Halo Reach - PC Pre-Release Impressions

Halo Reach on PC

Early this year Microsoft excited PC gamers everywhere by announcing the biggest xbox gaming franchise Halo is returning to PC. The Master Chief collection consisting of Halo 1-4, ODST, and Reach, including the remasters of 1 and 2, are all eventually making its way to PC. This was super exciting news and I will certainly be downloading them to my new pc at my new studio once I get it. I have said this before that Halo was the franchise that got me into serious gaming. It was the reason I bought my Xbox 360 where I really got to enjoy many many games.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend Halo Outpost Discovery down in Chicago. I did a full event recap in a separate article however for this review I wanted to share my experience with Halo on PC. I had the ability to play-test Halo Reach on PC. Unfortunately I do not know the specifications of the test machine I was playing on, so I can not speak to the level of performance needed to play the game at the quality I experienced but I can share that it ran beautifully. From what I could visually see of the inside of the machine and how the game ran, since this was a public demo I would conclude Microsoft had higher end specifications to ensure quality gameplay.

I was able to play through a portion of the single player campaign. It took me a moment to get used to the controls on PC as I have played every halo game on xbox. A console loving pc noob like me died a few times trying to figure out which button switches weapons. Once I got the hang of it I loved it. As much as I love my xbox one x, there is something to be said for the accuracy and beauty of a mouse when it comes to shooters. A long term console controller player going to pc can feel like being given an accuracy boost.

I was impressed at how smooth the game ran, I could tell it was running at a super high refresh rate. The detail of the characters and enemies was also really beautiful. Now granted like most of us I have only ever seen Reach on a Xbox 360, so I would hope the pc version would look great. I can’t wait to see how the even more modern Halo 4 will look. The first time I threw a grenade at an enemy and saw the explosions rendered, it looked and sounded so satisfying.

I was also impressed by the audio design, the surround sound and quality of the audio was amazing, while of course that is partially thanks to nice headphones but it was definitely something I noticed. Being able to hear that beautiful wispy sound of a Needler for the 1,000,000th time was still just as satisfying as before.

All in all this was just classic Halo, just on a different platform. For most of us Halo fans, we will just be happy to have an excuse to replay one of our most treasured franchises. It looked beautiful. It played beautiful. I experienced no frame rate drops, crashes, or bugs of any kind. That is how PC ports should feel like. In the end you should be able to forget about what box it is playing on and just enjoy the game; which is exactly what happened. I can’t wait to replay the whole MCC on PC.