I literally cackled the first time I fired a sniper rifle in Halo: Reach's PC multiplayer. Two shots, two kills, heavy caliber rounds crossing the map and cracking skulls as casually as you'd order off a drink menu. In the thousands of hours of Halo I've played on consoles in the last 15 years, I've never been a good sniper. With a controller, a headshot was a minor miracle. With a mouse, I point at the thing I want to die, and it obliges. But the same goes for everyone. Playing Halo: Reach on PC is like bringing death lasers to a fight designed for blunderbusses.
Is this what the weapons and maps and abilities were designed around? Hell no. Is it balanced? Absolutely not. But now I never want to play Halo any other way.
Halo: Reach was made for the Xbox 360 in 2010, and nine years later it's the first part of the Master Chief Collection, an anthology spanning the Halo series, to arrive on PC. Playing it again for the first time in many years, I think it's still a shooter worth experiencing in 2019. The campaign, which lasts for six hours or so, sticks closely to the formula that makes Halo great. Each mission threads together big, open-ended combat encounters against an endlessly killable group of enemies with a freedom still rare in shooters.
Sometimes I'll go out of my way to kick a puny Grunt out of his Ghost, a one person anti-grav vehicle with a nasty pair of laser cannons, just so I can use it to run over his friends. Other times I'll hang back and use a rifle to pick off Jackals, who crouch behind defensive shields, by shooting them in the hand and then in the head, the most satisfying two-shot kill in videogames. There's fun to be had even with puny weapons like the needler, which home in and lodge in flesh until they explode, killing anyone foolish enough to stand nearby.
The real threats are the Elites and the Brutes, whose AI can occasionally still be intimidating today. They'll dodge grenades and try to get around behind you, and killing them first has many advantages. It'll stop them from rushing you for a deadly melee, and their Grunt escorts will sometimes even flee in terror when you take them down. But they're shielded and much harder to kill, so focusing on them can be dangerous when you're being peppered with shield-draining fire from the Grunts and Jackals in their squads.
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