Halo Reach Demo Now Available On Xbox Live

Hey, so the game has been out for 9 Months. There are still a lot of people who have not made the trip to Reach.

Microsoft has never released a demo for a Halo title (with the exception of the RTS spin-off Halo Wars), so seeing its boldest and most recent chapter suddenly get some free play is kind of unexpected!

The demo is a nice vertical slice of 3 of Reach’s game modes: Campaign, Multiplayer, and Firefight. The campaign is a portion of “Long Night Of Solace” which you saw in the E3 demo last year. Only about half the chapter is included, but thats well over a half hour of play on the ground and in space. You’ll also be able to play multiplayer on “Powerhouse” which has a wide variety of weapons on the ground and lots of high and low combat. Finally, Firefight on “Outpost” will pit you against wave after wave of aliens until the timer runs out, or you finally run out of lives.

You can download the demo from your Xbox 360, or queue it up on xbox.com.

If you like it, go ahead and buy the game. You won’t be disappointed. I purchased on day one and still managed to put another 2 hours into the game this morning. There are two downloadable map packs for sale, but I’ve seen dozens of maps made by the community and they’ve all been offered for free and included in regular online play, so even if you don’t buy the professional maps, you’ll still have something new to look at almost every time you play.