Don’t Play Reach, Read It

Everyone loves reading material. Particularly game-related reading material. It allows those who can’t bear to be apart from their favorite game the opportunity to immerse themselves in said game even when they can’t be playing it. For example, when they’re on the toilet. Many a great strategy has been devised while on the can, and then put into glorious action later that day.

With Halo: Reach now lighting up Xbox LIVE, it’s fitting that toilet generals should have the opportunity to plan out their new tactics. And so BradyGames have released their Halo: Reach Signature Series Guide to coincide with the game’s launch.

“Signature Series”, for the curious, appears to be BradyGames’ branding for particularly in-depth strategy guides. Or possibly ones with a slightly higher price point. It’s difficult to say.

What is obvious, though, is that the Halo: Reach Signature Series Guide is a fine piece of work. It has 400 pages. Most of which have actual content on them. It has dedicated sections for Campaign, Firefight, multiplayer, Forge World and an extensive reference section. It’s on nice shiny paper that will have fingerprints all over it within five seconds of picking it up. Even dedicated people who don’t really like Halo that much are acquiring copies of said book. Look:

You won’t see this exclusive image anywhere but Kombo. FACT.

The book covers everything players could possibly want to know about Reach in exhaustive detail. It’s full of clear screenshots and “exclusive rendered maps”, whatever that means. There are in-depth, thorough guides on scoring, earning Credits and Achievements. Armor Abilities, new to the series, are explored in detail. And of course, it spoils the hell out of the Campaign mode. So those who give a damn about Halo’s story should probably skip the first 175 pages.

If nothing else, the guide gives an insight into quite how much planning and thought must go into producing a blockbuster such as Reach. It’s easy to take these things for granted when playing impressive games every day. But flipping through just the Reference section of this guide is enough. Seeing that the in-game enemies have been designed to have specific personalities and “weapon tendencies” is interesting to learn. Plus there’s always the possibility it might make readers into better players.

With games increasing in complexity all the time, it’s fitting that strategy guides should provide an appropriate level of depth to their coverage. The Reach guide certainly does that. It’s all very well saying that those who want to read walkthroughs should go to GameFAQs. It’s true, too. But in some ways, it’s nice to have a beautifully-produced book to thumb through.

And GameFAQs is harder to read on the toilet.