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.

The Defiant Map Pack is the very first offering from 343 Industries, the new caretakers of the Halo Franchise. Bungie produced the previous map pack, but its unknown if they have any more due later or if 343 will take over producing maps and the Matchmaking offering in the future.

What is known is this set will offer two competitive multiplayer maps and one Firefight arena. Condemned takes place on a UNSC space station above Reach and is built for slayer and objective games in that 6-12 player range. Highlands is a big team battle map on a nature preserve with vehicles available. Finally, Unearthed is a large Firefight map with multiple drop zones and a Rocket Hog good for all variants. As the multiplayer spaces always fit in somewhere within the Halo fiction, all three maps take place after the events of the Lone Wolf campaign mission, with the Covenant forces completely overrunning the planet in the background.

If you look closely in the trailer, you’ll spot bs angel, a former Halo blogger who joined 343 last year.

Source: HaloWaypoint

You knew it was coming. Halo 2 and Halo 3 successfully doubled the available maps for multiplayer, and the Halo prequel game Reach will add three new maps for Multiplayer (including Invasion) on November 30, 2010. It’ll set you back 800 MS points ($10) and also add 250 gamerscore points.

And to reveal these, Bungie has packed an excellent trailer. No just because it has some amazing gameplay footage on the new maps, but it also has a fantastic new variation of the classic Halo theme with all the action. Seriously, the music is great, and composer Marty O’Donnell knows it, so expect to see an MP3 available on Bungie.net soon.