The earlier campaigns are better IMO because you could be more "naughty" some of the most memorable moments in campaign are in halo 2 exploring around for hours in empty hills and fighting tartarus in a banshee and been a body guard for your marines and taking the alternative way of completing a mission. Pretty much only choices you have in Reach are like DMR or Pistol/Warthog or Ghost.
Now I know this is probably going to get alot of people mad at me but the lack of flood also makes it depressing. sure you can't have the flood in reach but you could always have a firefight map that basically takes all the flood from halo 3 and pits them against the player. That way it would make sense for spartans and elites to work together in firefight.
I honestly am cos Ive never played CE, well I played the demo but loathed the graphics. Ce with reach graphics has me tingling!
After completing Reach i wanted to play Halo: CE to see how it would end... Then i remembered it actually was the second Halo i played. I played them in this order: Halo 2 - Halo: CE - Halo 3 - Reach- ODST
Maybe... Perhaps if they added some of the things from the newer halo games into it (just more flood types, a rare occasion where you see some brutes unloading a phantom. you know this and that). Also if they can change the CE flame-thrower to where it was as good as it was in halo 3 then I would be jumping with joy.
Yeah I totally forgot about ODST, great campaign imo. The whole style was great, sorta film noir I guess, from visuals to music and even extending in to that same sense of scale for the character within the world. That same sense of open wordness that people are talking about with regard to CE, and the futility from Reach. On that note, I agree about the futility and sense of sadness present throughout the Reach campaign. That's a big part of what I liked about it, especially what people are saying about the evacuation bits and when the Corvette's warped in. Still, now that people mention it, I think I probably like ODST better than Reach, putting in 2nd behind CE.