Halo: Reach has a lot going for it. It's got an amazing soundtrack, addicting gameplay, beautiful visuals, inspiring skyboxe's, and so much more. All of those are great things to have in a game and are certainly never overlooked. I do however feel like there's one aspect of all the Halo game's, especially Reach, that never gets enough love, and that is the legendary difficulty.

Halo's heroic difficulty usually gets all the love from Bungie as being the way Halo should be played. I can't say I disagree with them, I usually feel like I die just the right amount of times. It's strange I know, saying that a game makes me feel like I'm doing a good job. I love the Heroic difficulty for that reason. Any difficulty below it and I feel all to powerful, wading through enemies like a hot knife through butter. The easier difficulty's provide no challenge, there's no strategy involved. And let's be honest, who really enjoys a game that let's them go from start to finish and never challenges them?

Let me be abundantly clear, Halo's legendary difficulty is a constant source of anger. There isn't a moment I'm not cursing at the game for being extremely difficult and putting me in situations I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. But that's also the reason I love legendary, is because of the challenge, and the impossible odds I'm constantly faced with. Each and every time I make it out of a situation, I feel a sense of accomplishment and relief I rarely feel in any game.

One of my favorite things about playing on legendary though, is the strategy. I can't count the number of times I was faced with 10+ enemies, half of which wielded shields or were Elites, and had little to no ammo. Literally, I ran into encounters where I had zero ammunition and all that I could find were plasma pistols. Thankfully, Bungie knows what they are doing. On legendary, seemingly weak weapons (the plasma pistol) become your best friend, you will learn to toss aside your power weapons. Let me explain.

Let's say you enter a narrow stretch of game space. You are approaching a building that forces you to take the stairs and tight walkway's. You can see and hear several enemies ahead, some enemies that wield shields, a lot of grunts and some Elites. You are carrying a fully loaded assault rifle and the human pistol. On any other difficulty, those might suffice, but not here. That assault rifle will eat away at the enemy shields, but eventually run out of ammo. As will the pistol. And in this location you have only covenant weapons, so your human weapons are of no use. What do you do? You strategize.

Take into account the cover you have ahead of you. Are you going to be able to duck behind something? If you kill an enemy that has a weapon you desperately need, can you sprint from cover to cover so that you may get that weapon without dying? You also need to account for the types of enemies. Don't pick a weapon up that's useless against the foes you face. The plasma pistol should always be at your side so that you can dispatch shields and achieve headshots quickly and effectively. And always kill the grunts before anything else. They may not seem menacing, but they are numerous and will eat away at your shields quicker than anything.

You get the idea, you can't just play through legendary difficulty as you would any other. If you do, you'll be killed quickly, and you probably won't have any fun. I like to play it like a game of chess. I pick my battles, I think about consequences and I make my move. Sometimes you get owned, and sometimes you own, that's the way it works. I've been through the Reach campaign twice on legendary and both times I had a much more fulfilling, enjoyable experience than I did on Heroic. That's the experience I've always had with Halo, and I hope in the future 343 Industries puts as much love and effort into it as Bungie has, so that the tradition carries on.