaign that Bungie have managed to go a little crazy with. It's all the other features in the game too. You'll see, for example, the return of Forge - the map editing option that was available in Halo 3 - and it's been significantly overhauled. You can now move every piece the environment around, sink it in the ground, float it, rotate it, re-create your favourite levels and much more. You'll have a whole toolset at your disposal and there's a huge expanse to discover with outside in indoor spaces to customise.

 

But it's really all about the Firefight, which is what we were focusing on more than anything else. This has now become the ultimate Firefight and along with all the Firefight features we've grown to love, you'll also have the chance to customise the way the Firefight works. Now you can set parameters for the time of the game; so you're not constantly fighting wave after wave, you can change the intelligence and type of enemy at each point; meaning you can choose to have Hunters exclusively each time if you want. Equally, you can change the way the enemy reacts to seeing you, so you could have really conservative enemies that prefer to fight melee, or you can have sharp-shooters, or even trigger happy bastards that go crazy every time they see something move. All of these are presets so it's just a matter of selecting them, making it easy to have a purely bespoke experience every time.

But it doesn't stop there. You remember the skulls? Well, you'll be able to set and customise up to three skulls at a time to suit your gaming style. If you've ever want to kick around the world with super speed then you can do that, if you prefer having more powerful melee or higher jumping, faster regenerative health, it's all there for you. The Firefight aspect of the game is where it all seems to be at, and we spent a good hour playing through Firefight, although it felt like ten minutes.

The other new feature of Halo: Reach is a new experience points system. Irrespective of how you play the game, you get experience points for everything you do. These experience points can be spent in the armoury for customised armour, which include that of the Master Chief. You can unlock much more than just armour too, but other than voices and armour, Bungie weren't really willing to elaborate much, so you're just going to have to wait to see what other goodies are hiding in there to spend your hard earned points on.

The last game from Bungie on Halo, and we're not sure we're going to see another Bungie Halo game in the near future. What we do know is that Bungie has spent a lot of time and effort making this the most definitive Halo game ever, and we're very excited to see what exactly is in the game on release.

Oh, and on a closing note, you can check out our interview with Brian Jared early next week.

 

 

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