Halo: Reach - the game that made us cry

Bungie’s last Halo effort is an epic, action-filled and suitably emotional farewell to the franchise that has come to define the company.

The really interesting thing about Halo: Reach is that we know how it ends - no one's walking away from this battle. It's the Total Party Kill of the Halo universe, an epic battle that's been referenced in past games and even written about in the novels. As far back as the first Halo game, we knew that by the battle's end, humanity will be on the ropes and only one of the Spartans - the game's massively armoured super-soldiers - will be left.

You might think, then, that Reach cannot deliver any drama, but if you're a fan of this dude called Shakespeare, you should know that a tragedy can tell a very different kind of story. After all, no one ever worries about knowing the ending to Hamlet.

And while that may be a long bow to draw, comparing the Bard to Halo: Reach's tale of the struggle of Noble Team and the Fall of Reach, it's a far more apt comparison than you might think. For its last foray into the war between the brave UNSC and the implacable Covenant, Bungie's pulled out all the emotional stops, and delivered what might be not only the best game of the series, but also one of the most emotionally satisfying.

It starts here
The game starts slow - a unit of UNSC troops has gone out into Reach's hinterlands to investigate a malfunctioning comms relay, and have not checked back in. Your mission, as part of the Noble Team (a six-strong unit of Spartans) is to find out what happened, and deal with any Insurrectionists the marines might have run into.

Now, that might make for an okay game for those deep into the back story of the Halo universe, but it might disappoint the cheap seats who aren't up to date on the lore. So, thankfully, it's soon explained that what's happening is a full-on Covenant incursion onto the surface of Reach, which quickly turns into a full-on invasion.

The Covenant are looking for an important Forerunner artefact but, thankfully, humanity's gotten there first. While Noble Team works to help repel the initial invasion, they discover that Dr Catherine Halsey, the creator of the Spartan program, has uncovered the relic first. She believes it to be crucial to defeating the Covenant, and recruits Noble Team to make sure the data she's uncovered can be evacuated from under the Covenant's nose.

From very early on in the game, it's clear that this is Halo on a vastly different scale. Not only are you not alone, nor the only Spartan, but you're in the middle of a full-blooded military campaign. Thanks to some serious effort in updating the Halo 3 engine, and some clever use of old fashioned sprite-like tech, you get to see what a future war really looks like. The sky above every level is often full of friendly and enemy craft, while some level intros depict entire battlegroups moving into position.

Also, in some ways, the stakes even feel a little higher - Reach, the planet you're defending, is home to 700 million people, and much of the game is about ensuring as many escape as possible. Similarly, when the Forerunner artefact comes into play, the sense of urgency ramps up yet again.

And, while all this is happening, there's the cold feeling that things are going to get much, much worse before they get better. One character sums up this sense perfectly, when she says "I know we're losing; I just want to know if we've lost."

And yet the game never feels hopeless - rather, Bungie's delivered an experience which is all about heroic sacrifice.