Halo: Reach's remaster is OK – but key improvements are required

This week’s arrival of Halo: Reach on Xbox One, Windows Store and Steam is a highly significant release. Nine years after its Xbox 360 debut, it has finally been added to the Master Chief Collection with all last-gen Bungie and 343 titles now available to Xbox One users. It’s also available on PC as part of a scheduled, episodic roll-out of Halo titles – and it’s the first full franchise release to hit the platform since 2004. It’s a big deal then, but how does it improve on the original and are there any problems with the conversion?

I’ve been really looking forward to this, simply because as the final Bungie release in the series, Reach is simply an incredible game that’s just as brilliant to play today. Its single-player component is deeply evocative of everything that made Halo: Combat Evolved a milestone achievement. There’s that sense of ambience and enchantment from its beautifully designed alien structures and the sheer scale of its outdoor environments. Then there’s its incredible soundtrack, of course – and all before we consider the actual gameplay mechanics, which still feel superb. It’s Bungie at the top of its game and it’s frankly unmissable.

So how can we improve on such a wonderful piece of work? Well, the increased processing power of today’s hardware gives us plenty of avenues for an even better Reach experience. The first and most immediate difference in the remaster is the frame-rate. The inconsistent and often chugging performance level of the Xbox 360 release was eventually cleaned up to a nigh-on locked 30fps via its back-compat release but this new port goes the extra mile, targeting 60fps instead. On PC, you can technically go higher, but the situation is somewhat complex there – and I’m not sure going beyond 60 is actually a good idea.

Thankfully, at 60fps at least, animation works beautifully – perfectly synchronised with the target frame-rate – but there are some caveats. The first would be the camera movement in cutscenes: more often than not it is 60fps, but sometimes it can stutter. Motion seems to be running out of step with the refresh rate in some scenarios – so while the renderer updates (as registered by our frame-rate analysis tools), actual movement can lag behind. It looks odd and hints at further issues to come for PC users.

Beyond frame-rate, the next big upgrade is resolution. Reach originally operated at a sub-HD 1152×720, using a very early form of temporal super-sampling anti-ailasing that gave 2x SSAA in static scenes but exhibited egregious ghosting in motion. Pixel-counts are boosted to 1080p on Xbox One and full 4K on Xbox One X, backed up by a simple post-process AA solution that seems to have issues on edge-smoothing anything other than static detail. Of course, PC lets you run at any resolution you desire, though 21:9 resolutions see more limited support in cutscenes (don’t worry too much though – gameplay is fine).