Halo Reach Head hunter mode

Australia, April 21, 2010 - Last September's Halo 3: ODST has already delivered its fare share of fun for fans – a refreshing Master Chief-less campaign and the excellent Firefight co-op mode in particular elevated it from optional expansion to essential acquisition for Halo heads – yet arguably its most enticing attribute has been thus far both figuratively and literally out of Reach.

Come May the 4th (or May the 3rd for our North American readers) everyone with a copy of ODST will automatically have a ticket into the Halo: Reach beta, but recently we were invited for an advanced look at the upcoming online trial at Microsoft's Australian headquarters. We came away from our session convinced that while the beta is going to be a generous taste test with a healthy number of maps and modes on offer, the new Headhunter game type is worth the price of admission alone.

Headhunter – no relation to the Sega Dreamcast Metal Gear clone from 2001, thankfully – is a risk versus reward, every man for himself affair. The premise is that each time you kill an opponent they drop a skull, and each skull you collect can be banked at one of the two scoring zones that periodically move around the map. For each skull you bank, you receive a point. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins, but you can end the game at any moment and claim victory by banking ten skulls in one transaction. Sounds straightforward enough.

Stab a man in the back and take his skulls. He'd do the same to you.


Only in practice its complete and utter chaos. Each kill you achieve in the mode will be immediately followed by a frantic scramble for discarded skulls like a greedy child under a spilled pinata, all the while leaving yourself open to an assault rifle blast to the temple or a grenade tossed under your feet while you're distracted. Each player in the game has their current un-banked skull tally visible above their heads, so you know who's pockets are full and therefore who's head you should be hunting, and if you manage to snatch a fistful of skulls at any one time you should prepare yourself for your opponents to be in hot pursuit as you leg it towards one of the scoring zones.

These zones are locked to one area of the map for a short time only, meaning you could be inches away from reaching one to bank your collected skulls and potentially win a match, only for it to vanish from right in front of your nose and relocate to another point on the map – forcing you to fight your way back through the skull-hungry mob on your tail. If you're capped before you can make it, your corpse will erupt into a fountain of skulls, and then the beneficiary of your dropped goods will suddenly become the marked man.

Headhunter, like all of Reach's game types, is made all the more unpredictable thanks to the new armour abilities tied to the LB button such as the sprint and jet pack abilities. Although while you might think it will be easy to just hover your way over the heads of your enemies to the scoring zone with little resistance, just know that thanks to the arsenal of new weapons such as the Designated Marksman Rifle (a powerful revision of the Battle Rifle), experienced opponents will likely be cancelling your flights faster than an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano.

The Powerhouse map from the air.


We had our most intense Headhunter matches on the new Powerhouse map, a location reminiscent of Halo 3's High Ground in terms of architecture and setting, situated around a large pool of water where many skulls were contested, but we can see it suited to any small to mid-sized map in the Halo library.

With the wonderfully chaotic Headhunter just one example of the four game types included in the beta, you'd have to have lost your own head to trade your copy of ODST between now and May 4th. Bring it on, Bungie.