Bungie has passed the reigns of the “Halo” series to 343 Industries, Microsoft’s new Halo ambassador.
343’s first contribution to the series is the Defiant Map Pack for Halo: Reach, made by Certain Affinity, who also worked on the Blastacular Map Pack for “Halo 2.”
The second downloadable content for “Reach,” the map pack was released on March 15. The pack contains three maps, two for multiplayer and one for firefight.
Highlands, one of the multiplayer maps, is the star of the three. Being the biggest of the bunch, Highlands is perfect for big-team games, with gametypes like capture the flag or just plain ‘ole team slayer playing perfect on it.
Highlands is set in a Spartan-training facility on the planet “Reach,” which is a perfect resemblance of Halo lore from the book “The Fall of Reach,” which “Reach” is based on.
The map is also a perfect map for sitting in a well-hidden spot with your trusty sniper, picking off opponents as they cross the open areas of the map.
There are lots of ways to get around without having to run out in the open, unlike Hemorrhage (Blood Gulch), and Boneyard, which are the alternatives for 16-player matches.
The hilly landscape, paired with the almost-symmetrical layout of the bases, make for a perfect big-team battle littered with vehicular warfare. The vehicles of “Halo” have always been what make the game great, and there just aren’t enough maps that work with them in “Reach,” and Highlands is a welcomed relief to the absence of vehicle-friendly maps.
Speaking of vehicle-friendly maps, Unearthed, the firefight map released with the pack, is the only great-vehicle-firefight map on the game. The open space and fields on the map make it perfect to steal a ghost from a Covenant foe and follow it up with splatter after splatter.
Unearthed is named perfect for the setting around the battlefield-a mining dig site. This is the best firefight experience I’ve had since the game mode was introduced in “Halo: ODST.”
Condemned is the other multiplayer map, and is smaller than Highlands. It provides hectic medium-to-short-range gameplay, which is all over “Reach,” so the game didn’t need it.
Condemned is set on a soon-to-be-destroyed space station in Reach’s orbit. The map is pretty much a circular layout with a room in the middle that has no gravity. The gameplay always seems to be concentrated in the center room. The low-gravity has been done in “Reach” twice before, and it failed for the third time. The battles that take place in the “low-grav” doesn’t feel like “Halo,” and are frustrating.
With just the three maps, I was really disappointed. Although the content of the maps is certainly top-notch, the lack of content is what makes the pack kneel to DLC for other games in the gaming industry.
Apparently Certain Affinity has been working on Defiant since before “Reach” was released. With all this time to work on it, they come out with just three maps? Hopefully they have more content but are hanging on to them for future releases-but that means we will open our wallets once again.
In all the map pack is an insignificant addition to the game, and for $10, the amount of content is just absurd.