By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: September 12, 2010

The highest compliment I can pay Halo: Reach, set for release Tuesday for the Xbox 360, is to say that as soon as I finished it, I wanted to return to November 2001 and start the Halo saga all over again.

I wasn’t paying much attention to game consoles back then. I had hunkered down in New York City that difficult autumn with Internet PC games like Diablo II, and when Microsoft introduced the original Xbox that month, the news didn’t really register with me.

But even in my online worlds (consoles were rarely networked back then), I almost immediately heard about Halo: Combat Evolved, the big new science-fiction shooter that Microsoft had released alongside its new game machine. It was immediately obvious that Halo was the Xbox’s killer app: the essential new experience that drives people to buy new technology.

And that was because Halo was the first truly modern first-person shooter on any console. (GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 was not as advanced.) After years of development on the PC through franchises like Doom, Quake and Unreal, someone had finally figured out how to make a real shooter — an exciting, story-driven one at that — on a living-room console.

So it is fair to say that the entire Xbox franchise would not be the success it is today if not for the Halo series. And yet until now I was never quite a fan. And that is because, I have to admit, that as a PC gaming snob, I have always struggled at some level to take console shooters seriously. And last year’s lackluster Halo 3: ODST cemented my skepticism about the whole Halo experience.

But now Reach has cured me. You could call it “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Halo.” The development studio Bungie invented Halo, but is now leaving it behind after Reach. (Microsoft will retain the brand while Bungie moves on.) For its last go-round with its most famous franchise Bungie has produced a superbly enjoyable science-fiction combat romp.

In my ODST review last year I described Halo as “the consummate middlebrow science-fiction space opera with a lot of fun in the shooting but without much wit or character.” Reach casts the same elements in quite different proportions: the shooting and combat are so much fun and look so attractive that you stop caring about wit or character. You get to run and fly around spectacular virtual environments while firing all manner of high-powered futuristic weapons at computer-controlled aliens or other players online. And you get to do it in style and comfort. What more do you want from a game like this?

Reach is actually set as a prequel to the previous Halo games, so you won’t be seeing or playing as the faceless Master Chief character that has become the series hallmark. Instead, Reach tells the story, in 2552, of the beginning of humanity’s war with the alien species called the Covenant. Instead of Master Chief you play as the even more cipherlike Noble 6, a member of the space commandos called the Spartans (naturally).

The earlier Halo games annoyed me with mawkish dialogue and some loony, over-the-top storytelling. Reach tones down its attempts at emotional connection and finds itself in fewer awkward situations of forced melodrama. Bungie is allowing Reach’s fairly typical cast of characters to fade into the background a bit, which is where they belong. There are moments of self-sacrifice and loss, but Reach doesn’t oversell them. So I found myself stop trying to take them seriously.

Instead I was able to focus my attention in the roughly 10-hour single-player campaign squarely where it belongs — on the slick visuals; the fabulous environment design; the admirably realistic and varied artificial intelligence; and the tight, polished combat mechanics.

If there’s anything I can’t stand in flat-out combat shooters it is tunnels. (A survival-horror-type game is different.) Put me in a tunnel, shooting guys coming at me for more than a minute, and I start to frown.

There are almost no tunnels in Halo: Reach. At its best Reach sets you on one end of fairly open battlefields, with lasers and missiles flying everywhere and humans battling aliens all over the place, and it tells you: Get to the other side. You may have to trip some switches along the way or accomplish some other objective, but the game offers the player a wide range of tactical flexibility in conquering obstacles.

You might prefer a shield or healing power for your armor, or you might choose to project a holographic image to confuse the enemy. Combine such abilities with an assortment of weaponry from shotguns to sniper rifles, as well as enemies who hunt you intelligently, and you have an excellent combat game. And, this being a Halo game, it doesn’t limit you to your feet. Tanks, gun-festooned hovercraft and even small spaceships are yours to command.

I tried only a few matches online in multiplayer mode, but it should almost go without saying — given Bungie’s track record — that the play seemed smooth and the matchmaking options both varied and robust for competitive and cooperative play. Like recent Call of Duty games, Reach will certainly find its real legs online.

After all of these years Bungie finally made a Halo fan out of me. Time to kick back and fry some aliens.

(Source: A version of this review appeared in print on September 13, 2010, on page C5 of the National edition.)