Does anyone else think the newer style graphics in ODST and Reach have actually gotten worse since the original?
The first Halo had a lot of luminosity and sort of a glossy sheen over structures in the environment giving the alien world a unique and strange feel, the world was bright in a building or outdoors keeping the mood lighter but also allowing you to see your enemies, and the back drops appeared to fit into the level giving epic views of the ring world you were fighting on.
Halo: Reach is dark almost everywhere making it very hard to recognize the difference between an enemy brute attempting to rip your face off or a random civilian you are supposed to be protecting. I attempted to resolve this by tuning my TVs picture mode to dynamic and upping the video brightness configuration in Halo: Reach to the highest setting, but lighting becomes uninteresting and also appears washed out while not making it much easier to identify targets. The sheen and lighting of the original Halo is not there at all, just as in ODST structures in the environment look cartoonified. Spartans and Elites are about the only things that retain some interesting lighting effects, everything else can catch a shadow, but doesn't seem to reflect light in anyway. The 2D backgrounds are non-immersive, obviously drawn, and separate from the 3d world.
Some of these lighting issues seemed forgivable in ODST as this was mainly an expansion pack and the real feature in ODST for me anyway was firefight which never seemed as dark. The use of VISR in ODST also helped to make up for the terrible lighting conditions, but at least so far I haven't seen anything like VISR in Halo: Reach. There is a night vision ability, but this just adds to the general brightness, effectively washing out everything in green.
Aside from all this at least on my xbox 360, the engine stutters(although infrequently), textures can be seen loading in even during some cut scenes(again infrequently), and there seems to be a total lack of AA which creates so much flicker at edges that after a few hours of play my eyes were left almost bleeding. Fortunately my 360 decided to commit suicide about 6 hours into gameplay saving my eyes from melting out of my skull.
I'm sure with smaller better lit levels in multiplayer or firefight the issues aren't so egregious, and the better luminosity on Spartans and Elites must make it easier to track enemies in multiplayer. For the campaign though, one word sums up my experience: unplayable.