Play as an ODST in Halo: Reach with this PC mod

Halo: Reach on PC is pretty new, but that hasn’t stopped the Halo community from creating tons of cool different mod projects in record timing. These mods shake up gameplay and provide players with new ways to experience Halo: Reach, which will undoubtedly help keep the game feeling fresh to players who get bored of the vanilla gameplay every so often.

One such project is the ODST Campaign Overhaul, which allows players to play through the game’s Campaign as an ODST instead of a Spartan, increasing the difficulty and forcing you to employ new tactics against the Covenant that you normally wouldn’t need. Here’s an in-depth look at what the mod does, as well as an explanation about where you can download it.

This mod by Xulah replaces Noble Six with an ODST soldier in every Campaign level, allowing you to experience the infamous Fall of Reach from the perspective of a regular human instead of an amped-up supersoldier. As such, you have no shielding, lower health, and slower mobility. To compensate, though, you’re given third-person view and can thus be much more aware of your surroundings than in the vanilla Campaign.

This essentially transforms Halo: Reach into a challenging tactical shooter where you’re constantly forced to seek cover and find quality firing positions, especially if you play on one of the harder difficulties. In a weird (but very good) way, it almost feels like a blend of Halo, Gears of War, and one of the older Rainbow Six games.

In the future, the mod author is planning to add more content to the project, including custom weapons, the ability to customize your ODST’s armor, some sandbox tweaks, and more. It will be interesting to see how these additions and changes impact the mod’s gameplay experience.

How to get the mod

The ODST Campaign Overhaul mod is available right now for free here on the Nexus Mods website. The mod author has an in-depth installation guide on the mod’s description tab, so make sure to follow the instructions to get everything working properly. Before beginning, you’ll need to download a special software called Assembly. Lots of Halo modders use this to manipulate files, and you’re going to need it to install some special patches onto the mod’s map files so that you can use unique vehicles like the Sabre and Mass Driver in Campaign as an ODST without issue.

It’s important to note that if you own the Windows 10 Store version of Halo: Reach on PC, you don’t automatically have access to the files you need to replace for the mod to work. Thankfully, though, it’s not hard to change that. Make sure to follow this guide from the helpful Halo community on how to get access to your files. The installation process for this mod is identical for Windows 10 Store users, with the only difference being the specific place that Halo: Reach will be installed.

Your thoughts

What do you think of this mod? Are you interested in trying out Halo: Reach’s Campaign with this brand new type of challenge? Personally, I always enjoy when game campaigns get mods that freshen up the kinds of gameplay experiences you can have with them, so I think this mod is fantastic. If you’d like to use ODSTs and other types of UNSC troops in Firefight, check out this mod.

Halo: Reach on PC is available now for $10 on both Steam and the Windows 10 Store.