I've played Halo since Combat Evolved in 2001. My high school friends and I played double health, no shields, only shotguns on Hang 'Em High over and over and over. To this day my preferred style is up close and personal.
Quick terminology for those who don't know:
Master Chief = your character and the protagonist from Halo 1-5, a Spartan
Spartan = a human super-soldier for the UNSC, United Nations Space Command
the Covenant = a coalition of alien races that want to destroy humanity
campaign = single player story mode, though you can play cooperatively
multiplayer = player versus player mode
matchmaking = game hosted match finding, where you play against random people
loadout = a preset combination of weapons, equipment etc. that can be quickly selected
Master Chief is the man. The campaigns of Halo 2 and 3 are just incredible, and I still replay them from time to time. But my favorite multiplayer has undoubtedly been Halo: Reach, which came out in 2010. Reach's campaign is actually quite sad. Instead of Master Chief you play as 'Noble 6.' You are part of a Spartan team on a human stronghold planet that falls to the Covenant before the first Halo game, and your team dies one by one. And so do you, after ensuring some important tech gets delivered. It was the first Halo game to incorporate a form of loadouts (which H4 then took too far and I hated). What really made it stand out were the big maps and vehicle play, mostly in Big Team Battle. I particularly liked Wraith tanks on the latest iteration of Blood Gulch and the two gunner seat Falcons, a flying vehicle, on Spire. My friend Saunders and I played way too much of that game and earned high ranks, which was just based on experience, or time playing the game. The only real reason I stopped playing was Halo 5 coming out with the Xbox One in 2015, because in the end I didn't put much time into 4.
After H5 came out we played it for quite a while, with the most interesting aspect being Warzone, a 12v12 variant considerably larger than anything Halo had done before. The biggest problem with Warzone was frequently unbalanced teams, a fairly consistent Halo problem, and when one team dominated Warzone it was brutal. I longed for the days of Reach, but nobody was playing that anymore and my 360 couldn't be setup on the big flat screen. A year or so ago, they allowed Reach to be played on the Xbox One. Generally 360 games don't work, as the One isn't backward compatible (how dumb is that?). I installed the game, but still almost nobody was playing the game. At this point, when Saunders and I played we played Master Chief Collection, which was a combo version of Halos 1-4 where you could again play the campaigns, but also a mix of multiplayer from all four. Since matchmaking hadn't been up for years for the first three games, this was a great option. I still hated whenever we got a H4 game. I'm not at all bitter.
Just recently, like in the past couple weeks, they've added Reach to the Master Chief Collection, including a remaster of the graphics and gameplay. All the people talking about it on the Halo subreddit are sucking me in. Even with all the time we played that game, it's still been (what?) 5 years since I've put any time into it. I'll have to start over with my rank, which doesn't mean anything, but the experience that goes along with rank can be used to customize your characters appearance, which is fun. All I've done so far is play a bit of the campaign, something I usually do to (re)acquaint myself with the controls if it's a new game or one I haven't touched in a while.
The loss of the planet Reach in Halo lore was a major defeat for humanity. They say you need to Remember Reach. But I never forgot it. And am excited to jump back in.
We'll see how long this lasts, though. If I don't have anyone to play with, I may go back to Destiny 2 (Bungie ftw). There's a lot to do, with a whole year of content that just unlocked. And with the limited time I have to play games these days, I can really only play one.
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