E3 2019 - Hands on with Halo Reach on PC

Wandering through the rows of Xbox One consoles and dev kits at the Xbox Showcase, I spotted more mouse and keyboards, figuring that Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition would be the only one, I made my way over and found Halo Reach, running on PC as part of the Halo Master Chief Collection, so I sat down and gave it a go.

Sitting down at the station, I got a quick run down from the dev on hand, and then it was on me to take the fight to the Covenant and that is where things went downhill. Playing the game when on foot was beautiful, but driving the Warthog was a nightmare, because in order to keep turning, I had to keep picking up the mouse and sliding it back across the direction I wanted to move towards, It was, quite frankly annoying and while not exclusive to Halo Reach, other PC games suffer this movement method as well, it really took away from the experience of playing Halo, with a mouse and keyboard again.

As I said, on foot, there were no issues, running and gunning with the mouse and keyboard, felt great, it was super responsive and after a few issues with learning where some functions were assigned on the keyboard, I was taking out the enemy with ease. What did surprise me, was the lack of auto-aim, given Halo’s roots on console, I expected there to be a fairly exuberant aiming system, but I could not see anything, I had to manually move each and every time, which was something that felt so good, especially when nailing an enemy from a large distance away.

Using of abilities or items, like throwing grenades or dashing across distances felt like they did on the Xbox 360 release, there was very little that I could see had changed. In fact apart from the fact that I was using a mouse and keyboard to play the game, the entire experience felt like it did back when the game first released. Which I suppose is a good thing, of course, that does not take into account the bizarre driving controls, but there is time, so hopefully a more elegant solution can be found with those.

If this is the level of quality we can expect from the Halo Master Chief Collection, when it releases in full on PC, then I think we are all set to enjoy Halo in an all new way, because it has been quite a while since Chief spent time on PC and I for one, can’t wait to welcome him back.