Hey guys,

I have played Halo Reach for 5 hours now and all I can say is: It is awesome. I felt in love with this game during the multiplayer beta and the final version is so much better. The stats for multiplayer matches are way better to navigate and you can see how many medals you earned and not just which ones like in the beta. There are a few other improvements, but this should not be the topic here.

I want to talk about the reviews for Halo Reach.

Currently it sits on a 93 on metacritic. Don't get me wrong, this is a fantastic score, but they are not doing justice to the masterpiece that is Halo Reach.

How in the name of god can someone give this game a 8/10? You just can't. The content for this game is so insane that deserves a 9 alone. I don't know what people expect for a Halo game. If you go out and buy a Halo game you know one or two things about. It is a shooter, there are aliens, it comes with a multiplayer mode. You know the gameplay / controls work like they did in previous halo games and every full game sees a few improvements.

Let's compare this to other games which saw a equal or even better rating. MW2 for example:

MW2 has a very short campaign mode, a great mulitplayer mode and some offline coop gameplay. MW2 got a 94 on metacritic.

Halo reach comes with a pretty long campaign, firefight (online and offline), coop campaign, forge world (map editor), a great multiplayer, file sharing, extreme data center at bungie.net, splitscreen online gameplay, customize your spartan etc.

And it is not like all the things Halo does are executed in a bad way. Hell no. Everything works fine and smooth. Gametrailers gave it a 9.3, because they thought one or two weapons were not perfectly balanced. Seriously: WTF! I know imba weapons might ruin the fun, but there are always one or two weapons on each map that are the ones you have to get. Rocket launcher, Grenade launcher, sniper, sword. This has been the case since Halo CE. And this is nothing you can't patch. Balance patches are so common these days. Again, look at MW2. I could go everytime I see a sniper with thermal vision, heartbeat sensor and a shotgun as 2nd weapon.

Halo 3 got a 94 on meta. How can Halo Reach score lower according to different reviewers when it brings more than Halo 3? Some people said the FPS genre saw improvements especially for the multiplayer in the past 3 years. I say: The Halo 3 multiplayer is still unmatched. There is no game on consoles that offers you this much. Halo Reach got better graphics than Halo 3, better sound (grenades), much better forge world, challenges in MP matches and of course firefight as a completly new mode.

Compare it with Uncharted 2. It is a great game. I played it, it looks great, it was fun. But in the end, it was a great singeplayer campaign and a somehow basic multiplayer. Well I haven't spent so much time with the mp, but it seemed basic to me. Nothing like MW2 or Halo 3 / Halo Reach.

UC deservers the reviews it got, but Halo Reach deserves better ones that it currently has. I just miss a logic behind reviews.

All this shows that you can't trust reviews at all. If you like a game from what you have seen on screenshots, trailers or story-stuff, go and pick it up, no matter how the reviews are. If there is a game you are not interested in and it gets great reviews, you can get interested in this game.

reviews are opinions just like your praise for halo

I think if you're complaining because one game got 93 and another got 94 then you probably have too much time on your hands :P

Anyway, if you read the reviews instead of just having the combination of 34 * approx 1000 words sumarised into a single number, you will see that the main complaints with the game are

Short single player (6 hours is how long they said it took to finish it)

"paper thin plot"

Very little innovation from previous Halo games

Now, this is why reviews include words as well as a big ol' number. Obviously, if you care not for long lasting single player, or are buying the game mostly for multiplayer anyway, and especially if you really loved Halo and don't want them to wreck the series by moving too far from its roots, then obviously the 80 isn't going to be aimed at you.

Edit - fixed a typo

It's all a matter of taste really. A lot of people really like MW2, but I was very disappointed with it. I don't like the multiplayer and the SP was a mess. For me, BFBC2 is the only multiplayer I can keep playing this generation (from what I have tried so far). I don't know how I would feel about Halo: Reach's multiplayer, but no type of multiplayer is for everyone.

Dude all that proves is that review scores mean shit all.

Enjoy the game. You don't need other people to tell you that they reckon Reach is a 9.3 game.

For me Transformers War for Cybertron was an absolute blast to play and look at where that's sitting on Meta. 76.

Just one thing though from your post, Halo 3 has like 90 reviews on Meta while Reach only has 30 right now. By the time Reach reaches 90 reviews on Meta, it'll either be on 94, 93 or 92.

94 if more reviewers give more 10/10. 93 if review scores range more 9-9.5 and 92 if more reviews give 8/10.

And since you brought up the topic, it continues to bug me how on earth no game is able to top GTA IV on Metacritic of 98. Is GTA IV really that God like that it's on a 98 on both consoles?

Check the PC version of GTA IV

The comments are all

"pretty much identical to the console version" and yet instead of getting 98, they give the PC version 85-90.

When that game came out, all the world's reviewers were busy injecting random chemicals into their bloodstream hoping for a high

LOL :D!

Like I personally could not get passed the first level in GTA IV. I found it soooo boring. I've never been a GTA fan and I tried GTA IV at a friends house to see if this GTA was any better but damn no different. That's why I felt skeptical at first about Red Dead Redemption but when I got to play RDR, it was an immediate hit for me and that is why I'm looking forward to Agent. And right now RDR sits on a 95 when I find it far better than GTA IV. I just find it hard to believe that still today that GTA IV is yet to be beaten on Metacritic. I find it sad that great innovative IP games like Bioshock, Uncharted 2 and Mass Effect 2 all sit 2 whole points below GTA IV...

Just play the game. what does it matter if a review did'nt give it a 10/10. We all know it's going to be the top game in sales for sometime to come.

"""Halo 3 got a 94 on meta. How can Halo Reach score lower according to different reviewers when it brings more than Halo 3?"""

==> because Halo 3 was OVERrated

Time for you to make another thread about Halo3 review score being unfair ... Oh, wait, I suppose this was not a problem to you ...

/thread

The same happened to me. I could not believe the game was so over rated.

But just like you before your purchase, I feel compelled to buy Red Dead Redemption. I'll do it anyday soon.