Last time - Halo Legends - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=142666

This time - “Our enemy was ruthless. Efficient. But they weren't nearly fast enough.”

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The 2010s saw Bungie pivot to working on a new franchise of games, while Microsoft handed the saga off to its in-house studio 343 Industries which it had created in 2007 in anticipation of Bungie regaining its independence. But prior to that was Bungie’s final contractually-mandated entry in the Halo series, a prequel which had it covering an event that was talked about in prior entries but never shown: the alien Covenant enemy attacking the human colony planet Reach. Breaking sales records in 2010 and getting praise once again for its campaign and multiplayer gameplay, the Halo: Reach game was seen as an impressive coda to the studio’s work on the franchise over the last decade, and it’s not uncommon to see the game at or near the top of fan rankings of the games in the series.

It would be O’Donnell and Salvatori’s final effort in the franchise as well; O’Donnell for his part had no interest in any post-Reach projects in the series and described the subsequent Bungie project as “trying to make the Halo killer.” The Reach score’s strengths lie in its array of otherworldly and occasionally rather weird vocals (including one haunting bit where O’Donnell processed his own voice to sound like a child’s) and in its passages of epic sadness, with the composers impressively playing up the sense of tragedy in a story where every soldier in your squad meets their end on the doomed planet’s surface. A few legacy franchise themes make nice cameos as well. The borderline omission of the Halo 2 Covenant theme is a bit puzzling at first but ultimately justifiable given that the prequel seemed to position the alien enemy more like the combative unknown that they were in the first Halo game rather than the religious zealots they were in the sequels.

The score’s action material is a mixed bag though. Some of it has the badass rock feel of ODST, but other sections are more anonymous, almost like second-tier Media Ventures interstitial electronic passages. For a franchise that generally had a notable voice, the indistinctiveness was a tad puzzling. So too was the budget; whereas Halo 3 summoned an orchestra, some areas of Halo: Reach sound like they were realized on the budget for Halo: Combat Evolved. One can’t help but wonder if some financial compromises had to be made given that the production process overlapped with the making of Halo 3: ODST. Still, on the whole the score is a solid entry in the series, one definitely a notch below ODST and Halo 3 but probably on par with Halo 2 (not hitting the nostalgia button as much as that earlier score does but also lacking its extremes).

**** - https://open.spotify.com/album/6uUz4LzAehf8ZzWhZzoIc1

The album situation for Halo: Reach is a bit of a curiosity. 86 minutes represent the highlights of the score as used in the game, a substantially shorter program than the last two score releases in the franchise. Another 21 minutes of bonus tracks mixed alternate arrangements of legacy material, bits that were only partially realized in the game, album-only remixes, and the music from the 2009 trailer.

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Next time:
- “Arrest that man!”
- “I’m saddened to say that Bungie's board of directors terminated me without cause.”