So, a while ago, I decided to give some Halo mods a try, at the time, Halo 3 was about to join the Master Chief Collection on PC and the Halo Infinite gameplay reveal was around the corner, and I had seen a few things involving mods for Halo, including Halo Reach Evolved, created by the user "The Vengeful 'Vadam". Given my nostalgic feelings for Halo Reach and given the popularity this mod had, I decided to give it a try. The following thoughts were originally written into a chat group shortly after my first playthrough of the campaign. I also did a second playthrough shortly after I wrote the bulk of this opinion piece, or whatever you want to call it.
While fun and interesting with what it did, I wouldn't say this replaces the original for me, it's more of a fun side thing, and I'd like to share a bit on why I think that way.
To start with some of what I liked, the new hunter variants were super cool and felt appropriate, and while hopping on their backs and "hijacking" them wasn't always the smartest strategy, it felt pretty cool.
The shotgun felt super good, while not quite Combat Evolved, the increased range made it feel very useful to have on hand, unlike in vanilla where it's just outclassed completely due to its range of "slightly farther than arm's length". I frequently used the shotgun as a primary weapon across multiple missions, including on the section where you fight drones in the caves on "The Package".
The new Apparition vehicle, effectively the Revenant from base Reach but blue and with a flamethrower instead of a mortar, was very fun, even if the fire didn't work how I might prefer (but I can forgive this on account of being limited in how much could realistically be done with it). Allowing this vehicle to be more than a small wraith was a good move to diversify the sandbox, and I've always wanted to see Halo do more with flame-based weapons.
A lot of weapons did feel meaningfully different, no issues like the plasma rifle and plasma repeater in the base game. The repeater was actually replaced by the plasma spate, which fires in bursts and is rather neat in concept at least [and a note from after the Infinite gameplay trailer, it looks like a very similar weapon made it into that game, so, well done, Vengeful 'Vadam, you predicted Halo Infinite], the plasma rifle feels similar to how it does in CE, with decent range and power, and the replacement for the spiker that uses all the same assets as the spiker is just a completely different gun altogether.
I liked being able to drive around the troop transport warthog with 3 rocket marines in one mission, I had to do some weapon trading to make it happen and that's fine since I felt cool and smart for going through the effort to do that.
I enjoyed many of the changed encounters, more drones being utilized (which were absolutely demolished by the new shotgun), more hunter encounters in places that worked pretty well, skirmishers being placed in certain places they weren't before, I could appreciate these things.
I wasn't a fan of all the weapon changes, though. I didn't like making the DMR into the Battle Rifle, this may be an unpopular opinion, but I think I generally like the single shot of the DMR over the BR's 3 round burst, but that could also be nostalgia since I played so much Halo Reach, but never really played Halo 2 or 3 until long after. I had used the BR before, my first Halo title was Halo 3, but I never got good enough to want to try using precision weapons until Halo Reach.
The sword swings faster in the mod, but it still used the same slower animations of the base game, making it hard to tell when a swing was ready, and I often tried swinging thinking I would be close enough to lunge, but I wasn't. While the sword being faster is cool, it doesn't feel like I should be using it over the hammer or shotgun in any situation where the alternatives are available, which, making more of the weapons sandbox more useful was part of the goals for this mod, as stated by the developer. Perhaps, if there were armor abilities like sprint, I could make more use of the sword because I could close in more...
Which brings me to my next point against the mod, the lack of armor abilities outside of jetpacks on Exodus and New Alexandria. While I understand armor abilities are not well loved by all (and I do certainly appreciate making it so enemies can't armor lock), there are points, especially early in the campaign, where you are expected to be sprinting, and a 10-ish percent base walk speed boost and 50% jump height boost (if I remembered correctly) is not enough to keep those parts from feeling long and slow and really messing up the pacing. If the actual level layout were able to be changed to accommodate no-sprint, maybe it'd be better, but that isn't the case, and likely couldn't be the case unless there were much stronger editing tools. I miss being able to throw down bubble shields, or using jetpacks on other levels, like how you can use a jetpack on Tip Of The Spear to steal a banshee in the last section of the level and use that to just fly right up to the top of the spire. I think just removing armor abilities entirely was the wrong move, given how certain parts of some missions felt built around being able to use them.
While this has been the only Reach mod I've played so far, I know other mods have tried different things with armor abilities, even if the biggest thing is "you start the level with a different armor ability that isn't always sprint" which I think is a really cool idea. Starting Nightfall with active camo is thematically appropriate, you may start Exodus with armor lock to help with the grunt tunnels, and you could even let the player use evade in campaign! I love evade! It kind of evolved into the thruster packs of the newer games! But you can never use it in campaign, ever, and that's really unfortunate to me.
The lack of speed/sprint also makes it basically impossible to do one of my favorite things, running off the cliffs at the start of Pillar of Autumn and landing with an assassination on the elite below, where most people would get the "If They Came To Hear Me Beg" achievement in the original game.
Like I said though, I had fun. Making weapons like the plasma launcher useful was cool, shielded spec-ops grunts were a nice alternative to the kind of annoying grunt hats that are normally used, enemy elites dual wielding needlers was neat, but the mod as a whole was not quite what I would have done if given control of a project like this.
[Later] New idea, DMR is single shot, but needle rifle is burst fire, needler based weapons are already semi-dependant on landing multiple shots to create a supercombine, let that be the shorter ranges precision weapon and let the DMR be the mini-sniper it always kind of was. Given that supercombines were slightly nerfed in this mod for the sake of making the brutes at least somewhat threatening, I don't see why getting a supercombine with the needle rifle should be so hard.
[Later again] More opinions on this mod, assault rifle is great, 60 rounds/mag works well with the AR's other modified stats and allows it to chew up at closer ranges at full auto or actually apply consistent pressure from medium range with controlled shots.
I don't think the grenade launcher has been changed at all, which I find sad, the tap fire normal grenade doesn't really do enough damage to feel strong like it probably should and is hard to hit with a kind of small blast radius, meaning it's mostly only good for the special EMP shot it can do, which just makes it more of an indirect-fire overcharged plasma pistol, a stronger main blast would make the regular shot feel more worth using over EMP + Headshot weapon.
I love the grenade launcher, but it just seems inconsistent at times
If you're already changing so much, why not try adjusting a few values, just to see what works?
[Later once more] Actually, thinking about it, I don't remember having such troubles with the "Reach Grenade Launcher" in Halo 5, and the answer could be one of those values I suggested, or, possibly projectile magnetism. It's hard to say without the numbers in front of me.