Quote Originally Posted by DarkHalo003 View Post
I can agree that the Vehicle Health (at least for tanks and banshees) is a load of bull. If anything, they should just have the tank's material impervious to common weapons (like the DMR, AR, Plasma Repeater etc.) The Banshee should be damageable by all weapons, but not incurr so much damage from the sniper. It takes only 3-4 shots from a Sniper Rifle to kill a Banshee. If I hop in, I already have to worry about Plasma Pistols, Plasma Grenades, Tanks, Warthogs, Small Arms from the ground after a while, Rockets, and the Splazer. The last thing I need to be destroyed by is the Sniper Rifle too.
The sniper rifle is an ANTI-MATERIEL rifle. It's SUPPOSED to blast through armour, just like the PTRD did with the same caliber bullet in the Second World War. Hell, I should even be able to take out a Wraith with it in a few shots to the back side. If there could be more than two enemy snipers on the map at a given time, I can see the problem. Since the sniper doesn't respawn when some imbecile has it, just bomb the shit out of that faggot.

Now, I don't think Halo 1 was at all balanced, but it had a happy medium between cheap tactics and competitiveness. Sure, the pistol was the end-all, be-all gun of the game and tanks camping the bases was a dick move, but they were all counterable. With practise, you can engage a pistoleer with the MA5B and a well-timed grenade. With more practise, you can take out a tank with three shots from a pistol or a well-placed grenade and MA5B spray to the cockpit. Alternatively, you can use the Plasma Pistol to take down his shields and then either pop him in the face, toss a grenade, or blast him out using the AR again. And then we have the melees. Bungie invented this "tripod" of power for Halo 2. They say that it wasn't balanced in the first game. I call bullshit on that. It didn't even exist before because they hadn't thought of it that way until AFTER the first game. Melee, from the way Halo 1 plays, was designed to be your fall-back weapon when you ran out of ammunition, a finisher so you could take out your opponent in a close-quarters fight if he made the mistake of reloading, or a way to humiliate your opponent by taking him down with a backstab (AKA, using the weakest "weapon" in the game to kill him in one shot). This "tripod" shit is what started all of the crap. By making the game what they did, they turned it into a series of preset engagement types: grenade-rifle, rifle-grenade, grenade-grenade, grenade-melee, rifle-melee, and the ever ellusive rifle-rifle. I see no tripod of power in here, only many bipods. Halo: CE was by comparison unpredictable, and that's what made it fun.

In Reach, if you don't have Bungie's predetermined counter to a situation, you're fucked. Guy has a sniper, sucks to be you. Guy has a DMR, grab a sniper. Guy has a tank, grab a rocket. Guy has a rocket, you're fucked. Guy has a shotgun, grab a sniper again (Close quarters you say? You're fucked). In all scenarios, the universal counter is "land the first hit."

tl;dr-the game is too regimented and over-engineered. What they SHOULD have done is just added new features instead of fixing something that wasn't broken.

On the side, I still love the game. The audio is fantastic, the graphics are pretty damn good for console, and it's relatively fun compared against its predecessor. I bought it for its campaign, and compared to the last three titles, it certainly did not disappoint. One of the better expenditures of $70. I'm just bummed that the multiplayer still lacks the "magic" that made the original so entertaining.