‘Halo: Reach’ is about losing completely. You play as a member of an elite team that discovers an alien invasion of humanity’s second Earth – Reach, and tries to defend it. It ends in catastrophe: the planet is glassed, its people decimated, and your team killed. The last level has a single (impossible) objective: “Survive”.
You win every firefight, complete every objective, but losing, while tragic, isn’t ultimately frustrating. It’s an impressive subversion of the power fantasy typical of shooters like it. The helplessness of individuals to prevent defeat is at the heart of Reach’s tragedy. It’s anti-heroic.
The military is American, mechanised, and competent (!). The enemy are infinite, religiously-fanatical, _alien_. Like other 2000s sci-fi, Reach looked at the past, but instead of an origin story it looks at a past _collapse_. It’s post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-2008, and post-Fukuyama. Culture had lost confidence in heroes, in the future, and in agency.