Halo: Reach - Bigger Than You Think

*HUGE SPOILERS BELOW*

What a day. I've just come back from playing what might be the best video game I've ever experienced - Halo: Reach! I was lucky enough to get a hands-on demo at a full campaign mission called "The Long Night of Solace", and boy are you in for a surprise. For a start, this is by far the longest mission throughout all the Halo games, it took me just over 2 hours to complete the mission on "Heroic" difficulty, but the end of the mission is the most rewarding part of it.

The mission starts with you and a few other members of noble team getting dropped of near a "Sabre Launching Facility", and you have to fight through Covenant ground units to get there. Once you get inside, you preform a sweet assassination against an elite, then hop into a new vehicle called the "Sabre". A cutscene shows you launching up into space, then you have to complete a brief training exercise to get you used to the controls. You then fight multiple waves of Banshees, Seraphs and Phantoms for 20 minutes, then you dock the Sabre onto a space station called "Anchor 9". A little later you are back in your Sabre and you have to escort a UNSC Frigate to a Covenant Corvette in order to destroy it's engine core. You encounter multiple Seraphs approaching the Corvette, after you take them all out, you must fly towards the Corvette and then a cutscene appears in which you crash land on it, unhurt of course.

You have to fight dozens of Elites in order to get to the engine room, in which I died multiple times. In the engine room you have to destroy about 3 "big-shiny-purple-things" (as I call them) then you have a few minutes to escape, it was reminiscent of the last level of Halo: CE. Once you make it back onto the upper deck, a truly epic cutscene happens, where Noble 6 jumps from the exploding Corvette onto the nearby UNSC Frigate "Savannah", barely making it on.

Just when you think that's the end of the mission, you get to actually control the Frigate as well as two of the weapon systems, which I recall being "MAC" and "Archer Missiles", although If you are playing in co-op mode, your team mates will control the weapon systems. The Frigate is much faster and manoeuvrable than you might think, it has boosters which make you go very quickly and turns pretty fast too. You have to destroy 2 Covenant Battlecruisers with the MAC gun and the missiles. I noticed it takes around 6 MAC Rounds to knock it's shields out, and 3 to destroy it, the missiles weren't as effective, they did little damage overall. Sounds easy eh? Not at all, you have to time your shots perfectly, the Covenant ships shields come down every 20-seconds or so, when they do you have to they only stay down for 2-3 seconds, so you have to dodge incoming plasma fire AND fire at the same time. A few AI Ships to support you, but not very much, you have to do most of the work. I dread what it's like on Legendary. 

However, I did finally destroy both ships, which was very satisfying. The mission finally ends with a cutscene of you flying back down to Reach where you can get your feet back on solid ground. 

It was very hard to stop playing, but I was told I had to wait until September like everyone else, aww :(

I hope you will enjoy the game as much as I did! See you in Matchmaking! And forgive me if I left out any details, It was hard to take it all in at once. 

Ooh! Almost forgot, I managed to get a few screen shots of the level on my phone, heres one: 

I may post the others later, we'll see!